Speaker 1: You're listening to comedy central. What happens? Roy Wood Jr
Speaker 1: next year about to hear a special presentation of the
Speaker 1: daily show podcast that I host, called beyond the scenes. Now,
Speaker 1: all it is. It's very simple. If it's a topic
Speaker 1: that's already been on the daily show, we talk about
Speaker 1: it again and we go even deeper on the topic
Speaker 1: and you know, see where we are now on the issue,
Speaker 1: get deeper into the origins of the problem. When we
Speaker 1: do that with daily show producers, writers, correspondents and expert
Speaker 1: guests who know a hell of a lot more about
Speaker 1: it than us to help us break it down, heaven listen. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to beyond the scenes, the podcast that goes deeper
Speaker 1: into segments and topics that originally aired on the daily
Speaker 1: show with Trevor Noah. Look, this, this is what you
Speaker 1: gotta think of. This podcast is all right. This podcast
Speaker 1: is like a full stack of pancakes drizzle with Maple Syrup.
Speaker 1: I just can't have one. You know, you'd be a
Speaker 1: Brunch and then you order an extra plate for the
Speaker 1: table so you can share it with all your friends.
Speaker 1: That's what we are now. I'm Roy with JR and
Speaker 1: we're here to talk about a piece that I did
Speaker 1: in seventeen called black eye on America. On black twitter,
Speaker 1: roll the cliff. For decades the black barbershop has been
Speaker 1: the epicenter of black cultural discussion, but the Internet has
Speaker 1: changed things. Let me introduce you to black twitter. Black
Speaker 1: twitter is an entire think that I think we need
Speaker 1: somebody more qualified. Let's go with Jimmy, little Muir, executive
Speaker 1: writer and looks importantly black person. Jimmy. What is black twitter?
Speaker 1: It's just really an extension of how we communicate in
Speaker 1: our neighborhoods and our barbershops and our churches and our schools.
Speaker 1: It is our village. Think of black twitter as Harlem.
Speaker 1: Black folks made it cool, and a white people trying
Speaker 1: to move in what we do on social media. And
Speaker 1: of course we over index and we use it more
Speaker 1: than anybody else and we use it on mobile, which
Speaker 1: means we have it, you know, by our side twenty
Speaker 1: four hours a day. That's right. While we make up
Speaker 1: just twelve of the US population, American twitter users are
Speaker 1: black and they're three times more likely to post daily
Speaker 1: on twitter than white people. Today I'm joined by fellow
Speaker 1: family alumni, an associate professor in media studies at Northeastern University. Matter.
Speaker 1: Meredith D Clark, welcome to be on the scenes. How
Speaker 1: you doing today? I'm doing well. Thank you for having
Speaker 1: me well, thank you. Thank you for being here. Also
Speaker 1: joining us is a brother who was a writer at
Speaker 1: the Grio and he does a lot of hard work
Speaker 1: on the ground and he also starts up a lot
Speaker 1: of mess on twitter and, you know, every nine and
Speaker 1: then have them, folks. Mad He dropped knowledge and then
Speaker 1: he'll pivot right into did having aim, mad and startsome
Speaker 1: as if it's anybody who knows about engaging with black twitter,
Speaker 1: it's the homie Michael, Harriet, Michael. How you doing, man?
Speaker 1: I'm great. Man. Thanks for having me. Man. I appreciate
Speaker 1: you all for being here. Now let's go ahead and
Speaker 1: be real about this. We know what type of show
Speaker 1: we own. We know what type of audience the daily
Speaker 1: show is. That's part of why we did the black
Speaker 1: twitter piece at the time time when conversations around blackness
Speaker 1: we're starting to, you know, really permeate, you know, on
Speaker 1: social media a lot more so. Meredith, for our listeners
Speaker 1: who don't know, can you define what black twitter is
Speaker 1: and explain the origins of it absolutely so. I tell
Speaker 1: people there's no special knock, there's not a separate platform,
Speaker 1: there's not a special portal that you can go to
Speaker 1: to get to black twitter. You know there's there's no
Speaker 1: secret handshake that will get you into black twitter. But
Speaker 1: there are two ways of thinking about it. The short
Speaker 1: version that I tell people black twitter is black people
Speaker 1: on twitter. Being black on twitter like being our black
Speaker 1: selves having a good time doing what we do. The
Speaker 1: long answer is that black twitter is a series of
Speaker 1: black communities, of folks who are linked together talking about
Speaker 1: things that are of concern to our various communities, and
Speaker 1: I really stress that plural idea of communities. So everything
Speaker 1: from racial justice, which we've seen a lot of conversations
Speaker 1: about Um, to what it's like to be on the
Speaker 1: dating market. Today we've got a lot of conversations about relationships.
Speaker 1: So every single way that people can come together and
Speaker 1: be connected, from Greek life and Hbcu life to just
Speaker 1: being black living in a certain part of the country
Speaker 1: or a certain part of the world. That is black twitter.
