EGN NEWS DESK
When Prentice Penny first started work on the forthcoming docuseries “Black Twitter: A People’s History,” the very last thing the director needed to do was clarify to anyone simply what Black Twitter was. How may he?
“Everybody has a distinct opinion what it’s, and a distinct entry level and path to how they really feel about it,” he mentioned.
“Black Twitter” is a sort of shorthand descriptor referring loosely to commentary, jokes and other forms of cultural dialog and activism pushed largely by Black customers of the social media platform now named X. What Penny needed to do was seize the pivotal moments which have come to outline this natural on-line neighborhood, together with the actions (Black Lives Matter; OscarsSoWhite) and defining hashtags (#uknowurblackwhen, #BlackGirlMagic) it has propelled and championed.
And he needed to do all of this whereas Black Twitter was nonetheless round.
“So a lot of Black tradition on this nation isn’t documented,” Penny mentioned. “When you see books about tradition and race being banned, if you see narratives saying, oh, there have been good sides to slavery, you notice that Black Twitter may very well be right here right now and gone tomorrow.”
Indeed, since Penny began the mission, Twitter itself has disappeared — or the title formally has, anyway. “I don’t belief anyone who stopped calling it Twitter,” mentioned Jason Parham, a producer on the present whose 2021 Wired story “A People’s History of Black Twitter” impressed the sequence.
Now streaming on Hulu, the three-part sequence opens with the rise of Black Twitter earlier than and throughout the Obama presidency, with nods to earlier on-line platforms like Blackvoices and NetNoir, and continues by the Trump years and into the pandemic.
Critics, artists, journalists and activists, together with the stand-up comedian W. Kamau Bell, the creator Roxane Gay, the author and trans activist Raquel Willis and the Northeastern journalism professor Meredith Clark, talk about what Black Twitter meant to them.
Also showing are people who made their names on Black Twitter, like CaShawn Thompson, whose offhand tweet “Black ladies are magic” went viral and sparked a world dialog, and Ashley Weatherspoon, whose uknowurblackwhen hashtag in 2009 is credited as one among Black Twitter’s foundational sparks.
More than 40 individuals sat down for interviews. “I’ve been on tasks the place you’re pulling tooth to attempt to get any individual to sit down down,” mentioned Joie Jacoby, the showrunner and a documentary filmmaker (“Candace Parker: Unapologetic”). “This wasn’t like that. People needed to speak.”
Parham’s Wired article was a response, a minimum of partially, to tales about Black Twitter he had been seeing in different retailers. “There had been media people and white people generally saying, ‘What are all these Black people doing over there on Twitter?’” Parham mentioned. “It was type of like we had been in a petri dish.”
“Black Twitter” started manufacturing originally of 2023, not lengthy after Penny accomplished his duties because the showrunner on the HBO sequence “Insecure.” He primarily used Twitter for Los Angeles Lakers updates, “and that was type of my entryway into Black Twitter, this type of coming from the N.B.A. world,” he mentioned. But he initially had no real interest in making a movie about it — he had by no means accomplished a documentary earlier than, not to mention one about one thing so amorphous. “I used to be scared,” he admitted.
At first, it was tough to discover a through-line in a narrative with so many various voices, tales and pivotal moments. “But then we realized that this was actually a coming-of-age story,” Penny mentioned. “Black Twitter was coming of age, and so was the neighborhood. That’s why Trayvon Martin is totally different from Rodney King: The platform allowed individuals to present voice to it in ways in which didn’t exist 20, 30 years in the past.”
For Jacoby, “It was a lot larger than a social media platform story,” she mentioned. “We needed to inform a narrative about Black individuals in America over the past 25 years in a method that was enjoyable, a celebration, however that was additionally significant and genuine to who we’re.”
Finding the precise tone was difficult, given the usually somber subject material. The second episode takes the viewer from the killing of Trayvon Martin and the rise of Black Lives Matter by the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
“We didn’t need it to be a complete downer,” Jacoby mentioned.
Comedy turned a key counterbalance, Parham mentioned. “One factor Black people are going to do is get a joke off, irrespective of how dangerous issues get,” he mentioned.
To that finish, the sequence additionally explores the roots and progress of memes like Crying Jordan, which creatively repurposed a photograph of Michael Jordan weeping at his 2009 induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame, and #MeetMeInTemecula, during which a web-based spat between strangers over Kobe Bryant devolved right into a problem to struggle about it, on Christmas Day, in a small California city.
“We had been cracking up on a regular basis,” Jacoby mentioned.
One massive query lingered: When, the place and the way ought to the story finish? Parham’s Wired article ended with reflections concerning the legacy of Black Twitter and concerning the Jan. 6 riot. (In the piece, the podcast host Brandon Jenkins mentioned, “If we noticed Black individuals on the market, we’d know that we had been about to look at one of many greatest massacres to ever happen on American soil.”)
For the docuseries, Penny needed to increase the narrative to the current day and to incorporate such subjects as the worldwide coronavirus pandemic and the racist backlash in opposition to Black Twitter. But then a humorous factor occurred mid-production: Elon Musk purchased the platform.
“It turned, how does this affect the story?” Penny mentioned. “But as individuals began getting fired and the hate speech began going up, it simply actually crystallized to me why we had been making the doc. So many issues on the web are impermanent, and if Elon needed to, he may flip it off, and it could all be gone.”
The creators hope the sequence reveals the big affect that Black Twitter has had on the tradition, from encouraging media retailers to cowl tales like Ferguson to convincing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to diversify its ranks. They additionally hope it reveals that the entire thing was about extra than simply celebrities like Michael Jordan, crying or not, or Rihanna, who remodeled the Twitter beef (in opposition to everybody from Joan Rivers to Ciara) into excessive artwork.
“Black Twitter is made up of all of us: well-known individuals, common individuals, and all the things in between,” Penny mentioned. “It’s an important democratization of an area.”
When the sequence had its world premiere at South by Southwest in March, Jacoby invited members of her household to the screening. “Loads of Black individuals aren’t on Twitter,” she mentioned. “So I’ve household that was like, ‘What is that this all about? What are you doing right here?’”
“Then one among my sisters, she noticed Episode 1 and a pair of, and he or she was like, ‘Oh, it’s us,’” Jacoby mentioned, laughing. “‘It’s simply us on the web.’ And I used to be like, yeah, just about.”
