Why are there so many Black people on Twitter?

This question came up again when @nukirk retweeted @blackcanseco’s tweet that mainstream media (NBC Chicago) picked up that there are Black people in Twitter. What the heck!? Yes folks, not only is Twitter being used by people of all races

updated 3/14/2010
Of online adults, 19% have reported using an online update service like Twitter.  Of that segment, 26% report their race as African American (Non-Hispanic)
(thanks @shanselman for the factual correction and then @baratunde for pointing out the 26% is a segment of the 19% who report using an update service!)

Ok, now that we’ve covered that, let’s explore some thoughts on the issue that I’ve had inside my mind since joining Twitter in March of 2008:

What does it mean to be Black on Twitter?

Some people on Twitter who are Black talk about issues related to race; some don’t. Some use slang; some don’t. Some are just who they are. People bring their interests to Twitter, some find new things to enjoy via Twitter.

Cool! Black People are on Twitter!

The first Black (Brown) person I followed on Twitter was @WayneSutton in North Carolina. I quickly realized there were a lot of Black people on Twitter who were about technology, news and were “givers” who were actively sharing links, resources, information and experiences. I had never encountered this type of environment where people were all about results and success in such a concentrated way regardless of race but the fact that I was finding so many folks just-like-me, blew me away! Now I didn’t know I could share this sort of stuff on my blog last year but now I’m sharing!!! I began following more Black people by seeing who was following Wayne and who he followed. That’s how I found @Kenyatta in NYC. I began to follow more people but made a special effort to ensure I followed Brown people who I felt a connection with. My circle expanded outside of technology to include people who focused on politics, breaking news, music, social media, education, health care, legal, mommy bloggers.

You can read my post where I share how I didn’t know there were Black bloggers on the Internet until I heard about the Blogging While Brown conference.

How Black people use Twitter

I remember when I met Senam at Blogging while Brown and she said, “My goal is to get all the black people on Twitter connected!”. Her handle on Twitter is @tweetmeblack and she proceeded to explain the benefits of creating a directory and resource of Black Twitter folks. I thought it was a great idea but more importantly, I was happy to see how enthusiastic she was about community and technology. I’ve never been one for “community” but quickly learned that in the blogosphere, bloggers are like an extended family.

Are they (Black people) aware of their own presence and impact on Twitter?

Some people watch, monitor and comment on trends, some do not. The same thing applies here. I am glad there are sites out there who are paying attention to this.

Social Media is about community

The important thing about Twitter is your ability to connect with other people just-like-you. That applies to your race, gender, hobbies, marital status, sexual orientation, career, political standing, religion, pet ownership and your favorite TV shows.

My first taste of the Black technology community was at Blogging While Brown which was amazing! It was a fundamental turning point for me regarding my attendance to technology and blogging conferences and made going to other conferences easier. I felt completely at ease as soon as I arrived.

Who’s monitoring Black people on Twitter?

I was over a Technicultr which is a new website focusing on marketing to multicultural communities and technology. There was an article posted about a PEW research study showing Blacks and Hispanics make up 40% of online status updaters so there you have it.  Black people like using Twitter and companies are starting to notice!

Black people “voyeurs” on Twitter

It also seems there are people on Twitter who like to watch Black people interact with each other. Is this the technology version of the Cotton Club where people who are White can watch Black people without direct interaction and maintain their stereotypes about them?

Is everyone who says they’re Black online really Black?

I’ve talked with several people about sharing your race online. I know I felt uncomfortable with it for my consulting work and finally decided I was going to put myself forth I was: A Black and Jewish Female. People would either accept it and contact me for technology consulting or click away from my website. When I made this choice in 2008, I got immediate positive feedback! You might wonder why it would be such a big deal to have an avatar (cartoon representation) of yourself on your own website…

read on…

This girl…she did experiment in the virtual game, Second Life, where she changed her skin color to see if she was treated differently. And was she ever! People ignored her, some people stopped being her friend and she was sexually propositioned.

The Skin You’re In

Normally Erika Thereian is blonde and California tan, an avatar hybrid of Jenny McCarthy and Pamela Anderson, nothing less than the archetypal white girl of the world’s dreams. Recently her friend Chip Midnight asked her to model his latest “skin”– not an unusual request, since Midnight is a long-established master in the creation of customized avatar skins that Residents make, buy, and wear, when they’re going for a look that Linden Lab’s avatar adjustment sliders can’t achieve. She’d wear Chip Midnight’s latest skin around Second Life to build up word of mouth, and generate sales. “I often throw her my new stuff to take for a spin,” Midnight explains to me. “She’s very social, so she’s a good way to get feedback.” Viral marketing at its most immersive.

But when she wore one of Chip’s recent skins, it also became, as Erika tells me, “[A]lmost a Black like Me thing.”

