Yes, You’re Racist
Yes, You’re Racist is a social media account founded by Logan Smith, a white man from North Carolina, in 2012. By 2024 it was still going strong with nearly 300,000 followers. “It started out a light-hearted way to call out casual racism and call attention to it,” said Smith. One day, he decided to search Twitter for the familiar excuse, “I’m not a racist, but…”. “It was astonishing how many people were posting blatant casual racism often under their real names and thinking that it wasn’t racist,” Smith said. So he decided to create a Twitter account devoted to retweeting their messages to correct them publicly.
Smith said that in the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency, he heard many people claim that Obama’s election proved that the United States was a “post-racial” (no longer racist) nation. By amplifying racist comments with Yes, You’re Racist, he said, he wanted to make sure that “people knew racism still existed.”
“I’m a white man, I have no illusion that I’m the wokest person in the world or that I have any enlightened perspective on race. So where I’ve focused my effort is in helping white people like myself in recognizing casual racism.”
Once other white people recognize it, Smith hopes, they will be more likely to call it out when they see it.
There are other accounts that employ a similar strategy to Smith’s, including Yes, You’re Sexist (20,000 followers) which operates the same way with sexist tweets, and Racism Watchdog (640,000 followers), whose founders retweet content they believe to be racist along with the words “bark!” or “woof!”
Appalled and infuriated by the 2017 “Unite the Right '' march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a counter-protestor was killed, Smith briefly used his account in a different way. He posted photographs of the marchers, and asked his army of followers to help identify them by name. “If you recognize any of the Nazis marching in #Charlottesville, send me their names/profiles and I'll make them famous #GoodNightAltRight,” Smith tweeted.
Several marchers were quickly named. One of them, Cole White, “chose to voluntarily resign his employment” after the hot dog shop he worked at in Berkeley, California was “inundated with inquiries” about White’s participation in the march. Another marcher was mistakenly identified as a University of Arkansas engineering professor who was swamped with vitriol and threats. When the real marcher was named, he also lost his job.
Smith has not used such tactics again. Instead he has broadened his approach, also calling out other examples of racism in society (such as comments from school board meetings about Critical Race Theory) and suspect policies (and the policy makers who endorse them), tweeting, for example:
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