Speech Acts of Racism In The Comment Column Of Rachel Zegler Instagram Account As Snow White
Abstract
Racism remains prevalent on social media, where discriminatory attitudes are often expressed through language. This study aims to identify the speech acts used in racist comments on Rachel Zegler's Instagram account and examine the types of racism they represent. A qualitative descriptive method with purposive sampling was employed to select ten racist comments. The data were analyzed using Searle's Speech Act Theory and Braveman racism framework. The findings reveal three speech act categories: representative, expressive, and directive, with representative speech acts occurring most frequently. The comments also reflect two dominant forms of racism, namely individual racism and cultural racism. Individual racism appears through racial insults and labeling, whereas cultural racism is expressed through stereotypes surrounding the representation of Snow White. This study contributes to pragmatic research by demonstrating how speech acts function as linguistic strategies for expressing racism in online discourse.
Keywords
References
Ajayi, V. O. (n.d.). A Review on Primary Sources of Data and Secondary Sources of Data. Humanities, Science and Technology Education Research. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16739602
Braveman, P. A., Arkin, E., Proctor, D., Kauh, T., & Holm, N. (2022). Systemic And Structural Racism: Definitions, Examples, Health Damages, And Approaches To Dismantling. Health Affairs, 41(2), 171–178. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2021.01394
Creswell, J. W. (2018). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approach (5th ed.). SAGE Publications.
Floranti, A. D. (2022). Racism Toward Chinese Ethnic Group in Indonesian Social Media: Hate Speeches Analysis from Forensic Linguistic Perspective. In FISS (Vol. 2, Number 2).
John Langshaw Austin. (1962). How to Do Things with Words: Second Edition. President and Fellows of Harvard Collage.
Maulana Azhari, R., Prihandini, A., & Purwani Sari, R. (n.d.). POLITE RACISM: A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF RACIAL IMPLICATURE IN GET OUT.
May, S. (2023). Linguistic racism: Origins and implications. Ethnicities, 23(5), 651–661. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968231193072
Nazar, M., Aso, L., & Martisa, E. (2024). Discourse Analysis of Racism in Just Mercy Movie. 9(1).
Rismayanti, H. (2021). The Analysis of Locutionary Act, Illocutionary Act, and Perlocutionary Act in Five Feet Apart Movie. MEDIOVA: Journal of Islamic Media Studies, 1(2), 138–149. https://doi.org/10.32923/medio.v1i2.1915
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. R. (2005). Expressing and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shiao, J., & Woody, A. (2021). The Meaning of “Racism.” Sociological Perspectives, 64(4), 495–517. https://doi.org/10.1177/0731121420964239
DOI: https://doi.org/10.31004/jele.v%25vi%25i.3010
Refbacks
Copyright (c) 2026 Salsabila Nurhusna, Lili Awaludin, Irman Nurhapitudin
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
