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--:-- Host: Duarte Giraldino: Welcome to In Conversation from Apple News Today. I'm Duarte Giraldino.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News. Today on In Conversation, you're going to meet Jason Parham. He's a senior writer at Wired. He recently came out with an article called A People's History of Black Twitter. This is an oral history of how Black Twitter came to be, as told by the people who were there.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Black Twitter is one of the most influential parts of the Internet. It's the driving force behind countless memes, hashtags, and also social justice movements. It started off as an online place where Black people could come together and joke around, but it has evolved into something that's changed the real world. It played a big role in Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movement.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And as Parham told me, it's hard to encapsulate everything that Black Twitter is. Black Twitter is the ultimate multiverse. It's call and response. It's a therapy session. It's the cookout. It's a soul train line. It's judge and jury. It's all these things coming together in one place.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: on the sort of like black landscape of like love and joy and community, but also like realness at the same time. You can read Parham's article on Apple News with an Apple News Plus subscription.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: When I talked with Parham, he took me through the history of black Twitter, each phase in subtle evolution. He also pointed out how Twitter's vast accessibility made black people and black culture vulnerable to exploitation and appropriation.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Twitter is not an exclusively Black space, and yet this history talks about Black people carving out their own space within the broader platform. How would you define who's there, who's making the content? It is Black people, but is it just Black people?
--:-- Jason Parham: I would say the majority of people that are involved in Black Twitter are Black. But someone I spoke with, April Rain, who is the creator of the Oscar So White hashtag, she was saying how, like, you know, obviously not everybody who is black is also on black Twitter.
--:-- Jason Parham: One person she brought up was Candace Owens, the conservative news commentator, which I thought was pretty hilarious because she doesn't necessarily identify with a lot of things that are happening on black Twitter. So I don't know if everybody who is black is even part of black Twitter, but it's tough.
--:-- Jason Parham: It's hard to sometimes put a nose on it, right, which I think was part of the struggle in putting oral history together, because I was like, how can I best encompass all that this thing is, right?
--:-- Jason Parham: And so I think an oral history lent itself to that in that way. Black Twitter, if you know it, you know it. But if you don't know it, let's set this up. Just how influential is Black Twitter?
--:-- Jason Parham: Talk about why you think it's worthy of this massive oral history. I mean, it's pushed the culture in so many ways, right? One person I spoke with, Judd Nick Mayer, she's a TV writer and producer from New York, where she lives in L.A. now.
--:-- Jason Parham: Something she said just really blew my mind. She was like, Black Twitter invented language. What? What does that mean? I was like, well, what do you mean by that?
--:-- Jason Parham: And I thought it was so hilarious, but also kind of profound in the way that I think a lot of the idioms, a lot of the language used on Black Twitter, a lot of the ways we speak and communicate is co-opted by brand, is co-opted by major companies.
--:-- Jason Parham: And so in that way, we're driving and moving the culture in a lot of ways I think people don't recognize and see, which is also why it was important for me to document what we were doing on Black Twitter.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You took the entirety of Black Twitter and you sort of structured it into three distinct eras. Lay that out for us.
--:-- Jason Parham: Early on, it kind of begins around 2008, 2009. You know, Ashley Weatherspoon, somebody I spoke with, she worked for Adrienne Bailon, who a pop singer for 3LW and the Cheetah Girls They were working on social media strategy trying to figure out how they could essentially go viral
--:-- Jason Parham: And this is 2009 Twitter still fairly new. They're thinking of all these hashtags. And one they come up with is, you know, you're Black when. And it kind of just pops off on Twitter in this sort of volcanic way, right?
--:-- Jason Parham: And that specific day on Twitter, you have all these folks sort of chiming in saying, you know, you're Black when, you cancel your plans when it rains, you know, you're black when, you know, you have tall, wear tall tees or have, you know, 20 inch rims on your cars.
--:-- Jason Parham: It hadn't existed or people hadn't gathered together and gravitated towards each other in that way around a specific hashtag on Twitter in any way like that before. So it was really special in that sense.
--:-- Jason Parham: So the first phase is sort of this wild west free flowing period when people defined it as, you know, we had Twitter After Dark, you had things like people really described it as a college campus feel.
--:-- Jason Parham: People would come to Twitter and just want to commune with their friends and talk about things that were going on. You'd see a lot of stray observations. You even had popular stars like Rihanna and Questlove and Snoop Dogg sort of talking to fans.
--:-- Jason Parham: It was a really direct one-to-one communication platform. And then things change around 2013, 2014 when Trayvon Martin dies, And then you have Michael Brown being shot in Ferguson a year later.
--:-- Jason Parham: And then that's when that platform takes a real drastic shift into its social justice era. And then you fast forward a little bit, I would say around the end of the Obama era, the Trump era, you have this sort of third act that we're in right now, or the third generation of black Twitter, which is still in a lot of ways defining itself.
