#MAGA and Whiteness

The initial inspiration for the visualization project was Ta-Nehisi Coates's article in The Atlantic, "The First White President." I was interested in exploring how the #MAGA hashtag, a controversial but indisputable locus for imaginging national identity, might be mobilized towards promoting a particular vision of "greatness" in America for white nationalists and white supremacists. To that end, I combined all tweets containing the keyword "white" over the five days of data collection into single subset of data, which I then used to create the visualizations below.

Although the word "white" obviously gets taken up in a wide variety of senses - "White House" as one pertinent example - the visibility of hashtags like #whitepride, #whitegenocide and #itsokaytobewhite is difficult to ignore.

Words in the Orbit of #MAGA and "White"

The visualization below shows the words that occur most frequently in tweets containing the keyword "white" and the #MAGA hashtag.

Related Terms

The visualization below shows the most frequently used words in the context of their collocation - that is, appearing within the two words on either side of the active term (the range can be expanded using the "Context" slider). Hovering over "whitepride," the association with particular figures and hashtags (e.g. nutty conspiracy theorist magnets like #followthewhiterabbit) becomes visible.

Correlating Frequency of Term Use

The visualization below shows the extent to which the term frequency for a pair of terms varies in sync - that is, terms whose frequencies rise and fall together - for the term "white" (use the search field to look for other terms).

"White" in Context

The last tool, though not a visualization per se, presents the keyword "white" in the context of the words that directly precede and follow it, for a more nuanced illustration of its use.

 

Textual Analysis

Using a web-based suite of textual analysis tools (Voyant), I examined the data set using both quantitative and qualitative measures to explore the context of the #MAGA hashtag's use.

Cirrus Tool (Word Cloud)
Shows frequency with which terms occur.

TermsBerry
Term and collocate frequency.

#MAGA & Whiteness
A closer look at how #MAGA is invoked in the discursive construction of race.