“Thank You,Black Twitter”: State Violence,Digital Counterpublics,and Pedagogies of Resistance

Abstract

In this article, I examine the role of Black Twitter as a “digital counterpublic” that enables critical pedagogy, political organizing, and both symbolic and material forms of resistance to anti-Black state violence within the United States. Focusing primarily on post-Ferguson events, I spotlight the ways that Black people have used Black Twitter and other digital counterpublics to engage in forms of pedagogy that reorganize relations of surveillance, reject rigid respectability politics, and contest the erasure of marginalized groups within the Black community.

Keywords

race identity activism social diversity popular culture racism poverty urban violence Black males subjects culture

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

African American Policy Forum. (2015). Say her name: Resisting police brutality against Black women. New York, NY: Center For Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies.

Ali

(2016). Citizens under suspicion: Responsive research with community under surveillance. Anthropology of Education Quarterly, 47, 78-95.

Anderson

Hitlin

(2016, August 15). The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter emerges: Social activism on Twitter. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/08/15/the-hashtag-blacklivesmatter-emerges-social-activism-on-twitter/

Appadurai

(1990). Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Theory, Culture & Society, 7, 295-310. doi:10.1177/026327690007002017

Ariel

Farrar

W.A.

Sutherland

(2015). The effect of police body-worn cameras on use of force and citizens’ complaints against the police. A randomized controlled trial. American Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 31(3), 509-535.

Baldridge

(2014). Relocating the deficit: Reimagining black youth in neoliberal times. American Educational Research Journal, 51(3), 440-472.

Banks

(2014, August 12). Black kids don’t have to be college-bound for their deaths to be tragic. The Root. Retrieved from https://www.theroot.com/black-kids-don-t-have-to-be-college-bound-for-their-dea-1790876684

Browne

(2015). Dark matters: On the surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Coates

T. N.

(2013, May 20). How the Obama administration talks to Black America: “Convenient race-talk” from a president who ought to know better. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/how-the-obama-administration-talks-to-black-america/276015/

10.

Cobb

W.J.

(2014, November 25). “Chronicle of a riot foretold”. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/chronicle-ferguson-riot-michael-brown.

11.

Cooper

(in press). Race women: The intellectual thought of race women. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

12.

Devine

(1997). Maximum security: The culture of violence in inner-city schools. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

13.

di Leonardo

. (1998). Exotics at home: Anthropologies, others, and American modernity. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

14.

di Leonardo

. (2016). Partyin’ with a purpose: Black respectability politics and the Tom Joyner morning show. Souls, 18, 358-378. doi:10.1080/10999949.2016.1230816

15.

DuBois

W. E. B.

(1935). Black reconstruction: An essay toward a history of the part which Black Folk played in the attempt to reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace. Retrieved from http://archive.org/details/blackreconstruc00dubo

16.

Durrani

(2015, March 26). AN News: “Digital counterpublics: Black Twitter in the aftermath of Ferguson” (University of Pennsylvania). Retrieved from http://linguisticanthropology.org/blog/2015/03/26/an-news-digital-counterpublics-black-twitter-in-the-aftermath-of-ferguson-by-marian-durrani-university-of-pennsylvania/

17.

Dyson

(2005). Is Bill Cosby right? Or has the Black middle class lost its mind? New York, NY: Basic Civitas.

18.

Dyson

(2016). The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the politics of race in America. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin.

19.

Fraser

(1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text, 25(26), 56-80.

20.

Freiburger

T. L.

Burke

A. L.

(2011). Status offenders in the juvenile court: The effects of gender, race, and ethnicity on the adjudication decision. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 9, 352-365.

21.

Gaines

(1996). Uplifting the race: Black leadership, politics, and culture in the twentieth century. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

22.

Garza

(2014, October 7). A herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter movement by Alicia Garza. The Feminist Wire. Retrieved from http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/

23.

Giroux

(2009). Youth in a suspect society: Democracy or disposability. New York, NY: Palgrave McMillan.

24.

Goff

P. A.

Jackson

M. C.

Di Leone

B. A. L.

Culotta

C. M.

DiTomasso

N. A.

(2014). The essence of innocence: Consequences of dehumanizing Black children. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(4), 526-545.

25.

Griffin

(2000). “Black feminists and Dubois: Respectability, protection, and beyond.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 568, 28-40.

26.

Habermas

(1962). The structural formation of the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

27.

Harris

F. C.

(2014, Winter). The rise of respectability politics. Dissent Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-rise-of-respectability-politics

28.

Harris-Lacewell

M. V.

(2004). Barbershops, bibles, and BET: Everyday talk and Black political thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

29.

Higgenbotham

(1993). Righteous discontent: The women’s movement in the Black baptist church: 1880-1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

30.

Hill

M.L.

(2011). A different world: Black bookstores as literacy counterpublics. In Kinlock

(ed.), Urban Literacies: Critical perspectives on language, learning, and community. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

31.