--:-- Jason Parham: It's defined a lot by the hardship and the craziness of the Trump era, but a lot of levity and joy and humor that was happening at the same time.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You mentioned that pivot to social justice, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown. How linked were those demonstrations with what was happening on Twitter?
--:-- Jason Parham: I was talking to Janetta Elzey. She's an activist in Ferguson. She was saying the day that Michael Brown got shot, you know, a lot of people were messaging her on Twitter saying, Hey, Netta, have you seen this? Do you see what's going on? You should get down there.
--:-- Jason Parham: And she was saying that her partner at the time was saying, you know, this is the time when you have to make a decision. And so you see this happening on the platform a lot around this time where another person I spoke with, Professor Sarah Jackson, she was saying it's, you know, hashtag activism, right?
--:-- Jason Parham: Where you have the platform sort of transitioning into a platform where you're not only creating change online, but the change you're talking about online is creating change in the real world IRL.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So Black Lives Matter, that very name, it's an Internet phenomenon by nature, right? You're talking about creating change in real life.
--:-- Jason Parham: Black Lives Matter actually has roots in Facebook. It was created on Facebook in response to, you know, the killing of Trayvon Martin. but it sort of grew and became what it is today, the movement it is today through Black Twitter and people pushing it forward on the platform.
--:-- Jason Parham: One thing, Wesley Lawry, who's a correspondent for 60 Minutes, but at the time he was working at The Post, you know, he was one of the big reporters down on the ground in Ferguson.
--:-- Jason Parham: And I was like, what was it about Black Lives Matter that caught on? Because around the same time, you had a lot of other hashtags popping up around separate killings that were happening across the country, right?
--:-- Jason Parham: With Trayvon Martin, you had If They Gun Me Down. With Michael Brown, you had Hands Up, Don't Shoot. With Laquan McDonald, you had 17 shots.
--:-- Jason Parham: But there were some things very specific about Black Lives Matter that was this sort of umbrella hashtag that was a critique to the larger system that was oppressing what was oppressing Black folks across the country.
--:-- Jason Parham: It sort of encapsulated everything that we wanted to say. You know, it was a radical thing to say at the time. Black Lives Matter. Nobody was saying that, right? At least white folks weren't saying that, right?
--:-- Jason Parham: And so it was very radical to sort of even utter that online. It seem so now but back in 2013 2014 it seemed wild to say something like that
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You're right about that movement. And you say there was a shift recently, in particular after the last presidential election. Has there been an evolution in Black Twitter that extends beyond social justice?
--:-- Jason Parham: Black Twitter will never not be a platform for social justice, I think. you know, since 2014, it will always, no matter what, be a platform for the underrepresented, the marginalized, the other, the oppressed, the queer.
--:-- Jason Parham: I think it will be a place where people can speak out in ways that they feel important. But it's more than that. And I think it was important for me in doing this to show that Black Twitter wasn't just pain.
--:-- Jason Parham: It wasn't just police killings. It wasn't just saying, hey, we're hurting, we're grieving. You have things that are born out of Black Twitter. You have Black Lives Matter becoming its own thing.
--:-- Jason Parham: But Black Twitter itself is still doing what it does. People are still on the platform, you know, joking around. Some people are still on the platform sharing relationship advice.
--:-- Jason Parham: People are still on the platform, you know, being raunchy after 11 p.m. of Twitter after dark. I think that the platform, Black Twitter itself, is still this ecosystem that's constantly sort of transforming transforming in ways that even sometimes I couldn't see in reporting the story.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I think that's really interesting. Black women play a prominent role in this oral history. Talk to us about what that role is.
--:-- Jason Parham: I mean, Black women are, in a lot of ways, in the way that they're the backbone of the country, they're the backbone of Black Twitter, I would say.
--:-- Jason Parham: They have been so fundamental to so many of the movements, the sort of offshoot movements that have been born through Black Twitter. We have all these hashtags that are speaking to gender justice and racial justice in ways that I think Black women in a lot of ways wouldn't have gotten credit for if it wasn't for a Black Twitter.
--:-- Jason Parham: One of those sources I spoke with, Jamila Lemieux, was an essayist and a cultural critic for Slate. She was saying how, like, it's really tough being a black woman online.
--:-- Jason Parham: And she has constantly, from the day she's been on there, gotten threats, gotten harassed, gotten, you know, saying, I'm going to come to your house and I'm going to kill you.
--:-- Jason Parham: But she continues on because the platform is so essential in bringing light to all the other things in her community and all the other things that she finds important. Right.
--:-- Jason Parham: And I think a lot of black women operate in that way. April Rain was also saying the same thing. You know, the larger your platform gets, the more harassment you naturally get as a black woman online.
--:-- Jason Parham: And it's so true of Twitter where, you know, they're constantly getting trolled. People are constantly coming into their DMs, you know, with negative thoughts.