Speaker 1: Also food. There's a lot of food critiquing black twitter
Speaker 1: struggle plates. If you post or plate of food, you
Speaker 1: know you might break your Grandmama's heart, because black twitter
Speaker 1: pulls no punches. Marra Keisha could tell us. Okay, I
Speaker 1: mean I'm not wrong. It's interesting because, you know, there
Speaker 1: can be days on twitter where it is something as
Speaker 1: simple as I can't believe you put mayonnaise on a
Speaker 1: hot dog, and the next day it's should you spend
Speaker 1: two hundred dollars on the first date, and then the
Speaker 1: next day it's free Brittany Grinder, and all three of
Speaker 1: those conversations happened with the same level of ferocity and engagement.
Speaker 1: And God bless your soul if you ever find yourself
Speaker 1: on the wrong side of some of that stuff. We
Speaker 1: call that getting ratio. We'll break that down, you know,
Speaker 1: on another podcast. But you know, this piece was set,
Speaker 1: the piece that we did it was we decided to
Speaker 1: set it in a barbershop because we felt like the barbershop,
Speaker 1: you know, in a sense, for black culture, is one
Speaker 1: of the many public squares that we have within the
Speaker 1: black community. And so you know, you know for Michael,
Speaker 1: you know, how is black twitter a part of a
Speaker 1: history of community spaces and publications for black people together
Speaker 1: and share their stories? Well, you know, in a sense
Speaker 1: it is like the barbershop. You know, it's a communal
Speaker 1: place where we share UH information, where we share our opinions,
Speaker 1: where we share, you know, what we think of everything
Speaker 1: going on around us. And you know, although we like
Speaker 1: to think that this is new, you know it goes
Speaker 1: back to the history of black media. You know, you're
Speaker 1: talking about the North Star, you're talking about black newspapers,
Speaker 1: black radio, all of that is part of the evolution
Speaker 1: that ended or has currently become black twitter. You know,
Speaker 1: when you think about black radio, you know white people
Speaker 1: were on a radio talking like this and then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden black people were talking the way they
Speaker 1: talked in jazz clubs on the radio and it flowed
Speaker 1: outside of the radio it it flowed into normal culture
Speaker 1: and and became part of the lexicon of America. And
Speaker 1: in a sense, black twitter is doing the same thing.
Speaker 1: Is Black twitter the right place to have these discussions? Because,
Speaker 1: unlike the barbershop, unlike the beauty salon, unlike the Church
Speaker 1: Fellowship Hall, this is a place where everyone can get
Speaker 1: in on the conversation and you know, we talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about, you know, cultural appropriation. Does having these
Speaker 1: moments and enjoying things communally in a public forum make
Speaker 1: us more susceptible two people coming in who don't necessarily
Speaker 1: understand the origins of the conversation, don't or or oblivious
Speaker 1: to the appropriation that they're doing. I think it's it's
Speaker 1: a little bit of both. You know, Um, there is
Speaker 1: a certain level of resistance that I think about that
Speaker 1: is taking place, whether we are willing participants in that
Speaker 1: resistance or not, but showing up and being ourselves and
Speaker 1: bringing the whole of our experiences to this platform is
Speaker 1: one way that, by default, black people are resisting the
Speaker 1: pressures and the expectations, the norms that we do keep
Speaker 1: those conversations quiet, that we keep the family business inside
Speaker 1: the House, Um, and that we don't engage in the
Speaker 1: same ways that we would with each other in enclaved spaces,
Speaker 1: in a very public way. The downside of that, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: in many cases, is that people extract our conversations, just
Speaker 1: as you said, without context, without any sort of real
Speaker 1: connection to what is being discussed, and they often do
Speaker 1: it for profit, for cloud, for their own sort of
Speaker 1: privilege on the platform. And so you'll see things that
Speaker 1: black twitter talks about one day and suddenly it's a trend.
Speaker 1: It has this agenda, disrupting function, and the news media
Speaker 1: is all over it as though it's something that journalists
Speaker 1: discovered in and of themselves, when in fact it's people
Speaker 1: swooping into our conversations. You know, the old thing that
Speaker 1: we used to say back in the nineties, getting Kool aid,
Speaker 1: don't know the flavor. Um. It's common. We're sort of
Speaker 1: used to that. We've seen it, and everything from our
Speaker 1: music and what we create Um to our intellectual production
Speaker 1: and the same things happening on the platform. We talked
Speaker 1: in season one to be on the scenes about people
Speaker 1: who steal from you know, black tiktokers, and how the
Speaker 1: things that they do and the trends that they create
Speaker 1: are not properly you know, they're not compensated for a
Speaker 1: lot of that stuff. But you know, we can go back,
Speaker 1: I think was fifteen with Um, the girl teaches on fleek,
Speaker 1: young woman, eyebrows on fleek, and everybody was saying on fleek,
Speaker 1: but you're telling me came nobody figure out that it
Speaker 1: was that young lady who right, right, like the Damn
Speaker 1: Daniel guys. You know, they had deals with vans and
Speaker 1: all of this other stuff, and I have comes out
Speaker 1: with pancakes on fleek and everybody's brand has something that's
Speaker 1: on fleek, but no one's cutting this young woman a check.
