Inequality is a bigger threat to democracy than polarization.
In fact, polarization is often a sign of a healthy democracy beginning to confront systemic inequalities. And yet scholarship about technology and political communication often frames polarization as the biggest ongoing threat to democracy in the United States. This seeming contradiction, CITAP’s Daniel Kreiss and Shannon McGregor argue, is about race.
In “A review and provocation: On polarization and plaftorms,” Kreiss and McGregor point out that the content of the poles in polarization is both important—and often ignored. Polarization does not account for the crucial differences between, for example, white supremacists and racial justice activists. Black Lives Matter and Stop the Steal are not equally good movements for democracy: as BLM activists explicitly calls for greater equality in a democratic society, Stop the Steal activists seek to overturn elections.
As Kreiss and McGregor put it, “polarization is… the necessary byproduct of the struggle to realize democracy in unequal societies.”
If political communication and media and technology scholars want to understand polarization, they cannot continue to do so from a power-disinterested lens. Polarization and systemic inequality are co-produced. And yet frequently the problems caused by polarization are blamed on those simply calling for justice. Ultimately, scholars frame struggles for justice as “polarizing” because:
our field’s conceptualizations of democracy are so thin, solidarity is so treasured, racial analytics are so rare, and historical memory is so short. It is not polarization, but racial repression that has been far more challenging and destabilizing to democracy over the past 300 years if looked at from a non-White perspective.
“[O]ur field does not consider race to be an especially relevant factor in the study of political communication, and racism even less so.”
So conclude Deen Freelon, Meredith Pruden, and Daniel Malmer in their new piece “#politicalcommunicationsowhite: Race and Politics in Nine Communication Journals, 1991-2021,” released today in Political Communication.
Race is a potent political force in U.S. (and global) politics and political communication. To study polarization, mis and disinformation, and negative campaigning without accounting for race, the authors argue, leaves vital questions unanswered. Instead, much of our understanding of the role of race in political communication comes from outside the field, with important contributions from legal scholarship and political science.
In the face of rising anti-Black police violence and increasingly tolerance for outright racism since Trump's election (Jardina, 2019), political communication remains silent. As Freelon, Pruden, and Malmer argue, "we must confront the possibility that [racism] is simply being ignored, and that we therefore have little idea of how race affects the production, content, distribution, reception, and effects of political communication."
The authors call for political communication scholars to take up race in their work, echoing an earlier call from Daniel Kreiss that “that if we want to understand communication, we must account for social and cultural difference, and especially race and ethnicity.”
Not everyone deserves their own Wikipedia page; that’s why Wikipedia’s notability guidelines exist. But definitions of notability are unevenly applied across race and gender lines:
Wikipedia’s editors are less likely to consider you “notable” if you’re not a white man.
Using a combination of qualitative and statistical analysis of Wikipedia pages nominated for deletion, Mackenzie Emily Lemieux and Rebecca Zhang join with Francesca Tripodi to explore how Wikipedia’s notability considerations are applied for female and BIPOC academics. They examined two key metrics used in the process of establishing notability on Wikipedia: the Search Engine Test and the “Too Soon” metric. The search engine test determines if a person’s online presence is well covered by reputable, independent sources. In their analysis, Lemieux, Zhang, and Tripodi found that this test predicts whether or not white male academics’ pages will be kept or deleted. But academics who are women and people of color are more likely to have their Wikipedia page deleted—even if they have equivalent or greater online presence than their white male peers.
The second metric, “too soon,” is a label applied to Wikipedia pages when a Wikipedian thinks there aren’t enough independent, high quality news sources about the page’s subject. Women of all races are more likely than men to be considered not yet notable (i.e., “too soon” to be on Wikipedia). The online encyclopedia’s editors were more likely to justify this label applied to women based on their career stages (e.g., “she’s an assistant professor” and therefore not yet notable). But this tag was applied to women on average further in their careers than men who received the tag. Individual bias continues to disadvantage women and people of color on Wikipedia; and Wikipedia continues to allow these hidden biases to influence processes of determining notability.