‘Black Twitter: A People’s History’ Review: A Solid Hulu Primer

When “A Folks’s Historical past of Black Twitter” was printed in 2021, the social media platform appeared highly effective as ever. Because it had been for over a decade, the location was a hub of neighborhood and affect, the place customers may go to bullshit with mates, to arrange with activists, to learn and report information in actual time, perhaps even to mingle with a celeb or two. Certain, it had its issues with trolls or bots or poor moderation; positive, TikTok was already transferring in quick. However Twitter appeared to be, if not thriving, at the very least chugging together with no apparent finish in sight.

So much can change in three years, nonetheless — and loads has, significantly since Elon Musk’s acquisition of the location in 2022. Onyx Collective‘s Black Twitter: A Folks’s Historical past reiterates and expands on Jason Parham’s Wired article, braiding collectively interviews with journalists, comedians and different commentators to stipulate the rise of a revolution and its lasting impact. However from the vantage of 2024, the sequence takes on a extra reflective tenor — a glance again at a time lately handed, slightly than an effort to doc a narrative nonetheless unfolding.

Whereas Black customers have been on Twitter so long as Twitter has existed, each Parham and Black Twitter director Prentice Penny (Insecure) pin the beginning of Black Twitter as a definite phenomenon to round 2009, with Ashley Weatherspoon’s #UKnowUrBlackWhen as one in every of its first uniting viral moments. From there, the documentary traces a path loosely organized by chronology and theme.

The primary episode focuses on the early days of the neighborhood and its lighter aspect — the jokes, the watch events, the superstar spats, the dishy threads (who might overlook Zola?). The second charts the evolution of Black Twitter right into a software for real-world change, by way of actions like Black Lives Matter and #OscarsSoWhite. The third encompasses Twitter’s final gasp of relevance throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and its subsequent slide into Musk’s shabbier, seamier X. All through, the present thoughtfully positions its topic inside a bigger cultural context, underlining connections between civil rights marches and Black Lives Matter protests or drawing parallels between white flight and the departure of white individuals from the “ghetto” of MySpace to the gated neighborhood of Fb.

With a lot floor to cowl, Black Twitter can solely skim the floor of all of the complicated, interconnected concepts inside it. There’s simply not sufficient time in three hours for an intensive unpacking of the historical past instructed by an announcement like “I believe Black individuals discovered a very long time in the past that generally individuals can’t hear us once we’re being determined and once we’re being earnest, however they will hear us if we inflect our truths with humor and comedy,” from journalist Wesley Lowery. Or to completely map out the mechanics by which queer Black vernacular turns into coopted into generic web slang, as identified by Jamelle Dooley, a participant in one of many occasional group “kickback” segments.

Anybody desirous to dig additional into these rabbit holes must do their very own analysis; by the point you’ve formulated additional questions, the present has already barreled forward to the following subject. But when Black Twitter isn’t a lot for deep dives, it’s efficient as a primer for anybody nonetheless attempting to wrap their minds across the sheer breadth of its central subject — which, this quickly after the golden age of Black Twitter, might be most individuals.

Penny even embeds the expertise of the platform into the sequence itself, with a rhythm and a visible model that evoke the countless scroll. The factors made by its interviewees are illustrated in video memes, clips, 140-character quips, and punctuated by gifs of Kombucha Lady or Supa Sizzling Hearth. One-on-one interviews are carried out in units dressed to evoke a barbershop or an airport or a marketing campaign workplace — which, moreover including visible curiosity to the in any other case acquainted talking-head format, serve to remind us that Black Twitter is wherever Black persons are.

Penny takes pains to emphasise that the neighborhood it chronicles shouldn’t be a monolith. Its topics rattle off a dizzying array of subcategories, from HBCU Twitter to NBA Twitter to Blackademic Twitter, and so forth. And it’s conscious that these varied cliques don’t all the time mesh. The third chapter touches on problems with queerphobia and misogynoir inside Black Twitter, although as regular the sequence strikes on earlier than it could totally interrogate these thorny subjects.

Nonetheless, it finds inside this messy collective a typical narrative thread. It runs from the platform’s early attraction into what creator Luvvie Ajayi Jones describes as “a megaphone for people who find themselves on the margins,” the place Black individuals might go to name for justice, live-tweet a favourite drama, or just be themselves — after which twists ultimately into an instrument for the backlash, led by reactionaries like Donald Trump or Musk who noticed the location for the ability base it had change into. (Black Twitter rightfully roasts Musk’s bigoted views, however its most hilariously savage critique can be its easiest: “He’s simply not cool,” scoffs former Twitter exec God-is Rivera.)

Penny, like Parham, appears to have the lengthy view in thoughts in recording an period because it occurs so it’s not forgotten after it dissipates. It’s important work, particularly contemplating that social media is ephemeral nearly by nature: Author Ira Madison III mentions at one level the mid-2010s rash of “quite-unquote ‘articles’ that have been lifting issues straight from Black Twitter,” however dig up any of these tweet roundups now and also you’re prone to be met by damaged hyperlinks and failed embeds.

If posts aren’t ceaselessly, although, the affect they’ve will be. “Black Twitter actually was the foundational bedrock of the evolution of social affect as we see it now: the way in which that we joke, the way in which that we roast, the way in which that we push for accountability on the web generally,” says Rivera, and the docuseries makes a persuasive case that she’s proper. Black Twitter could be too broad, too temporary, too early to function the definitive account of this motion. Nevertheless it’s a compelling first chapter in what’s positive to be a protracted and full of life dialog.