Speaker 1: And that's that's sort of the downside. Folks are like,
Speaker 1: you know, twitter's terms of service for so many years
Speaker 1: said what you put here, if you have a public account,
Speaker 1: is open and accessible to everyone. The problem with that
Speaker 1: is for so many years black folks have been taking, well,
Speaker 1: our Labor has been taken from us and repurpose and
Speaker 1: we see the same thing happening with black twitter. Is
Speaker 1: twitter a place, though, Michael, where? I guess what black twitter,
Speaker 1: because you talked about one time we were gotten into
Speaker 1: a conversation online about actors who were black famous, where
Speaker 1: you have reached the peak level of stardom with black people,
Speaker 1: but a white person is like don't quite know who
Speaker 1: you are exactly, but every black person knows you, knows you.
Speaker 1: So when you look at something like that right, like
Speaker 1: when we talk about like that conversation being so inclusive,
Speaker 1: does it rub you the wrong way when you see
Speaker 1: other people that you know are not necessarily of our
Speaker 1: culture jumping in and joining those types of conversations that
Speaker 1: are very much, you know, family discussions? I think if
Speaker 1: you haven't that discussion right on twitter, then, like my
Speaker 1: perception is that you have to care more about what
Speaker 1: white people think. If you're going to be mad at
Speaker 1: that right like I am when I talk to black people,
Speaker 1: then I am looking at the responses of black people
Speaker 1: and I know that the people outside of the culture
Speaker 1: who respond don't know what they're talking about. It's not
Speaker 1: like if it's a doctor are going and asking somebody
Speaker 1: about diabetes and a dude on the Corner Office of opinion.
Speaker 1: The doctor doesn't take that opinion into consideration because he
Speaker 1: knows that that person didn't go to medical school. And
Speaker 1: that's the same thing. The way I feel like, oh,
Speaker 1: there's so certain people like I play a game with
Speaker 1: myself sometimes, while else tweet something that I know only
Speaker 1: black people care about or know know what I'm talking about,
Speaker 1: and it's funny to me to see the white people
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what we're talking about. And so
Speaker 1: to be bad at those things right because it's on twitter,
Speaker 1: you're you're basically posting it onto a public bill billboard
Speaker 1: or a bulletin board. If you're gonna do that, you
Speaker 1: have to know that white people are gonna see it
Speaker 1: and you know white people are going to say something
Speaker 1: about it or respond, and it's up to you whether
Speaker 1: or not that ways in to have some value to
Speaker 1: you or it's just something that somebody is saying as
Speaker 1: they walk past this billboard. But so, and how do
Speaker 1: we breach the gap? How do we breach the gap
Speaker 1: from black twitter being this place that drives the narrative
Speaker 1: of conversation, especially, Oh my God, we talk about whatever
Speaker 1: show is the hottest show live tweeting. That was scandal
Speaker 1: even digging the Craig to go all the way back
Speaker 1: to papa pope means and all of that type of stuff,
Speaker 1: and insecure and like all of these live viewing experiences
Speaker 1: and the new edition movie. Oh my God, that was
Speaker 1: that was a nice to three days. So we know
Speaker 1: that black twitter is a driver of culture. Uh, but
Speaker 1: does the media at large, using the conversations that happened
Speaker 1: on twitter, you know, trending topics and stuff like that?
Speaker 1: Has that made journalists more lazy and taking the temperature
Speaker 1: of what the public at large is into or vibing with?
Speaker 1: So it's two sides to that, right, because you know,
Speaker 1: journalism is mostly a white profession, right, my think you know,
Speaker 1: in the major news organizations it's at most six percent black.
Speaker 1: So for most of history what we call mainstream, which
Speaker 1: is translated as white media, would only consider, you know,
Speaker 1: or include the opinions of white people because they were
Speaker 1: no black no, what we're no white people telling the
Speaker 1: truth about black people and there were no black people
Speaker 1: in the newsroom saying hey, you might have this wrong.
Speaker 1: And so, in a sense, you know, they could go
Speaker 1: on twitter now and see what black people are saying
Speaker 1: about a certain thing that they might not have access to, uh,
Speaker 1: in the newsroom or as just as a white person
Speaker 1: like you know, one of the things I do, like
Speaker 1: when I covered Ferguson of Baltimore, right, and it's the
Speaker 1: thing that I do, and when I cover anything that
Speaker 1: happens in a black neighborhood. Now, y'all would know this.
Speaker 1: If you go to the store, it's always one store
Speaker 1: in that neighborhood where you could just go sit in
Speaker 1: front and there's people in front of that store was
Speaker 1: just hanging out and if you talk to them you
Speaker 1: can get the emperature and gage the temperature or the
Speaker 1: climate of that neighborhood. Right. White people can't do that.