--:-- Jason Parham: But they continue to do what they do because the platform helps to shine a light in areas that they feel needed.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: For black women, it sounds like a double-edged sword here. I'm hearing you talk about how this platform is essential for lifting up voices, but then they get too big and they start attracting these waves of toxicity.
--:-- Jason Parham: How do you explain that? Or what do you make of this tension?
--:-- Jason Parham: I mean, I think both things can be true, right? It is, as I said in the beginning, this multiverse, you know, it's joy and pain. It's discord and harmony. It's all these things together.
--:-- Jason Parham: And I think you're right. There is a ton of vitriol. There is a ton of hate. And that's just sort of naturally what the Internet is, I think, especially when you're a person of color online.
--:-- Jason Parham: You naturally get that. And I think that's part of what comes with Black Twitter. So Black Twitter is this public space online.
--:-- Jason Parham: And as a public space in a public form or a cultural marketplace, as I like to describe it, you have people constantly looking at what's going on in your world.
--:-- Jason Parham: But some of those people don't necessarily identify with your platform. That obviously has an effect on the platform, but that doesn't necessarily change the intention of what Black Twitter is for, what the people on the platform are trying to do.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You wrote a piece last year about TikTok and the evolution of what you call digital blackface.
--:-- Jason Parham: And you identify ways in which these new emerging medias are allowing Black creators to essentially be ripped off And I talking about their content their dance moves their jokes their language all stolen by the wider culture
--:-- Jason Parham: But this pattern it predated the internet, right? I mean, is history repeating itself?
--:-- Jason Parham: I mean, I think it is. You know, we're not in charge of these platforms. And so I think it's tough to dictate who gets to do what and how people get to operate.
--:-- Jason Parham: You know, these platforms weren't built with Black people in mind. And so we come on them and we make them our own and we add value to them in ways that people didn't expect.
--:-- Jason Parham: But, you know, we're still being taken advantage of. Our labor, as you said, is still being exploited. I think TikTok is obviously the most perverse example of that because it's the most in-demand app.
--:-- Jason Parham: And I think it lends itself to a sort of 3D realness in a way that Twitter doesn't. Right. Twitter, when you see exploitation on Twitter or co-optation on Twitter or appropriation on Twitter, it's flat.
--:-- Jason Parham: But on TikTok, you see things like, you know, people pretending to speak how they expect black folks to speak. Right. People embodying the rhythms and the gestures and affectations of housewives or these sort of VH1 reality stars that they beloved.
--:-- Jason Parham: But it's not necessarily the full scope of what we call Black cultural identity. I think it's a very skewed sense of what they think Black people are.
--:-- Jason Parham: You know, one of the most perverse examples I came across in my reporting for that particular story on TikTok last year was the sort of stereotypical what they call the hot Cheeto girl.
--:-- Jason Parham: You would see a lot of white creators putting, you know, tape on their fingernails like they had these long fingernails, these hoop earrings, eating Cheeto bags, talking sort of like these around the way girls that they would see in sort of these 90s movies.
--:-- Jason Parham: these sort of low-income youth, this idea that they had of this is what, you know, young Black youth act like and operate like. And so it's really, really troubling.
--:-- Jason Parham: But I think, as you know, those tensions will always exist as long as America is America, unfortunately.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Finally, let's look at how you structured this piece, this oral history, these snippets of dialogue from all these different people. It's a really unique way of telling a story, and it doesn't read like a typical magazine article.
--:-- Jason Parham: What made you decide to go about it this way?
--:-- Jason Parham: There were a lot of ways that I wanted to attack this story from the onset, but I thought that an oral history lent itself to sort of what Black Twitter, or what the essence of Black Twitter is, right?
--:-- Jason Parham: You literally have hundreds of thousands of people on the platform every day speaking, sharing, talking about their day. And I don't think I could have done it justice if I reported this as a sort of investigative look at Black Twitter.
--:-- Jason Parham: And I also don't think that would have lent itself to the sort of genius that's inherent within the platform. I think I owed it to other folks and the people that have been on Black Twitter from the beginning and that are on there still to let them speak up and say something.
--:-- Jason Parham: Black history itself has always been an oral tradition, right? Way, way, way back, you know, our stories were told orally. And so part of that was important for me to sort of structure the story in that way as well.
--:-- Jason Parham: I wanted other people to have just as much of a stake in the story as I did. You know, it's not my story, it's their story. As much as I am a part of Black Twitter, it's not my story to tell only.
--:-- Jason Parham: And I think that was important for me to do it in that way that we did the oral history.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Jason Parham, he's a senior writer for Wired. Thanks for being on Apple News today.
--:-- Jason Parham: Thank you.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Parham's three-part feature, A People's History of Black Twitter, is available for Apple News Plus subscribers. iPhone users can subscribe in the Apple News app. You can also find it on Wired.com. And look out for an upcoming documentary based on Parham's piece. It's made by Wired Studios in partnership with Culture House.
