It's okay to be white, it's not great to troll about it
On how things can be more normal in 2024
Our topic today is ancient history, specifically, the 2017 4chan troll campaign it’s okay to be white (IOTBW). With more trolling likely incoming during the 2024 US presidential election season, analyzing this episode can help us understand how trolling works. My analysis of this incident suggests that trolling abuses the cooperative principle, a fundamental human cultural resource which underlies the utility we derive from the speech of others.
What Was “It’s Okay to be White”?
Here’s Wikipedia’s summary of what happened:
"It's okay to be white" is an alt-right slogan which originated as part of an organized trolling campaign on the website 4chan's discussion board /pol/ in 2017. A /pol/ user described it as a proof of concept that an otherwise innocuous message could be used maliciously to spark media backlash. Posters and stickers stating "It's okay to be white" were placed in streets in the United States as well as on campuses in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. […]
Many of the flyers were torn down, and some accused the posters of being covertly racist and white nationalist, while others, like Jeff Guillory, executive director of Washington State University's Office of Equity and Diversity, argued that it was a nonthreatening statement.
Wikipedia is not specific in the timing of the campaign, but per the ADL, the initial campaigns occurred in October 2017 and 2018.
Earlier today, a friend referenced the reaction against IOTBW as proving its point. I take that point to be the following: “if the media and institutions like universities react negatively to the assertion that it’s okay to be white, that must mean that they are uncomfortable with the concept that it’s okay to be white, and perhaps even think it’s not okay to be white. Our provocation revealed the truth that these institutions are bigoted against white people.”
Initially I wanted to jump into the fray supporting my friend. I generally think it should be okay to make true, innocuous assertions, and IOTBW is a true, seemingly innocuous assertion. But I decided against it. Here’s why.
The Philosopher’s Guide to Trolling
According to philosopher Paul Grice, people normally talk to each other under an implied set of norms known as the cooperative principle: “make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.” This terse formulation may be further expanded into four maxims:
The maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no more.
The maxim of quality, where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence.
The maxim of relation, where one tries to be relevant, and says things that are pertinent to the discussion.
The maxim of manner, when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity.
Let’s think about how IOTBW — not the slogan in a vacuum, but in its actual 2017 invocation — matches up to this schema.
Quality: IOTBW does well here. It’s true. 10/10.
Manner: it’s exceptionally clear, brief, and orderly. Big all caps type, sans serif font, grammatical, short words — it doesn’t get any better than that. But at the same time it somehow feels a little obscure and ambiguous, isn’t it? Hold that thought for just a second. 9/10.
Relevance and Quantity: imagine you encounter IT’S OKAY TO BE WHITE on a university information kiosk or telephone pole in 2017. It’s the first year of the Trump presidency, and people are agitated on both sides. The August 2017 Unite the Right rally, which plastered Nazi and other actual-fascist regalia all over the national news, may still be fresh in your mind. And now you’re being told IT’S OKAY TO BE WHITE. Who put this here? Why is it relevant? What’s the intent? Does it have something to do with that Nazi stuff that just happened? None of these questions are answered. In its original context, this message falls far short on relevance and quantity. 2/10.
A message which scores very well on some dimensions, but very poorly on others, has an uncanny valley effect on the audience. The high-scoring dimensions demonstrate competence, which implies the poor-scoring dimensions might not be an accident. Maybe this message is supposed to be hard for you to understand, but easy for other people to understand. Uh oh. If you’re a person of color at that university kiosk in October 2017, you could be forgiven for having a strong intuition for who those other people might be. You could be forgiven for suspecting that this is a dog whistle intended for them and not you. And if they went to such lengths to conceal the message from you, it must be because you’re the target of whatever hidden thing is going on.
The anonymous posters who run the /pol/ circus intended all of this. Like Trump, they have seasoned instincts for how to rile people up.
In summary, the negative reaction of people and institutions to IOTBW proves nothing about how they felt about the literal message, because the creepiness is what they were reacting to.
IOTBW as a Scissor Statement
Trolling is typically a mixture of innocuous surface reading and more subversive subtext. Superficially, IOTBW was simply-yet-audaciously reminding people that it’s okay to be white at a time that it was not uncommon to collectively characterize white people in a hostile fashion. But when you look closer at how the message was delivered and in what context, the 2017 IOTBW campaign was also sending an uncanny, vaguely threatening message by defecting from Gricean norms. The uncanny subtext was amplified by its being only partial, which intuitively suggests some kind of knowingness and hidden messaging to the audience.
Defection from Gricean norms is a problem, because they’re an exhaustible resource. We value the speech of others because the vast majority of people want to communicate in good faith the vast majority of the time, so we have very strong expectations that being exposed to the speech of others is beneficial to us. Trolling erodes that expectation and thus reduces the value we place on the speech of others.
What made things much worse in this case was the complexity of the message, which allowed different people to experience it in different ways. The 2017 IOTBW campaign bundled a superficial affirmation of racial equality with an alarming subtext of potential hidden racial conflict (again, this was two months after the death and mayhem of Unite the Right in Charlottesville). People who were upset about whites increasingly being presumed collectively problematic latched onto the superficial message, while people who were alarmed about hidden race-war signaling latched onto the subtext. Each side latched onto the part of the message that felt most salient to them and couldn’t understand why the other side didn’t see it their way. In this way, the 2017 IOTBW campaign propagated a highly effective scissor statement. By virtue of their plausible deniability, scissor statements can linger in the air for years, poisoning discourse and making us confused and irritable.
Perhaps the most devastating power of scissor statements is their utility in crafting false narratives:
Anna doesn’t see the subtext Bob sees, so she starts thinking that Bob is reacting to nothing. Bob now seems paranoid and irrational to Anna.
Bob doesn’t see how Anna can not see the subtext he sees. To Bob, Anna is at best a willfully useful idiot, and at worst she is in on it, reinforcing that the hidden rallying cry Bob heard was real.
When things go this far, and I think they sometimes do, the troll’s success is truly spectacular. With nothing but an ambiguous message, the troll has succeeded in making two groups of people hate each other, feel like they are justified in hating each other, that they have evidence the other side is unsalvageably insincere or mentally ill. In the terminal phase, it has become abundantly clear to both sides that the other is beyond saving and must be dealt with by force rather than persuasion.
It’s Called We Be A Little Normal
I just found out it’s called we do a little trolling is actually a Trumpism. Yes, Trump and the 4chan trolls all know exactly what they’re doing. They’re trying to change America. And yeah, it can be funny sometimes, but I for one am ready for a break. I’m ready for things to be normal and chill. That means not pretending that you can reveal people’s true natures by intentionally antagonizing them with ambiguous, subtextually hostile scissor statements. That means keeping our communication simple and straightforward and sincere. It means embracing Grice’s cooperative principle rather than abusing it for laughs, or worse, to propagate false narratives of the degeneracy of those who think differently than us.
We all have our grievances about how politics is going, but trolling didn’t get us anywhere and it’s not going to get us anywhere. Let’s try Normality in 2024. Thank you, and God Bless America.