This article was originally published by The Emancipator.
In 2011, Kelley Williams-Bolar, a Black mother of two in Ohio who wanted her daughters to have a better education, was jailed because she enrolled them in a neighboring district using her father’s address. Six months earlier, Casey Anthony was acquitted of first-degree murder charges. She was accused of killing her daughter in 2008.
Behind their screens, Black Twitter users watched both cases unfold and quickly noticed a stark difference: Anthony, a White woman, was released while Williams-Bolar was convicted of a federal charge. Black Twitter’s verdict was a swift and damning media counternarrative: if Anthony had been a Black woman, the outcome would have been different.
Similar to the historic Black press, Black Twitter users write with precision about Black life in ways that defy and flourish despite the White gaze. At the height of its popularity, Black Twitter gave Black people a digital space to connect, argue, and laugh across regions and time zones.
In her book, “We Tried to Tell Y’All,” researcher and journalist Meredith D. Clark underscores the prominence and impact of Black Twitter, the lessons we can glean from its creation and the ways Black Twitter emulated how Black people have historically disseminated information in the spirit of liberation, care, and protection.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Adeline Gutierrez Nunez: In your book, you often mention Black digital resistance. What does Black digital resistance mean in a modern era and more to the point, right now, when our speech and our press freedoms are being curtailed, and what lessons can we preserve from Black Twitter that we can translate to other emerging platforms?
Meredith D. Clark: I’m mindful to characterize Black digital resistance in a longer lineage history of resistance. In the book, I refer back to the very first newspaper that was published by Free Black Men in 1827, Freedom’s Journal. These Black men were paying attention to the way that our humanity was lumped together and people did not see us as individuals. We have continued that form of resistance through the media over the years through print, papers, broadcast, and television shows that were developed to focus on Black communities.
We have seen all of these different forms of communicating with one another through magazines like Ebony, Essence, Jet, Sister to Sister. Everything from the bulletin at church to the party flyers. All of this is using media to connect and to build with one another. The digital aspect of that focuses on how there are certain technologies, platforms, and tools that we are able to use to continue that legacy of resistance. In an era in which our histories are actively being erased, where there is a hostile environment nationwide and worldwide against us, we’re using those tools to defend ourselves and our communities.
I appreciate that you elevated the Freedom Journal. Historically, what connections can we draw between the similarities in how Ida B. Wells, for example, and the Black Press disseminated information about lynchings and other issues to Black Twitter?
If we reach back to history and we take someone like Ida B. Wells who did, what we would now call data journalism, this painstaking work of recording when lynchings happened, where they happened, who they happened to, who was involved and compiled all of this when mainstream news media wasn’t paying attention to it nor covering it adequately or accurately. We can look at what we have done. We have the hashtag memorials. That was our form of collating that same data.
We can look at even the coverage where coverage was given, with Walter Scott, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and see that their stories were covered, but they weren’t necessarily given the depth and care and attention that they needed. And they certainly haven’t been held together. And that’s the most important thing about Ida B. Wells’ work. She didn’t just go and collect this story and that story. She collated those stories and put them together so that they helped form this larger narrative.
What you’re saying makes me think of how you describe Black Twitter as “a collective intervention on mainstream media narratives about Black life in America in the early 21st century.” We know that Black Twitter challenged how the media covered Black people, however, it also drove cultural conversations and news and national conversations about Black people. Can you expand on this?
One of the things that Black Twitter did was bring to light stories that were going uncovered … and it took it out of Black-only media where we might see those stories covered in a local Black weekly paper.
What Black Twitter did was allow you to see multiple sides of the same story. Folks love to say that Black people are not a monolith. We know it’s true. It is a resistance tactic that we’ve used to draw attention to how complex our narratives are. Black Twitter showed news media that there are so many consumers that are out there missing because you’re so narrowly focused on one particular audience or one particular way of telling a story.
What I hear you saying is that Black Twitter filled the gap. I’m curious if you can share more about that and give us a sense of the cultural and political influences that gave birth to Black Twitter and by extension the prevalence and power of Black social media.
I love this question because I think often when we talk about what’s happened in cyberspace folks get ahistorical and they forget that there were things that came before the digital. I mentioned earlier all of these print and broadcast media channels for Black folks to connect to and through and with. But even in the digital space, there was a predecessor to Black Twitter. It was the Black blogosphere.