She spent three months in the skin of a black woman. Some of her friends shied away, she believes. Then there were the “guys that thought I was an easy lay, for lack of a better term. It scared me honestly, some of the assumptions made. Especially here where everything [in avatar appearance] is changeable with a click. I lost a couple of what I thought were good friends [who] stopped IMing and chatting. They were polite to a fault when I showed up, but [it] was weird. You know how you interact and something changes and no one tells you. Some were subtle, some weren’t.” She laughs without mirth, recalling how some friends would ask her questions such as, “‘[L]ike, when you going back to being you?”

Frustration of an Ethnic Avatar in Second Life

I’m shocked by the amount of effort it takes finding a skin with features, details, traits that are common in real life. While there are many “tan” and “dark” skins, many (if not all) are darker representations of their lighter counterparts. They lack certain characteristics to accurately represent ethnic people. An example is scalp hair, which is drawn on the scalp of the skin as a way to represent short hair. In real life, many Hispanics and Blacks have very short hair, but in Second Life, not all ethnic skins have this option. The few that do, the hair tends to be brown and not the more common black. There’s also a lack of hair style, low shaved heads are usually clean cut, some include a ‘widows peak’, others are faded, or military cut (cut low showing the scalp). This example may seem like a very issue, however this is one of the most important aspects that should be available for those wanting an ethnic avatar. I purposely avoid skins that lack this trait regardless of their quality.

Hair style may not seem important, but it is a major representation of ethnic identity. Dreadlocks aren’t grown just because they are cute, there’s a reason, a commitment and a story behind them. There are some very well done and authentic dreadlocks in Second Life, however it’s one of only three black hairstyles that seems to exist; afro’s and cornrows are the other two. While these hairstyles are the most distinctive they are not the only ethnic hair styles. Creators may want to take a look at other styles including the flat-tops, buns, and fro-hawks to add more diversity to their hair designs.

The choice of avatar clothing further exasperates this issue. “Urban” clothing doesn’t seem to represent urban clothing at all, most of these items are city clothing (jeans, faded t-shirts, etc). “Ethnic” clothing tends to be stereotypical Hip-Hop/gangsta’ replicas of actual clothing that are poorly designed. A middle-ground does not exist and the true style of urban clothing is void in Second Life. Clothing and accessory designers have created style-like virtual replicas of boots, loafers, and shoes; yet I cannot find a good Timberland boot style. Design styles of popular urban clothing, such as Fubu, and Ecko, aren’t seen often enough (if at all) in Second Life.

The Skin They’re In: Writing About Second Life and Race, 2008

To see if things have changed in nearly three years, my writing students recently spent a week as another race or gender (in some cases, both). Here are a few standout posts, with links to the students’ project pages in the class wiki. One tentative claim stands out from several students’ projects: newness to SL and the degree of customization, more than any racial or ethnic characteristic, get an avatar accepted or snubbed.
For Rae Belgar, switching race to a tall, dark-skinned woman led to little attention of any sort, Once she clad the same avatar in a sari, however, compliments and attention came her way.
When Deklin Windlow became a black man, he did not receive negative attention, though in many cases he got no attention at all in places where his white male avatar had been noticed. At the Public Orientation Island a group of older avatars, including some hero in a Batman costume, simply walked away when Deklin asked for assistance.

Nukirk’s Tweets Caught My Attention

“Why is black people on Twitter? What do we gotta gain from this?” Next thing, they gonna ask if we’re plotting to have political parties.about 3 hours ago from TweetDeck

What’s with the “theories” on why Black people is on twitter? Why is it everytime WE do something, people gotta research it?about 3 hours ago from TweetDeck

Mainstream Media: There’s Black People On Twitter!http://bit.ly/2eKShy (via @blackcanseco)about 3 hours ago from TweetDeck

BlackCanseco is the king of the Twitter question

• NBC just realized that Black People Use Twitter http://bit.ly/2UutFM
  about 7 hours ago from web
  
• BREAKING: NBC will now sprinkle their tweets w/”urban” vernacular to target Twitter’s surprisingly big Black population…(cont)
  about 7 hours ago from web
  
• I can see it now: “@NBC Yo’! The Office gon’ be back on they -ish tonite. Y’all twiggas gon’ watchit?”
  about 7 hours ago from web
  
• @Incilin Twitter’s following among urban audiences is pretty big. It’s free, it’s flexible—you can use your phone or laptop…
  about 7 hours ago from web

This guy is one of my Twitter hero’s because he’s real.  He says it like it is, he’s clever, reflective, persistent and on point!  I got to meet @BlackConsaco (Hadji) at Blogworld and like I thought, he’s extremely nice and personable; and reminds me of a teddy bear *smile*.

Breaking racial stereotypes with technology

Black people in America were brought here against their will and put into slavery where they weren’t allowed to learn how to read or educate themselves or barely even pray for a long time and then even after slavery was allegedly abolished there was sharecropping which is basically a form of slavery because you could never earn enough money to get out of it and then slavery and sharecropping were abolished but Black people couldn’t get hired on for good jobs so this sort of deprived state set Black people back not just financially but conditioned them to avoid success. Now not everyone was affected in the same way or to the same degree but it’s left a lasting impression on Black people whose roots are slavery.

