Understanding Self-Narration of Personally Experienced Racism on Reddit

We identify and classify users’ self-narration of racial discrimination and corresponding community support in social media. We developed natural language models first to distinguish self-narration of racial discrimination in Reddit threads, and then to identify which types of support are provided and valued in subsequent replies. Our classifiers can detect the self-narration of personally experienced racism in online textual accounts with 83% accuracy and can recognize four types of supportive actions in replies with up to 88% accuracy. Descriptively, our models identify types of racism experienced and the racist concepts (e.g., sexism, appearance or accent related) most experienced by people of different races. Finally, we show that commiseration is the most valued form of social support.