Speaker 1: White people don't even know that they can, and then
Speaker 1: if they go, you know, it's a white man holding
Speaker 1: a microphone versus, you know, somebody who looks like them,
Speaker 1: who talks like them, who knows what to ask them,
Speaker 1: who is going to be sympathetic. So, uh, the two
Speaker 1: sides right. In some aspects, twitter gives us a voice
Speaker 1: that we wouldn't have never had in mainstream media and
Speaker 1: on the other side it does make, you know, give
Speaker 1: white journalists more access than they would have had as
Speaker 1: white journalists. So it kind of prevents news rooms from,
Speaker 1: you know, hiring black people because they can say, Oh,
Speaker 1: you could just go ask somebody on twitter, take a
Speaker 1: twitter pole, instead of just going to a black neighborh
Speaker 1: we're gonna hire a black dude to go look into
Speaker 1: the black stuff and report the black news. As a
Speaker 1: journalism professor, one of the things that I teach my
Speaker 1: students all the time is that you it's like the
Speaker 1: analogy that Michael made earlier, and you don't necessarily listen
Speaker 1: to the guy who can go to medical school about
Speaker 1: something and just take what the guy on the corner
Speaker 1: is saying at face value, right, and that's akin to
Speaker 1: what I see with taking these tweets out of context,
Speaker 1: embedding them in a story or making them the story.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a big difference between source development and
Speaker 1: then just straight up co optation. It's possible for journalists
Speaker 1: to get on twitter, to actually develop sources on twitter,
Speaker 1: to reach out to people. You know, the D M
Speaker 1: s are there. You can reach out and say, Hey,
Speaker 1: I see you tweeting about this thing. Can we have
Speaker 1: a conversation about it um and effectively reach more black
Speaker 1: people than they would with shoe leather reporting that they're
Speaker 1: supposed to be doing but maybe don't have the time
Speaker 1: to do. But to just simply take what you see
Speaker 1: or observe what you see and report on that. That's
Speaker 1: what led us to a lot of miss and disinformation
Speaker 1: in communities and around the election. It's what leads to
Speaker 1: a warped sense of what black people in America are
Speaker 1: experiencing today, because you're going to get on black twitter
Speaker 1: all kinds of black people from all different walks of life.
Speaker 1: If you show up with one narrative out of that,
Speaker 1: then you've done a major disservice to reporting on black
Speaker 1: folks in America at large. Y'All know, if, like if
Speaker 1: somebody goes on twitter and like Roy said something and
Speaker 1: I said something. You know, to a white person it becomes,
Speaker 1: or to a white reporter a lot of times, that
Speaker 1: this is what black people this is what people think.
Speaker 1: Oh my God, it's you know what I have to
Speaker 1: do now, Michael? I have to when something breaks and
Speaker 1: I got a joke or I have an opinion, I
Speaker 1: have to wait thirty six hours. I have to wait
Speaker 1: for those articles to run because if I make the
Speaker 1: joke about the thing and I'm just being silly, it's
Speaker 1: not what my intention was. It's how it's presented. The
Speaker 1: true thing, the truth, the truth is what people choose
Speaker 1: to believe. So when they go people uh, perfectly, this
Speaker 1: is a this is a this isn't as serious of
Speaker 1: an example, but this is a perfect example of what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. Then, earlier this year that the chacoal
Speaker 1: Taco was gonna get discontinued and I made a quick
Speaker 1: tweet just I just didn't even think. I'm watching better
Speaker 1: call Sault Leton just tweeted Chacol tacoing dead good and
Speaker 1: the drumstick is terrible. To send phone down. Wake up
Speaker 1: the next morning and I'm in two or three different
Speaker 1: compilation tweet articles going people or outrage. Roy Wood Jr
Speaker 1: is very adamant. No, I wasn't. That's not what and
Speaker 1: the same thing can happen with with political tweets. If
Speaker 1: I make if I say something about this selection or this.
Speaker 1: We did, Um, you know, we did a little sketch
Speaker 1: about Herschel Walker and the whole illegitimate children thing or whatever,
Speaker 1: and that guy put in the article with the other
Speaker 1: Herschel Walker tweets. So now you have people in my
Speaker 1: D M S and I can only imagine what your
Speaker 1: d Ms Are like, Michael, because your ass be going
Speaker 1: in way harder than me half the time and you
Speaker 1: have people ready to jump on you about stuff and
Speaker 1: I'm like, I was just tweeting. Yeah, but you also
Speaker 1: have to understand, just like I was saying earlier, right,
Speaker 1: those people don't know what they're talking about. If they're
Speaker 1: just scanning tweets and see one of my tweets and
Speaker 1: included in a compilation of tweets, they don't know what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. They don't know about black people, they
Speaker 1: don't know about me, they don't know what this what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about, the subject that I'm talking about and
Speaker 1: so you know, in a sense, again, you have to
Speaker 1: ascribe to what white people say some level of importance
Speaker 1: to even care about that thing. Right, I do not
Speaker 1: care what white people are thinking when I'm talking to
Speaker 1: black people. Now, not not what white people are thinking,
Speaker 1: but when I'm talking to my people. The people who
Speaker 1: do not know what I'm talking about have no value
Speaker 1: in that conversation though, right. You know, like everybody, black
Speaker 1: person knows, like you can, it's certain cousins you can't
Speaker 1: sit next to at a funeral. It's not that they're
Speaker 1: making a macria the dead, it's just that they joke,
Speaker 1: crack jokes all the time, and you know if your
Speaker 1: Mama looked back there and see you, she's going to
Speaker 1: say you're being disrespectful to the church, to God, to Jesus,
Speaker 1: to the dead person. But she was not listening to
Speaker 1: your cousin crack those jokes, and it was a good joke.
