hHow to explain black Twitter? It is less a real place than a general practice, sometimes a secret society and other times a prominent advocacy bloc, neither an independent digital platform nor its own hashtag per se. However, when the police killKendrick Lamar drops either Harlem tremblesWe know black Twitter when we see it.
In the nearly 20 years that Twitter (or now X, if you must) has existed, Black Twitter has been the mystical life force that has kept it real, fascinating, and rich. But where to start, let alone catalog a seemingly endless stream of killer jokes? “I remember when the Alabama fight came out and there were a lot of jokes about Terrance Howard and the way he says mayne in Hustle and Flow,” says comedy guru Prentice Penny. “And then someone calls the (teenager who jumped off a riverboat to join the fight) aguamayne. “Simply use the boy coming out of the water as a setup to call back mayne It `s hilarious. “I just want to keep being this funny.”
Penny, showrunner of HBO’s Insecure, had no experience directing a documentary before Black Twitter: A People’s History, a three-parter he executive produced through Onyx Collective, Disney’s outlet for creatives of color. Told in hour-long fragments, the Hulu series is based on a Wired 2021 cover story by senior writer Jason Parham. At first glance, Black Twitter would seem too amorphous and, well, Black a topic for the official magazine of Silicon Valley. But Parham remembers that they accepted his speech immediately. “He was really interested in navigating this space because he had been on Black Twitter from the beginning,” says Parham, also an executive producer on the documentary. “This is the only story in the seven years I’ve been at Wired where I presented it as it was and that’s how it ended. The title of the proposal was A popular story. “That never happens.”
Each episode covers a different stage in the evolution of black Twitter, from its ascendancy in earlier digital forums like BlackPlanet and MySpace to its subsequent political influence and uncertain future under Elon Musk. Whenever there is an effort to give texture to the intangible, there is a risk of over-intellectualizing the obvious, killing the mystique and ruining the joke. But the Hulu documentary is not only smart about soliciting opinions from intellectuals, advocates, and online terminals, it also spices up the talking heads formula by photographing each expert against a soundstage that speaks to their past: a movie theater for April Reign, the media maven who launched #OscarsSoWhite; a school cafeteria for André Brock, the Georgia Tech communications professor, and a reading room for Roxane Gay.
“On people’s Twitter accounts, they have an avatar in the circle,” says Penny, who also provides narration for the series. “I always think about when you take a photograph, especially when you post it on social media, what is true and what is false. The (background) idea was kind of a funnier version of that, but I was also trying to find organic spaces where people would engage in black Twitter, whether it was the subway, their bedroom, or the barbershop.”
Another standout scene in the film is something Penny calls “kickbacks”: group scenes captured in more naturalistic settings: a cookout, a bar, a brunch. This last medium (which, among others, included Kalin Elisa of squatting and squinting meme fame) features a table of fried chicken, waffles and watermelon. Some might find more cultural elements to think about here, but documentary filmmaker Joie Jacoby assures: “It’s a wink.
“There are so many things you think about when you’re doing something specifically,” Penny says. “If it were quiche, people would say (she sucks her teeth disdainfully). That’s when you say, Argh, what is the perfect and appropriate food?? And then you just say, like, But we do this too.“
The documentary’s creators are ready for the “call and response” viewing party digital commentary that Black Twitter pioneered on TV series like Scandal and Game of Thrones and perfected with Verzuz concerts during Covid, too known as “the panorama”, one of several. alternative names twitter black coined for the pandemic. (Choir Choirthe Nigerian variant of the colloquialism, is a personal favorite, but no one made a meal with the root word like Cardi B.) When the Black Twitter preview was posted in March, users took to the platform to complain about contributors who were apparently left out, including Aziah “Zola” King, whose absorbing thread about a bad trip to Tampa culminated in drama of A24. . “We knew they were going to respond to us,” says Jacoby. “That’s what’s true on black Twitter. Because what’s the first question any black person asks (about a meeting)? Who will be there??”
The documentary awakens this circularity, splashing auto-generated tweets with old favorites. “We were in an interview and someone said something like ‘Karens’ Mount Rushmore,’” Penny says. “And we were like, ‘Oh shit, we have to do that!'” The fact that the final product looks a lot like something that could actually appear on your timeline is less a comment on the documentary’s production value than many talented users who come up with those types of memes. In the diary. As comedian Amanda Seales says in one episode, “I didn’t know black people were so good at Photoshop.” Rap Caviar podcast host Brandon “Jinx” Jenkins places Twitter’s impact on the zeitgeist on par with the Renaissance and Baroque eras. “We were excluded from those other eras of art,” he says of blacks. “That open tweet is the canvas. Words are a brush. GIFs are the accent.”
“There’s a pre-black Internet Twitter and a post-black Internet Twitter,” Parham says. “I think we really gave the Internet a way to talk about things that are happening, a certain slang terminology. The way people are always looking for “receipts”, calling people. “This is what we see a lot now in online discourse and communication and in our digital exchanges.” What’s more, as critic Baratunde Thurston argues in the doc, Black Twitter’s practice of providing nonstop commentary, criticizing institutions, and applauding Karens was simply a buildup to its biggest moment to date: January 6, also known as the fateful winter in which the world met the White Walkers. like QAnon Shaman. (“It’s none of my black business,” is how comedian Sam Jay summed up Black Twitter’s general view of the Capitol riots.) But of course, as the document points out, none of that black sarcasm would have been possible without Twitter also becoming a public square for the right-wing extremists who stormed the Capitol at the suggestion of Donald Trump, who dominated Twitter until he was banished, then reinstated, and then started again at Truth Social.
And there’s the rub: Unlike old-world artifacts that are meticulously preserved and further revered in books and other media, Black Twitter serves for the pleasure of Musk, aka Apartheid Clyde. Black users on social media, despite the big conversations, have yet to imbue the same singular coldness and weight on newcomer sites like Spill or Clubhouse or even TikTok, where Black creator Reesa Teesa has recently emerged as an escape like Zola’s however. “As long as it’s there and it works,” Jacoby says of Twitter, “it will be used to some extent.”
When it comes to relevant commentary that drives culture, Black Twitter is in many ways like the Internet itself: undefeated. But given the filmmakers’ admitted need to finish this project after Musk, who never pays $44 billion for Twitter without black users adding as much value, one wonders: If it all goes away tomorrow, what’s left? “It’s really hard to replicate what Twitter did because it’s so moment-specific,” Parham says. “We are now moving into a new time and a new era of social media, so I think it is very difficult to say what will be next. But I do think that black people have more ownership over what happens in the future, on these digital platforms that we are building, without a doubt.”