Abstract

Amid the social distancing measures enacted due to COVID-19, people have found themselves relying on social media more than ever to connect, debate, and grapple with the global pandemic. It is, in fact, through social media groups and many other digital spaces primarily occupied by people of African descent that we have discovered the news on the novel coronavirus from Black perspectives; stories and perspectives that may not always be covered in major news sources from the Global North. Using Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model, the aim of this paper is to assess how members of Black virtual spaces have responded to two White French doctors’ commentaries of using Africans as their preferred COVID-19 vaccine trial group. To do so, we first ask to what degree the members of these racially homogenous virtual communities have adopted the different positions Hall’s theory has long ago articulated: dominant-hegemonic, negotiated, or oppositional by making their voices heard in the liminal social media space. Secondly, we ask what kind of emerging discursive practices and articulations can be observed in the range of readings of and reactions from this kind of racialized, virtual identity group formation? To what extent does their singular occupation of the liminal social media space participate in denouncing the historical power relation between White Eurocentric representations and the Africans, who reclaim – or (r)appropriate – the African body, as a sovereign Black live or Black voice that should matter in conversation concerning their destiny.

Key Words: “Whitenessing”; Racism; COVID-19; Eurocentric Mentality; Encoding/Decoding; Liminality.

About the Authors

• Boulou Ebanda de B’béri, Ph.D., is a Full Professor of Communication, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada and the Founding-Director of the Audiovisual Media Lab for the study of Cultures and Societies (AMLAC&S).

**  Candide Uyanze is a researcher, and arts administrator based in Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests and creative practice explore online networks and communities, diasporic storytelling, immersive web experiences, open-source tools, accessible media production, African languages, and speech recognition.

^JCMR Journal of Communication and Media Research, Vol. 16, No. 1, April 2024, pp. 97 -111

© Association of Media and Communication Researchers of Nigeria (AMCRON).

Article Citation

de B’béri, B. E. & Uyanze, C. (2024). “We Are Not Your Guinea Pigs!” Black ‘rappropriation’ of ‘whitenessing’ COVID-19 discourses. Journal of Communication and Media Research, 16 (1): 97-111.

Full Article

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