Speaker 1: Why they bury him in that jacket? That jacket, he
Speaker 1: never had no suit like that, even on pass anniversary,
Speaker 1: and now they got him dead, the jacket over the
Speaker 1: jacket up after the break. I would love to get
Speaker 1: into the ways that black twitter contributes to the counter
Speaker 1: narrative and pushes back against the stereotypes that mainstream media
Speaker 1: pushes and also, you know, I want to unpack a
Speaker 1: little bit about the social justice side of black twitter
Speaker 1: and the number of things that I believe we're able
Speaker 1: to happen because there were people on the Internet raising
Speaker 1: noise and raising hell. This is beyond the scenes. We'll
Speaker 1: be right back. Welcome back. We are talking about black
Speaker 1: twitter now. We're broken down what it is, how it's use,
Speaker 1: how people misuse it and some of the topics that
Speaker 1: are discussed on black twitter. But narrative. I want to
Speaker 1: get to the serious side of it now and how
Speaker 1: black twitter is able to influence, you know, conversations. You
Speaker 1: know you've often referred to, you know, black twitter having
Speaker 1: the ability to to create a digital counter narrative and,
Speaker 1: you know, shift the way that black people are depicted
Speaker 1: in the mainstream media. What did you mean by that exactly,
Speaker 1: and how it's black twitter helped, helped to contribute to that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I talk about black twitter creating counter narratives because,
Speaker 1: as a journalist and as someone who studies journalism in
Speaker 1: the way that we communicate, I think about how news
Speaker 1: media has the potential to shape our social realities. Right.
Speaker 1: So the issues of the day, the way that they're
Speaker 1: reported on. That's the way people understand them, and we
Speaker 1: know that to be true, especially about black folks, with
Speaker 1: a kind of coverage that we've otten over the years.
Speaker 1: We see coverage about our communities that is generally crime focused.
Speaker 1: When you see more than one black face, they are
Speaker 1: either a public figure, like a celebrity or a politician,
Speaker 1: or they're an athlete. We see those overrepresentations and we
Speaker 1: see this coverage that gives you a singular narrative about
Speaker 1: black people in black life in America. What black twitter
Speaker 1: does is pushes back on those narratives and it allows
Speaker 1: us to present multiple narratives all at the same time
Speaker 1: about our lived experiences. So everything from the way that
Speaker 1: we experience the workplace, right, we talked about Um one
Speaker 1: of the hashtags that's near and dear to my heart
Speaker 1: black in the ivory, so what it's like to be
Speaker 1: black in academia. But we talk about everything from our
Speaker 1: hair and what it means when someone touches it to
Speaker 1: what legislation that is going to impact our communities is like.
Speaker 1: I think one case that really stands out to me
Speaker 1: about black folks and counter narrative is the assumption that
Speaker 1: all black pep for our democrats and willingly and enthusiastically
Speaker 1: voting Democrat. Right. But then you saw out of black twitter,
Speaker 1: a Hashtag like girl. I guess I'm with her, the
Speaker 1: resignation that people had in like yeah, Hillary, Hillary Clinton.
Speaker 1: You know, we're not excited about her candidacy, but if
Speaker 1: it's gonna Save America, which we tried to do, Um,
Speaker 1: then we're going to vote for her. And so that's
Speaker 1: what I mean when I talk about digital counter narratives.