One of the political and social influences that helped to create Black Twitter was the fact that folks didn’t think Black people were on the internet. And even though people didn’t recognize that we were there, we knew we were there. And so we would seek each other out. The fact that it was a surprise to so many people outside of Black communities that Black folks were on the internet started to gain traction in news media coverage. And it was unusual to people who don’t know Black people to see that there were so many Black people online and that they were talking to each other in ways that were different from the mainstream. We were creating trending topics that had nothing to do with the news of the day. And in fact, if you didn’t know the context, they did not make sense at all and that contributed to Black Twitter’s success.
In an era in which our histories are actively being erased, where there is a hostile environment nationwide and worldwide against us, we’re using those tools to defend ourselves and our communities.
The political advocacy and cultural sway that existed on Black Twitter was indisputable. I’m curious if you can speak to Black Twitter’s influence on activism and offline mobilizations.
We know that Black activism has a long history that predates digital technology. But what Twitter helped us to do as a tool was connect. So activists in one place who might’ve been relying on email or messaging boards before to coordinate a campaign or to connect with people who were interested in the same issues that they were interested in, could connect instantaneously. People were organizing for racial justice, for the abolition of the police, the abolition of surveillance states long before Twitter existed, what Twitter made possible was connectivity and the ability to scale.
We also saw Black Twitter as a space where Black people held each other, and held non-Black people and those in power accountable. I’m curious what we can learn from Black Twitter about building a culture of accountability and calling people in.
The first thing we can learn is you’re not going to find the nuance that you need on social media. I think we need to start there because as insightful as learning from others via the internet can be, you still have to do the work yourself. There still has to be discernment and discretion about how we hold each other accountable. And it has to go beyond what you are exposed to on the internet. What we can learn is that accountability is possible, and that it happens and that it’s required in order to be and stay in a healthy community and connectivity with people.
We can also learn about the difference between community and collectivity, which is something another one of my collaborators, Feminista Jones, mentions all the time about Black Twitter, that there is a difference between being so bound to someone that you’re thinking of them as your own, and being responsible for them.
One of the cases I talk about in the book is where Russell Simmons came up with this skit about Harriet Tubman blackmailing her master with a sex tape, and he put it online, thought it was really funny, and everyone came for Russell Simmons, but the person who could really hold him accountable, and who was most effective was Spike Lee. Given their personal networks, Spike could have sent a message directly to Russell. And he may have, but he put it on Twitter where it got amplified. That was an example of what it means for us to hold someone accountable in a digital space and in a way that is effective and not abusive. But again, we have to exercise discretion and good judgment when we think about what digital accountability practices are actually adaptable for our lives and our communities away from the keyboard.
Speaking of calling in, there’s no discussion about Twitter that is complete without conceptualizing its new owner, Elon Musk, his political views, and his rise in political prominence. A number of news organizations, the Emancipator included, were conflicted about remaining on the platform. What are your thoughts on whether Twitter is still a space that’s best for advocacy?
I’m going to throw it back to history and encourage folks to look at the bigger picture. After emancipation, we have Reconstruction where Black folks are making significant advances. And I often think about what was lost in the post-Reconstruction era because of the laws put into place to keep Black people from advancing. People were building towns and communities, and then racial violence was used to squelch those advancements.
The same has happened in the digital age. Finding a way to control the means of production is what Elon Musk did with Twitter. So you can’t stop the people from organizing, from using this free technology and having access to this free tool. How do you shut that down? You buy the platform and then you can silence them. And what sticks out to me is something that I heard on the podcast Gaslit Nation. The hosts, Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa, said you don’t cede territory in an information war. Often we fail to consider the social-political context that we’re in as warfare, but it took war for Black people to earn any modicum of freedom. We still haven’t made it to liberation. And liberation is an ongoing process, but that takes war. Elon Musk purchasing this platform is an act of war. And what you don’t do in an act of war is cede territory to your enemy. Unless you have some grand strategy about how you’re going to get that territory back, you do not cede territory to your enemy. And so I think there are a couple of ways that we can engage that don’t cede that territory to someone like Elon Musk, but also do not sacrifice ourselves, our minds, or our well-being.
The advice that I would have for people in this era, one, is to start thinking about information warfare. We’ve always been in it, but it has taken on new heights and new levels and new meanings. You may not want to actively engage, but you do not have a choice about being involved if you are a person with any kind of digital footprint, if anything that you do is somehow connected to the internet, you are engaged. And so you got to figure out how you want to do that in a way that protects you and continues to uphold, support, and protect our communities.
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