The Racial Other: The Social Media Experience of Mixed-Race South Africans

This study explores the experience of first-generation Mixed-Race South African individuals, understood as those whose immediate racial makeup is that of two or more different race groups. Despite being a society deeply shaped by racial politics, Mixed-Race, as a formal classification, is absent in the South African context. Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ (2016) Sociology of Absences is premised on the assumption that all that is absent is intentionally made so, by way of active non-recognition. The racial identity of Mixed-Race South Africans is made invisible within dominant power structures and mainstream social discourse. Those who choose not to identify with only one side of their racial makeup, or the previously prescribed category of Coloured, fall into the ‘Other/Unspecified’ category. This is problematic as it denotes difference and may manifest in literal social othering. Negative attitudes against interracial marriages and mixing continue to be espoused on social media; online discourse infiltrates public discourse, shaping and becoming embedded in everyday realities. Mixed-Race individuals’ experiences online have the potential to magnify othering and stigmatisation or, alternatively, to decrease their experience of otherness through their potential to actively obscure their racial identity. By gaining insight into the social media experience of Mixed-Race South Africans as a historically othered group, the present chapter seeks to provide some insight into the dynamics and implications of online race relations in South Africa. One-on-one interviews situate the positionality of the individuals, in conjunction with the Scroll-Back Method, whereby participants reflect on self-selected social media posts. Social media affords participants some control over how and what they communicate in relation to their racial makeup. Subjective curation of presentations of the self online enables them to de-essentialise their race, potentially circumventing the overt questioning of their racial identities that they experience in face-to-face interactions. On the other hand, their Otherness may be re-affirmed either in response to covert questioning of their racial identities by other users or in a deliberate attempt to challenge existing stereotypes and racial categorisations. Despite being a heterogeneous group, Mixed-Race South African’s social media experiences reveal some commonalities and shared (self)constructions as racial ‘Others’.