#BrownTwitterBird on NPR; Blacksnob.com on CNN.com!
Janelle Monae as a Brown Twitter Bird by InnyVinnyThis weekend I was interviewed for a segment on NPR's All Things Considered regarding that #browntwitterbird who won't quit. (Get caught up on your Twitter bird history by clicking here.) The story features myself, Jack & Jill Politics co-creator Baratunde Thurston and Alicia with Instant Vintage. It also contains insight from the Slate.com tech writer who started this whole mess. (He was just curious! Geez, why y'all takin' being a fetish so darn personal! You'd think black people had some history of everyone taking rote, boring things we do and writing 15-part essays, funding government studies and writing epic "white people tweet like this" but "black people tweet like this" jokes.) The story will air this afternoon, but you can read what myself and Slate's Farhad Manjoo said here.
When asked by NPR's Sam Sanders why he wrote the piece for Slate, here's what Farhad Manjoo had to say:
"I was bound to offend people with this article," Manjoo says. "But I thought that it was kind of worth a risk to ask and perhaps answer some interesting questions."
His question was why so many popular topics on Twitter, called hashtags, seem to come from blacks, specifically black youth. Manjoo says he made that observation by checking out the Twitter profile photos of tweeters taking part in the popular hashtags.
"Young black people are not a group of people I see every day," Manjoo says. "I don't have any teenage black friends. And the fact that they were kind of part of this conversation just a click away from me was something that I was very interested in. I was seeing trending topics every day that were dominated by black people."
When Sam and I talked on Saturday about Manjoo's story and the meme it spawned I mentioned that Manjoo was making the mistake of fetishizing something that is easily explained by human nature. The phenomenon he saw with black teenagers wasn't really that different from white teenagers on Twitter working together to keep Justin Bieber in trending topics, but he didn't find that interesting. He found the "exotic other" interesting of black people cracking racialized jokes to each other interesting because it was unfamiliar to him. Which seems kind of short-sided considering Manjoo is a member of a cultural group that is also often reduced to being the "exotic other," put under a microscope and constantly fetishized by people who think being any kind of minority is full primal "magic."
My #BrownTwitterBird Cockafella Dynasty Sign only rolls on .22s.My response was pretty simple: There is not a special, racialized way to use Twitter.
"It's like a black person on a bike — I've never seen that! Black people ride bikes? There's a black guy on a skateboard? Black people ride skateboards?! And it becomes a sort of thing. But no, they're on a bike and a skateboard for the same reason why anybody would be on a bike and a skateboard. There's no special, racialized way of skateboarding or riding a bike, and that's the same way it is with Twitter."
That said, one more time, with non-racialized feeling: Follow me on Twitter @blacksnob!
Also: I think out of all my press interviews about 80 percent of them are shootin' the breeze about the First Lady. Just check out CNN and you can read "The Tricky Path Forward for Michelle Obama" by clicking here. I'm quoted there along with shouts to MichelleObamaWatch.com and MichelleHuxtable.com.
Danielle Belton
UPDATE: The audio link to the NPR story is up. I'm all happy and talking super fast because ... ahem, that's how I talk in real life. Lord only knows how loud I was.
Reader Comments (12)
I love the article, but I admit the highlight was the Janelle Monae twitter bird :-)
Nice. Next, get on Tell Me More with my "boo crush" MM. :)
Interesting that you chose the example of skateboarding as a race neutral activity. Because under one way of looking at it, skateboarding could be considered a pretty racialized activity. Back in the 80s and early 90s, skateboarding seemed to be just about the whitest thing you could find. The distinct skateboarder subculture that existed mostly in lower-class white communities across the country probably wasn't closed to black skateboarders, it just didn't attract many. These days, black skateboarders are everywhere. How and why that happened I don't know, it isn't something I was paying attention to at the time. Maybe they were there all along? Maybe it's a form of reverse cultural appropriation? I'll leave it for the American Studies graduate students to explore in their masters theses.
I luv Baratunde and you, Snob, but I hated this article.
Funny thing about skateboards - in my neighborhood, the skaters are a mixed bunch: black, white, mexican, asian, and generally heinz 57, with about 10 - 15 years age span. Still mostly boys, though. :(
I have grown to dislike NPR soooo much! Their "news" is identical in many ways to the mainstream media's tabloidism: vapid, reactionary, and insulting. I listened for you and Baratunde (just like I listen for Click and Clack, This American Life, The Splendid Table, and yes, dammit, the super ridiculous, stubborn bit o' white resistence and revisionist-framing Prarie Home Companion) because I digs ya' some kinds o' fierce. Otherwise? NPR is in the ICU as far as I'm concerned.
I really enjoyed your opinion on the article.
"It's like a black person on a bike — I've never seen that! Black people ride bikes? There's a black guy on a skateboard? Black people ride skateboards?! And it becomes a sort of thing. But no, they're on a bike and a skateboard for the same reason why anybody would be on a bike and a skateboard. There's no special, racialized way of skateboarding or riding a bike, and that's the same way it is with Twitter."
The only thing I don't understand is that you're not just a snob you're a black snob. I suppose it goes both ways doesn't it?
@ Joe
I really don't see adding an ethnic reference in front of a nickname you call yourself any different than Sly Stallone calling himself "The Italian Stallion" or JVCD calling himself "The Mussels from Brussels" or your Jewish American Princesses or your Black American Princesses. I follow a woman on Twitter who calls herself "Celtic Diva." It's just a way of tying ethnic pride to a nickname. I don't think she's implying that there's a special Celtic way for her to be a "diva." Just that she's a self-described diva who happens to be of Irish descent. I'm a black person who has been called a snob in the past. That's all it means.
Ooh, you were so funny, Danielle. I was laughing out loud in the car.
I caught this on the way home yesterday! Good stuff. Although I gave my co-worker a ride home and she was all types of confused regarding why this is even an issue. Heh.
I heard this yesterday when it went live and was so excited to hear you. My favorite line was the one you quoted above where you said "It's like a black person on a bike — I've never seen that! Black people ride bikes?" I was laughing to myself and saying that most of my after work drive to an appointment, especially when I saw a black dude on a bike. ROFLMBAO. Seriously though, you and the other guests were right about people acting like black folks are some sort of strange exotic zoo animals. Gives me a headache.
Oh and BTW, the BBC America Channel (which though you see "Anglo-Africans" on there) is a network that features mostly white folks (as do most networks on US cable) and most likely has a very large white audience was encouraging its viewers to tweet about a particular show with a hashtag just the other day and maybe get their comments pop-up bublled on the rebroadcast. Oh wait, never mind there is black regular on the show who is fairly young so it is probably some genetic black person across the Atlantic ogga-boogah thing.