Black Twitter, Combating the New Jim Crow & the Power of Social Networking
by Kyra D. Gaunt
"...i wanted to be a new person
and my rebirth was stifled not by the master
but the slave." - Nikki Giovanni
Statistics don't mean a damn thang! And being on Twitter cannot make a difference as a black person if ppl don't realize the potential of being publishers of not only content but also of thought leaderdship and opinion. Why have 3000 followers or even 300 if you don't USE your voice as a call to freedom, justice and democracy as a citizen in the United States? What does it even mean to be a citizen, if not a great one, if you cannot use the channels of access within your reach to broadcast when democracy and justice ISN'T WORKING as well as you like, if at all?
When Edison Research released their April 2010 Annual Twitter Usage Report that Twitter was disproportionately black with 24% participation, I wasn't surprised. (For perspective, we are only 12.9% or 39.6 million of the 307 million here in the U.S.) Black folk love to talk. But as an ethnic group--relative to the families and communities in which I have dwelled--as descendents of the forced inter- and intra- national migrations created by economic exploitation or Jim Crow disenfranchishment, our love of tweeting is connected to the embedded disadvantage we inherited. Nobody really listened to us and Twitter listens like it or not. We can now talk amongst ourselves in public. My tweets might be seen by people I follow and my followers which include celebrities, professors, students and politicians like my NY Senator Kristen Gillibrand. This is a new era of openness for black Twitterers from the UK to the US and the Netherlands, for instance.
But #BlackTwitter, as we have come to call ourselves in hashtagged tweets, is doing more or less what it does offline in the USA. We hear upsets about racism in the media through the grapevine, now our Twitter timeline, but rarely at a rate consistent with our numbers do we write letters to the directors of shows or distributors of films that offend us. We complain to the manager at Macy's but rarely put that ish in writing to be sure there is documentation in our files and theirs (plus its great fodder for nonfiction writing). In the past, we lived in a primarily oral and kinetic based world where songs and our bodies was all we had given we were once considered 3/5ths human. Being human means having a voice, a vote and the power to organize and demand justice.
The remnants of that voicelessness still sits in the back seat of our bus of expressive power but when Twitter came along it felt like a change to me. I could tweet out to @BillGates (and have). I could tweet to @nytimes and its reporters and have. I have tweeted with Ivanka Trump. Reached out to @llcoolj and more important to me, I can now tweet with all admired black intellectuals and professors who are on Twitter whom I would rarely would have had contact before Twitter. These people include @newblackman aka Mark Anthony Neal at Duke, @imaniperry at Princeton, @eddieglaude, @dumilewis, @mharrisperry aka Melissa Harris Perry of Princeton and an MSNBC contributor and many, many more. Black faculty are less than 3% of the entire professoriate in the United States so I value this mode of interaction that defies are separation we often experience as the only one in our department, division or school.
What prompted this post today? Or as many men I know would say, "what's the point?" Owning the power of the word as a blogger and a Twitter curator with a Ph.D. or a claim to being a TED Fellow. So here's the deal:
Yesterday I clicked a link in a tweet from my roommate @corvida about a black mother being convicted for sending her kids to a high-achieving school. Kelley Williams-Bolar was found guilty of two 3rd-degree felonies for falsifying RESIDENCY records in Ohio. I was appalled. She was caught sending her daughters to a high achieving school in the district where her kids' father lived rather than the schools near her subsidized housing. The judge actually wanted to give her two consecutive five-year sentences and reduced it to 10 days in prison and THREE YEARS on probation plus 80 hours of community service. WT..??! As a result of two felony convictions, Williams-Bolar is being denied completing her teacher training certification. A better job thwarted because she did what so many parents do all the time here in NYC.
This really struck me. I am currently reading in Michelle Alexander's brilliant NYTimes bestseller THE NEW JIM CROW: MASS INCARCERATION IN THE AGE OF COLORBLINDNESS (The New Press, 2010). Alexander opened my eyes to the fact that with a felony conviction in many states a person like Williams-Bolar will become permanently ineligible for any public assistance. She resides in subsidized housing in Ohio. Martha Stewart was not treated as badly. And even if you she was, Stewart could buy herself out of the disenfranchisement of being labeled a felon (and essentially did). Williams-Bolar cannot. Perhaps there is much more to this story but it seems that this was her first offense. What kind of democracy are we living in and under the administration of a black president? That should tell us something about the reality of our current democracy "of the people." If the new Jim Crow tactics are going to be instituted to criminalize a mother for doing a common violation in the name of "doing what's best for her children", why get an education? This is no liberty and death.
