Date: 5DEC2020

In all honesty, it is rare for me to use social media. But for our prep, I have decided to look into Reddit since it’s known to be a place for intense and intelligible debate. Before I began, I was under the impression that these terms would be implied rather than explicit because I see that they are more subconscious processes. My results, however, left me with much to ponder.

Here is what I found…

Reddit

Triangulation: It seems that there are several fields that use the term triangulation. As most initial results were about narcissism and places of supporting victims of narcissistic abuse, or a type of. Which warmed my heart to see that there were communities readily available to try and provide support for such issues. Scrolling down a bit more, it quickly turned into a list of people’s personal experiences in love affairs and drama that involved more than one party.

Despite not being used in the context of our readings, I think the term is used rather explicitly on this platform. Triangulation IS a sort of narcissism, especially if we use the ‘Psycho-analysis’ definition as a basis for comparison. Which states that triangulation is a self-centeredness arising from failure to distinguish the self from external objects. Within our texts, triangulation is the process of assuming prejudices are shared among majority peoples.

Both definitions emphasize this idea – ‘if one person thinks this way, so does everyone else.’

Most of the posts that turned up within the search results seemed to have this idea impact elements of their writing.

Unconscious/Unintentional Racism: There were more promising results this time. Most relevant posts that came up were about Oprah “Teaching White People how navigate ‘unconscious racism’ on Apple TV show” and analyzing how it is demonstrated in pop culture. There was even a post title “What do you do for unconscious racism?” This explicitly shows that people are aware of the term and are actively trying to improve upon it.

Internalized Racial Inferiority (IRI): Unfortunately this seems to be another term that is vaguely implied in the most popular posts. There are no communities for the term, and a shallow research would show that the focus of the conversation is about interracial dating. But once you scroll down a little more through the results. You will see that there are harrowing accounts of individuals struggling from IRI-based abuse. My heart breaks at their recounting, especially since the stories I read were from other mixed women. And, it seems that this is happening to people at all stages in their life. The intensity in which I related, left me feeling a bit dumbfounded and guilty.

My Thoughts

I saw as much as I expected and a bit more. I still feel unqualified to give my opinion on such topics, but if I had it my way I would wish for a more supportive community of those suffering from IRI backlash. And this would open up discussion for people to realize that Unconscious/Unintentional Racism is not just an issue within the white community, but all communities.