Speaker 1: The digital allows us to do it all in the
Speaker 1: same place, at the speed of light, uh, and in
Speaker 1: a number of different voices all at the same time,
Speaker 1: and that's really important to getting a more accurate picture
Speaker 1: of what our lives are like. It has also become
Speaker 1: a place where there's been real reporting happening in real time,
Speaker 1: and so then it can't be spun by anybody in
Speaker 1: the media. Um about it. I guess it's coming up
Speaker 1: on two years, Mike, UM, post Charlottesville, in the rise
Speaker 1: of the let me just call it. How are we
Speaker 1: gonna spend this? Uh, the motivated public unpermitted removal of
Speaker 1: confederate monument across this nation was occurring a lot of
Speaker 1: different spots and Um series of motivated fine citizens were
Speaker 1: showing up to the local town squares and time ropes
Speaker 1: the statues and getting them ships up out of there,
Speaker 1: as they should have. And you know, things in Birmingham
Speaker 1: got a little, you know, unsettled. And Michael, I remember
Speaker 1: you being one of the journalists who like this concept
Speaker 1: of journalistically. I will go there and tomorrow you will
Speaker 1: have my report. But there's also no let me tell
Speaker 1: you all right now, before somebody take my phone because
Speaker 1: the police might be tripping. Let me how much has
Speaker 1: black twitter been an asset in making sure that, as
Speaker 1: a journalist, you're able to deliver the truth faster? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: so what Roy is talking about is I was arrested
Speaker 1: covering a protest over a confederate monument and the clan
Speaker 1: supposedly coming to show up. Everything was stripped from me,
Speaker 1: but luckily I had a watch, an Apple Watch, on
Speaker 1: and was able to tweet that I've been arrested and
Speaker 1: that was the only way that people knew I'd been
Speaker 1: arrested for covering a protest. They wouldn't believe I was
Speaker 1: a journalist. They wouldn't believe anything that I said and
Speaker 1: it was black twitter that basically got me out of jail.
Speaker 1: Um someone called the lawyer and literally, you know, build
Speaker 1: me out. So you know it's it's important to activists men.
Speaker 1: When you think about it, right, it's important to justice.
Speaker 1: You think about the people who were convicted of Derek
Speaker 1: Chauvin being convicted of killing George Floyd. Well, the main
Speaker 1: reason he was convicted was because there was a bunch
Speaker 1: of black people around holding cameras. They would not have
Speaker 1: been holding those cameras and recording him if there was
Speaker 1: not a place for them to show that footage unfiltered.
Speaker 1: For the previous you know, two D and fifty years,
Speaker 1: all we had was what the police told us. Right,
Speaker 1: I have been a journalist in a newsroom watching other
Speaker 1: journalists just copy and paste of police report into an
Speaker 1: article about what happened at certain incidents. And now, because
Speaker 1: of the transparency offered by black twitter, we can counter
Speaker 1: those narratives of rioting or police brutality or many of
Speaker 1: the issues that black people have faced. And white people
Speaker 1: simply wouldn't be active because they didn't believe us, which
Speaker 1: also changes the nature of reporting on top of that.
Speaker 1: That's why, that's why I always love when I see,
Speaker 1: you know, a black person and posted something good, when
Speaker 1: you're look into replies to the tweet and it's like
Speaker 1: some news organization, Hey, can we use this clip? There's
Speaker 1: some there's some good report right here. Is it? Do
Speaker 1: you authorize us? Uh, when we talk about, you know,
Speaker 1: the hashtags that twitter used, which I think is an
Speaker 1: important I don't like this about activism, but I understand
Speaker 1: why we need it. Therefore, it is important. Black twitter
Speaker 1: has a way of boiling things down to a sentence,
Speaker 1: or twitter's case, it's a Hashtag. Like if we just
Speaker 1: go black lives matter, Oscar, so white, everything can sit
Speaker 1: comfortably under that umbrella. I do think that some issues
Speaker 1: are a little more nuanced and it's like, like abolish
Speaker 1: the police. If you ask ten black people what they
Speaker 1: mean when they say abolished the police, YOU'RE gonna get
Speaker 1: about three or four different constructs of what that concept is.
Speaker 1: So sometimes hashtags don't always give the nuance that I
Speaker 1: think a topic needs. But the Hashtag brings attention and
Speaker 1: it starts the conversation and in a lot of cases
Speaker 1: it actually brings about some type of change. Meredith like,
Speaker 1: could you talk a little bit about how those Hashtags
Speaker 1: have contributed to action, you know, offline? Absolutely so. I
Speaker 1: talked about this Um as I write about it, as
Speaker 1: the process of affirmation and reaffirmation. So when we tweet
Speaker 1: with these hashtags and someone responds to them in a
Speaker 1: number of ways, like the retweeting, the quote, tweeting, the
Speaker 1: building on what we've said, that's affirmation. You know that
Speaker 1: someone else online has heard what you've said. Reaffirmation is
Speaker 1: what happens when those hashtags go offline and they are
Speaker 1: used to a certain end. I actually moved to Charlottesville
Speaker 1: the day after the so called events of August eleven
Speaker 1: and twelfth with the White Supremacist March. Find people on
Speaker 1: both sides. Yet man, listen. I wasn't very interested in
Speaker 1: figuring that out with my new neighbors. But one thing
Speaker 1: that carried over from online to offline, where all these
Speaker 1: black lives matter signs. I saw them everywhere and it
Speaker 1: was a way for people to sort of signal that
Speaker 1: I'm I'm one of the good ones right, I'm an
Speaker 1: okay person. This wasn't me, this wasn't Charlotte'Sville, and so,
Speaker 1: in a number of ways we see hashtags sort of
Speaker 1: do wing the hard work of communicating to people what
Speaker 1: the aims of a particular slogan or a particular message are.
