“I’m so sick and tired of this”: Understanding the Roles andScenarios in Self-Disclosure of Everyday Experiences ofRacism on Social Media

Self-disclosure on social media has become increasingly popular, offering unique benefits to people who have experienced racism in real life. Insofar as encounters with racism universally produce adverse effects, they manifest differently based on the roles individuals occupy and the context in which they unfold. The elucidation of such variations sheds light on the universalities and differences of racism's impacts across different marginalized groups and also their specific needs in different scenarios. This research bridges studies of online self-disclosure and experiences of racism to understand the roles and scenarios in the self-disclosure of experiences of racism on social media. Adopting the Construal Level Theory (CLT), we first develop a framework that categorizes the narratives of experiences of racism into nine categories by identifying the psychological distance between the narrator and both the perpetrator and the victim. Guided by our framework, we then perform content analysis on 874 submissions collected from the subreddit r/racism. We found a considerable number of disclosed narratives where the narrators were only bystanders, even if the victims were strangers to them. Additionally, a substantial portion of the narratives portrayed racism occurring within the narrators' close social circles. Our qualitative analysis revealed distinct emotional responses, dilemmas, and challenges within and across different narrative categories, shaped by the interplay of roles and scenarios. Our novel framework establishes a topology to dissect the complexities of narratives of experiences of racism, contributing to the general study of experiences of racism. Our discovery of the prominent themes bears significance to digital platforms, community organizers, and policymakers in helping people cope with racist encounters. We call for future research to focus on the impact of racism on bystanders in racist encounters, the attention on the everydayness of racism experiences, and the pressing need for available offline anti-racist resources.