Hey Black Twitter!! No, correction. HEY TWITER!! HEY WORLD!!! Let's use our collective social media power to broadcast publicly Williams-Bolar's cause! Our networks are open not closed by laws the punish the wrong folks. Let's use our distributed and diverse networks to reach beyond our immediate anger and reach larger media outlets as well as our politicians. I am tweeting to senators about my concern.
by Kyra D. Gaunt
"...i wanted to be a new person
and my rebirth was stifled not by the master
but the slave." - Nikki Giovanni
Statistics don't mean a damn thang! And being on Twitter cannot make a difference as a black person if ppl don't realize the potential of being publishers of not only content but also of thought leaderdship and opinion. Why have 3000 followers or even 300 if you don't USE your voice as a call to freedom, justice and democracy as a citizen in the United States? What does it even mean to be a citizen, if not a great one, if you cannot use the channels of access within your reach to broadcast when democracy and justice ISN'T WORKING as well as you like, if at all?
When Edison Research released their April 2010 Annual Twitter Usage Report that Twitter was disproportionately black with 24% participation, I wasn't surprised. (For perspective, we are only 12.9% or 39.6 million of the 307 million here in the U.S.) Black folk love to talk. But as an ethnic group--relative to the families and communities in which I have dwelled--as descendents of the forced inter- and intra- national migrations created by economic exploitation or Jim Crow disenfranchishment, our love of tweeting is connected to the embedded disadvantage we inherited. Nobody really listened to us and Twitter listens like it or not. We can now talk amongst ourselves in public. My tweets might be seen by people I follow and my followers which include celebrities, professors, students and politicians like my NY Senator Kristen Gillibrand. This is a new era of openness for black Twitterers from the UK to the US and the Netherlands, for instance.
But #BlackTwitter, as we have come to call ourselves in hashtagged tweets, is doing more or less what it does offline in the USA. We hear upsets about racism in the media through the grapevine, now our Twitter timeline, but rarely at a rate consistent with our numbers do we write letters to the directors of shows or distributors of films that offend us. We complain to the manager at Macy's but rarely put that ish in writing to be sure there is documentation in our files and theirs (plus its great fodder for nonfiction writing). In the past, we lived in a primarily oral and kinetic based world where songs and our bodies was all we had given we were once considered 3/5ths human. Being human means having a voice, a vote and the power to organize and demand justice.
The remnants of that voicelessness still sits in the back seat of our bus of expressive power but when Twitter came along it felt like a change to me. I could tweet out to @BillGates (and have). I could tweet to @nytimes and its reporters and have. I have tweeted with Ivanka Trump. Reached out to @llcoolj and more important to me, I can now tweet with all admired black intellectuals and professors who are on Twitter whom I would rarely would have had contact before Twitter. These people include @newblackman aka Mark Anthony Neal at Duke, @imaniperry at Princeton, @eddieglaude, @dumilewis, @mharrisperry aka Melissa Harris Perry of Princeton and an MSNBC contributor and many, many more. Black faculty are less than 3% of the entire professoriate in the United States so I value this mode of interaction that defies are separation we often experience as the only one in our department, division or school.
What prompted this post today? Or as many men I know would say, "what's the point?" Owning the power of the word as a blogger and a Twitter curator with a Ph.D. or a claim to being a TED Fellow. So here's the deal:
Yesterday I clicked a link in a tweet from my roommate @corvida about a black mother being convicted for sending her kids to a high-achieving school. Kelley Williams-Bolar was found guilty of two 3rd-degree felonies for falsifying RESIDENCY records in Ohio. I was appalled. She was caught sending her daughters to a high achieving school in the district where her kids' father lived rather than the schools near her subsidized housing. The judge actually wanted to give her two consecutive five-year sentences and reduced it to 10 days in prison and THREE YEARS on probation plus 80 hours of community service. WT..??! As a result of two felony convictions, Williams-Bolar is being denied completing her teacher training certification. A better job thwarted because she did what so many parents do all the time here in NYC.
This really struck me. I am currently reading in Michelle Alexander's brilliant NYTimes bestseller THE NEW JIM CROW: MASS INCARCERATION IN THE AGE OF COLORBLINDNESS (The New Press, 2010). Alexander opened my eyes to the fact that with a felony conviction in many states a person like Williams-Bolar will become permanently ineligible for any public assistance. She resides in subsidized housing in Ohio. Martha Stewart was not treated as badly. And even if you she was, Stewart could buy herself out of the disenfranchisement of being labeled a felon (and essentially did). Williams-Bolar cannot. Perhaps there is much more to this story but it seems that this was her first offense. What kind of democracy are we living in and under the administration of a black president? That should tell us something about the reality of our current democracy "of the people." If the new Jim Crow tactics are going to be instituted to criminalize a mother for doing a common violation in the name of "doing what's best for her children", why get an education? This is no liberty and death.
Hey Black Twitter!! No, correction. HEY TWITER!! HEY WORLD!!! Let's use our collective social media power to broadcast publicly Williams-Bolar's cause! Our networks are open not closed by laws the punish the wrong folks. Let's use our distributed and diverse networks to reach beyond our immediate anger and reach larger media outlets as well as our politicians. I am tweeting to senators about my concern.
Read the Full Essay @ TEDFellows
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