Hill

M. L.

(2012, June 11). Why aren’t we fighting for CeCe McDonald? Ebony. Retrieved from http://www.ebony.com/news-views/why-arent-we-fighting-for-cece-mcdonald#axzz4eVZvp7fZ

32.

Hill

M. L.

(2013). “This shouldn’t happen here”: Sandy Hook, race, and the pedagogy of normalcy. Journal of Curriculum & Pedagogy, 10, 109-112. doi:10.1080/15505170.2013.849625

33.

Hill

M. L.

(2016). Nobody: Casualties of America’s war on the vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and beyond. New York, NY: Atria Books.

34.

Hirschkind

(2009). The ethical soundscape: Cassette sermons and Islamic counterpublics. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

35.

Hoose

(2009). Claudette Colvin: Twice toward justice. New York, NY: Square Fish.

36.

King

(2016). He recognized immediately the flaw in the tweets, was genuinely remorseful, open to learning, and explained what he truly meant to say [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/750958801503879168

37.

Kohn

(2012). Reading digital communities, publics, and counterpublics: Sociorhetorical heuristics in the public writing classroom. Journal of Literacy and Technology, 13, 19.

38.

Kulick

(1998). Travesti: Sex, gender, and culture among Brazilian transgendered prostitutes (1st ed.). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

39.

Lillard

(2016a, July 6). At the same time we have to take better care of each other . . . We do harm more often to our brother/sister than anyone else [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/Dame_Lillard/status/750931371552493568

40.

Lillard

(2016b, July 6). Change is needed on our behalf NOW . . . And then the battle can go further in demanding that we be treated better from others . . . And [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/Dame_Lillard/status/750931775031947265?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

41.

Movement Advancement Project & Center for American Progress. (2016). Unjust: How the broken criminal justice system fails transgender people. Retrieved from http://www.lgbtmap.org/policy-and-issue-analysis/criminal-justice-trans

42.

Muhammad

K.G.

(2011). The condemnation of Blackness: Race, crime, and the making of modern urban America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

43.

Nanda

(2012). Blind discretion: Girls of color & delinquency in the juvenile justice system. UCLA Law Review, 59, 1502-1539.

44.

Nick. (2016, July 6). Those are two separate issues, you are way off on this. Black people shouldn’t need to change to be treated equally [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/ripcitynick/status/750933578679103489

45.

One

(2016, July 6). Blacks were supportive of each other before. In the 1920s they burned down Black Wall St and killed a whole community [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/NahlejOne/status/750934121753423873

46.

Pearce

(2015, June 9). Texas police officer who aggressively confronted teens on video steps down. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-police-officer-resigns-20150609-story.html

47.

Pew Research Center. (2015). The Smartphone Difference. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/us-smartphone-use-in-2015/

48.

Ready

Young

(2015). The impact of on-officer video cameras on police–citizen contacts: Findings from a controlled experiment in Mesa, AZ. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 11(3), 445-458.

49.

Reed

(1996, April 16). Romancing Jim Crow: Black nostalgia for a segregated past. Village Voice, p. 24.

50.

Reed

(2001). Class notes: Posing as politics and other thoughts on the American scene. New York, NY: The New Press.

51.

Romano

(2015). A transgender woman was shot in Baltimore and no one is talking about it. The Daily Dot. Retrieved from https://www.dailydot.com/irl/transgender-sex-worker-mya-hall-death-nsa/.

52.

Saar

M. S.

Epstein

Rosenthal

Vafa

(2015). The sexual abuse to prison pipeline: The girls’ story. Report by Ms. Foundation for Women, Rights4Girls and the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality.

53.

Saltman

(2010). “Introduction”. In Saltman

Gabbard

(eds.), Education as enforcement: The militarization and corporatization of schools. New York, NY: Routledge.

54.

Spence

L. K.

(2015). Knocking the hustle: Against the neoliberal turn in black politics. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books.

55.

Warner

(2002). Publics and counterpublics. Cambridge: Zone Press.

56.

West

(2000). Black strivings in a twilight civilization. In West

(Ed.), The Cornel West reader (pp. 101-105). New York, NY: Civitas Books.

57.

Whaley

(2010). Disciplining women: Alpha kappa alpha, Black counterpublics, and the cultural politics of Black sororities. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

58.

Wilson

(2012, August 23). Hampton University’s cornrows and dreadlock ban: Is it right? Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/23/hampton-university-cornrows-dreadlock-ban_n_1826349.html

59.

Wolcott

(2001). Remaking respectability: African-American women in interwar detroit. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press

60.

Wright

(2016, July 6). Yet prisons are full of black people and being killed by the people SWORN to protect and serve them with no repercussions . . . SMH [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/SavionWright/status/750945978333757440

61.

Yan

Castillo

(2015, October 29). Attorney defends actions of fired school officer as ‘justified and lawful’. CNN.com . Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/28/us/south-carolina-school-arrest-videos/index.html.