“It’s okay to be white”: anatomy of a white supremacist trolling campaign

This article analyses the “It’s okay to be white” campaign, a trolling campaign that unfolded on 4chan and Twitter in early November 2017, and its relationship with white supremacism and racial neoliberalism. The first part of the article demonstrates how the campaign used an approach based in a combination of memetic and trolling strategies, and professional promotional practices, to reach its target audiences. The second part of the article analyses the ideological dimensions of the campaign and its relationship with racial neoliberalism. The campaign’s underlying ideological strategies, I argue, are at one level consistent with those of “color-blind racism” and the “antiracial” ideologies of racial neoliberalism that mobilise “racism without race”, to neutralise discussions of disadvantage experienced by racial minorities. At the same time, the campaign seeks to disrupt and supersede the antiracial ideologies of racial neoliberalism with an openly white supremacist race politics that re-emphasises biological difference.