Let’s take a quick look at Fredrick Douglass who was born a slave but became a super awesome figure in Black history:

Born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland 1818

Separated from his mother when he was still an infant.

When Douglass was about twelve, Hugh Auld’s wife Sophia started teaching him the alphabet. She was breaking the law against teaching slaves to read. When Hugh Auld discovered this, he strongly disapproved, saying that if a slave learned to read, he would become dissatisfied with his condition and desire freedom. Douglass later referred to this statement as the “first decidedly antislavery lecture” he had ever heard. As detailed in his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Douglass succeeded in learning to read from white children in the neighborhood and by observing the writings of men with whom he worked.

As Douglass learned and began to read newspapers, political materials, and books of every description, he was exposed to a new realm of thought that led him to question and then condemn the institution of slavery.

When Douglass was hired out to a Mr. Freeman, he taught other slaves on the plantation how to read the New Testament at a weekly Sabbath school. As word spread, the interest among slaves in learning to read was so great that in any week more than 40 slaves would attend lessons.

Fredrick took it upon himself to continue his education after he received a glimpse something that held promise for a better tomorrow: knowledge. This same thing is occurring with technology in the Black community as it does with humans in general. People who are White have clouded vision about this due to the history they created enslaving others.

So this expectation that black people can’t use technology… that’s what I really want to get to because it’s this isn’t almost a carryover from “all black people don’t like to read” and “black people aren’t educated”. Well if you spend a couple of hundred years having negative reinforcement that you know you’ll get whipped, sold off from your family or have thumb tacks applied for reading of it becomes ingrained in you to avoid that sort of thing.

This isn’t a “Black” thing, it’s a slavery thing.

I say this because I’ve seen and experienced how Black people born in Africa approach education, success and their careers vs Black people with generations in America. For example, Senam of BrownandBridal / Tweetmeblack and soon to be Sista TV was born in Ghana. She has a bubbly personality, is very positive, values family and has a strong vision about her future as a maven on the Internet running a series of successful business ventures. I know she’s going to make it.

I was going to just write this part out about what I thought but I had the chance to chat with Senam today! She confirmed that her family’s support of her interests has helped keep her focused on her business vision. Her father was a computer programmer and encouraged her when she showed interest in graphic design and website development. I told her about the book, Outliers, where Malcolm Gladwell cited studies that showed when parents pay attention, advocate on behalf of their kids and find ways to grow their children’s interest, the kids turn out to be more successful. There are fundamental differences between Black families and White families here. We need to close that gap by nurturing children, ensuring parents have support and encouraging everyone to find their voice. This is why Twitter is awesome.

I know education is the key to success. I know technology is the door that unlocks that success.

To be very successful and very motivated requires support. I think people are finding that via Twitter.

People who do not have slavery as part of their generational background don’t really understand the impact of a systematic, extended period of negative reinforcement on the educational opportunities to Black people. If your children’s lives were in mortal danger from picking up a book, how would you protect them? People who are White have not had to consider this. There are Black and Brown who feel uncomfortable thinking about this, discussing it or acting on things in their lives which hold them back from success.

If you’re Black and on Twitter, you’re headed in the right direction embrace success. Take it upon yourself to get 1 new person to sign up for Twitter. I often think of myself in different time periods and how my behavior would be the same and what struggles I would face. Take yourself back to 1820, before the Emancipation Proclamation, about 40 years before slaves were “freed”. I would of been right there helping people read, helping people embrace a better life, just like I do now.

Why do Black people like Twitter?

I think black people like twitter because it’s fast you can you can get reactions from other folks instantly. With the trending topics you are contributing to something that is bigger than yourself and it’s neat for people to see. Black people like to get together just like people of all other races. Discussion is an important part of Twitter. When Michael Jackson died for example. Now I don’t have a TV so I couldn’t actually watch the BET awards but I was able to experience them vicariously through Twitter because were just talking about it. The gist of it was the tribute to Michael Jackson was done last minute, was lacking logistics, the performers were acting up and it seemed BET was just selling out in general. I had to chuckle as people exclaimed surprise, promised to never watch BET again and made all sorts of jokes.

Black people stereotypes don’t match Technology use

Many people are just afraid of Black people. They feel uncomfortable around Black people so many avoid direct interactions vs exploring this. When confronted with a belief that doesn’t match, many people will create an “exclusion” vs evaluating their belief. This is what allows people to hold onto stereotypes based on rumors, urban legends and racism.

Technology is great because it’s new to most everybody. It levels the playing field. The whole thought that “racism is not okay is new”. We just had the civil rights movement in the 1950s where the government basically, “Ok, we agree that you can’t treat people different because of their skin color” but that was 100 years after they “gave” slaves their “freedom”. Maybe “restored original human rights” would be better than “freedom”.

Point is, many families and individuals are still holding onto things they learned as children and are taking those beliefs to the online world.

Photo Credit: Tweetmeblack.com