Speaker 1: In the case of something like defund the police or
Speaker 1: abolish the police. Um, I don't think that, you know,
Speaker 1: those have been as effective as they could have been.
Speaker 1: You can see how very quickly the message gets misappropriated.
Speaker 1: It gets misinterpreted because when people talk about defund they're
Speaker 1: not just simply talking about cutting off the budget numbers,
Speaker 1: but they are pushing you to have a conversation about
Speaker 1: what it would be like to redirect the millions of
Speaker 1: dollars that we spend in policing and over policing black
Speaker 1: and brown communities in particular, and put that back into
Speaker 1: the services that are needed in the community to make
Speaker 1: sure that we don't need to call police or to
Speaker 1: fortify exactly keep going. You know. So, no, that's it.
Speaker 1: That's it that in so many ways, the Hashtag have
Speaker 1: basically cut through the bureaucracy and the conversations and have
Speaker 1: forced people to say, Hey, this is a different direction
Speaker 1: that we should at least listen to or think about.
Speaker 1: There's another part of this conversation that we need to have.
Speaker 1: I would argue that, like, you know, this stuff like
Speaker 1: defund the police and like people getting lazy and just
Speaker 1: wanting to tweet black lives matter, those people are gonna
Speaker 1: do what they were going to do anyway. Like the
Speaker 1: people who just tweet black lives matter and say that's
Speaker 1: their activism, they weren't gonna do anything for black people anyway.
Speaker 1: The people who are arguing against the Hashtag defund the police,
Speaker 1: they are going to not support any effort to reform
Speaker 1: policing in America anyway and deformed. The defund the police
Speaker 1: is just the thing that they last on to to
Speaker 1: cast the gate, and it could have been anything, like,
Speaker 1: you know the civil rights movements were. They were communists
Speaker 1: and black power movement was anti white, right. So whatever
Speaker 1: black people say, they're going to be a contingent of
Speaker 1: people who are saying the opposite. Those people are going
Speaker 1: to exist, regardless of whether it's on twitter or in
Speaker 1: a newspaper, on TV, on the radio. Don't and so
Speaker 1: I don't think black people uh hashtags or turning white
Speaker 1: people negative, but I do think it is coalescing a
Speaker 1: group of people, of black people, who's like I thought
Speaker 1: I was the only one who thought we should defund
Speaker 1: the police. Like I thought I was the only one
Speaker 1: who had the idea of decreasing police funding. And those
Speaker 1: people see like minded people on the Internet and it
Speaker 1: coalesces into a movement. So I think overall is good,
Speaker 1: because the negative people were going to be negative regardless
Speaker 1: of what the Hashtag was. was like take a dollar
Speaker 1: away from the police. That would they would have never
Speaker 1: gonna be a phrase that there was never gonna be
Speaker 1: a magic phrase that pays. That got them on board. Okay,
Speaker 1: but then if we talk about the effectiveness of of Hashtags,
Speaker 1: like if we just go with Brittney grinder and everything
Speaker 1: that is that is transpired with Britney Grinder and as
Speaker 1: we talked about in the first break, the media follows
Speaker 1: a lot of what black people be talking about and
Speaker 1: then they present that as the national conversation on the thing.
Speaker 1: And sometimes it could be misinformation. Sometimes y'all could just
Speaker 1: be pulling tweets about US talking about beyonce, whatever, whatever, right,
Speaker 1: but then that same media is also the one that
Speaker 1: would listen to the ways that people were you know,
Speaker 1: because this is bigger than what people in the w
Speaker 1: NBA were doing, but then it was also black twitter
Speaker 1: that was taking those clips and putting those clips out
Speaker 1: on social to build more awareness about what was happening
Speaker 1: with Brittney Grinder and making sure that that conversation did
Speaker 1: not fall to the back page, you know, to the
Speaker 1: back page of you know, newspapers and conversations. So in
Speaker 1: a way, does that same media attention to black twitter
Speaker 1: when the stuff that really ain't their business and they
Speaker 1: don't really know and they get it wrong? Does that
Speaker 1: same media attention to some degree helped create momentum for
Speaker 1: a lot of these conversations, like even, like if you say,
Speaker 1: like even if we don't go Britney Grinder, we go
Speaker 1: further back with bring back our girl. You know, I'll
Speaker 1: be honest, that's one. When we talk about abduction. I
Speaker 1: was extremely educated by that Hashtag. So does the attention
Speaker 1: that black twitter gets from mainstream media in the case
Speaker 1: of activism, does it help? Yeah, I think so. I think,
Speaker 1: you know, on the whole right, because, I mean, when
Speaker 1: we talk about journalism, we talk about news, it's just
Speaker 1: like music is, just like art is, just like every
Speaker 1: other thing in America. Like white people are going to
Speaker 1: follow what black people do, like by the time they're
Speaker 1: talking about it, we've had the conversation. So, you know,
Speaker 1: in a sense it amplifies the conversations that black people
Speaker 1: were having yesterday today. And, you know, take this, you know,
Speaker 1: the conversation around police brutality. You know, a lot of
Speaker 1: people think, well, you know, since Obama, black people really
Speaker 1: came became, you know, obsessed and mad about police brutality.
