Casual Racism

Explanation:
One of the more interesting discoveries was the presence of casual racism and how it related to ethnic self-identification. As this comic suggests, in many instances of casual racism the perpetrator is often aware of the racist undertones in their comments. This casual racism is very common on Reddit, as more overt examples of racism generally get moderated away by the community via down-voting. Some Reddit users suggest that this casual racism is more bothersome than blatant racism because it is present to such a great degree and as a result it acts as a deterrent to ethnic self-identification. Unfortunately, as so many of these phrases have entered into the common vernacular online and offline there is no simple solution to ending its use.

Ask a Black Dude with Paul Mooney

Chappelle's Show
Get More: Comedy Central,Funny Videos,Funny TV Shows

Chappelle's Show
Get More: Comedy Central,Funny Videos,Funny TV Shows

Chappelle's Show
Get More: Comedy Central,Funny Videos,Funny TV Shows

Explanation:
These three videos are from a segment on Chappelle's Show called "Ask a Black Dude" featuring Paul Mooney. Random passerby on the street are offered the chance to ask a black man a question- any question at all. The questions asked are all the sort of borderline racist questions that concern black stereotypes and are a very accurate representation of the content of many of the questions asked in the various AskReddit or IamA posts. As we can also see, the segment was created with comedy in mind which is one of the primary reasons for ethnic self-identification on Reddit.

Standing Out in a Crowd

A primary pillar of internet forums is anonymity. The internet itself could be considered the largest crowd in existence and the additional cloak of anonymity further erases the identity of individual users. In order to gain some semblance of identity, providing any self-identification serves to separate a user from a crowd. This image is the basic effect of ethnic self-identification and one of the two primary end goals: it causes that user to stand out in the internet crowd. This is not limited to ethnic identification because the internet's anonymity so effectively suppresses a user's identity.

Stock Images: "Man + Computer"

These are two of the top results for a search of the words “computer man” in a stock image archive. The image on the top appeared second on the search list in terms of relevance, and the image on the bottom appeared third. Since both images came from a stock images archive, the website that hosts the images tracks both downloads and views of all images on the website and that information is clearly visible. The image on the top has 40 downloads and 1297 Views, and the image on the bottom has 49 downloads and 2192 views. While the download counts are similar, the views are significantly different which suggests that the image on the bottom is more popular. This supports the idea presented in my paper that ethnic self-identification serves to give content greater value.