Speaker 1: Luther King was talking about police brutality in the I
Speaker 1: have a dream speech right. So, in a since our
Speaker 1: conversation about police brutality has come to white people's attention
Speaker 1: because of the conversations we were having online, because of
Speaker 1: the Hashtag black lives matter, because we were posting those videos.
Speaker 1: Now they have evidence that it's not just, you know,
Speaker 1: a couple of people in Detroit and a couple of
Speaker 1: mad people in l a over Rodney King. It is
Speaker 1: a national thing that transcends geography and time and, you know,
Speaker 1: the police departments. It's a national problem and I think
Speaker 1: that's what black twitter and social media black people or
Speaker 1: social media give voice to our concerns. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that the contributions that black twitter makes um to national
Speaker 1: coverage of the issues that matter to us with things
Speaker 1: like Britney griner. That is one of the cases that
Speaker 1: particularly nuanced, because the message that we got from the
Speaker 1: federal government was that we didn't want to make a
Speaker 1: big fuss about this in case of some diplomatic issues. Right.
Speaker 1: So there's this problem that we now have to navigate
Speaker 1: as black folks, like how do we advocate for one
Speaker 1: of our own and make sure that her name stays
Speaker 1: on people's minds and make sure that people don't forget
Speaker 1: that she's there and that we need to bring her home,
Speaker 1: but also not put her in danger? We're already dealing
Speaker 1: with the devaluation of black life in our home country, right,
Speaker 1: and now we've got to deal with it as a
Speaker 1: diplomatic problem. We've basically all been deputized into the State
Speaker 1: Department at this point that we are having to act
Speaker 1: as a diplomatic corps to at least get our news
Speaker 1: media to pay attention to this story and to continue
Speaker 1: to keep the focus on it. I think black twitter
Speaker 1: does an excellent job with that, and it's just as
Speaker 1: Michael said. You know, this is bringing up things that
Speaker 1: we have been talking about four years. We've talked for
Speaker 1: years about our mistreatment when we visit other countries. We
Speaker 1: may not have been arrested, we may not be detained,
Speaker 1: we not be may be held by Um, a country
Speaker 1: that for a long time, I'm like as long as
Speaker 1: I've been alive, has been considered an enemy of the
Speaker 1: United States. How we got shot me with Russia in
Speaker 1: the last few years, I still don't understand. Uh Oh, listen,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to be nice. I'm trying to be nice,
Speaker 1: but you know, we we have talked about this. We've
Speaker 1: talked about what it's like to be mistreated in another
Speaker 1: country and to know that the U s government is
Speaker 1: not necessarily going to come to your aid. And so
Speaker 1: now we're pushing people to have more of that conversation
Speaker 1: and to say this is not just about high profile
Speaker 1: basketball star, a queer woman who is locked up in
Speaker 1: in Russia because of some trumped up charges. This is
Speaker 1: about what it is like to be black in this
Speaker 1: world and to know that, even though y'all, y'all tell
Speaker 1: us that we're not grateful for being citizens here, you
Speaker 1: show us that you're not really invested in US being
Speaker 1: a part of America, and this is an example of that.
Speaker 1: And so it brings all of those nuances to the
Speaker 1: conversation into the coverage in ways that we haven't been
Speaker 1: able to have those conversations before. Talk a little bit,
Speaker 1: both of you, about the political influence that black twitter
Speaker 1: has had. You know, when we talk about Georgia, Filipp
Speaker 1: and blue and a couple of years before that Doug
Speaker 1: Jones taking old Roy Moore off the sticks in Alabama
Speaker 1: and as in Alabama, and I know part of that
Speaker 1: happened because they were literally organizing driving people to the
Speaker 1: polls and all of the gerrymandered asked districts where the
Speaker 1: Poland station was way off the city bus route. So
Speaker 1: the influence that black twitter has on elections and its
Speaker 1: ability to get people registered to vote. You know, how
Speaker 1: much do you do we have? Here's here's the question.
Speaker 1: Here's here's a question of both you. Do we have
Speaker 1: Barack Obama and Stacy Abrams without social media? Oh, definitely not. Right, UM, neither.
Speaker 1: Not Even Obama, maybe because he was like earlier, Obama
Speaker 1: was my space is, but so so. I was living
Speaker 1: in South Carolina when Obama ran into I was an
Speaker 1: eight and I was covering him. There's no way, like
Speaker 1: the black people in South Carolina would have even considered
Speaker 1: that a black man could be president if not for
Speaker 1: social media, because everybody around them in South Carolina, like
Speaker 1: one of the most racist states in the country, would
Speaker 1: have said, ain't no way, like they'll kill the first right.
Speaker 1: But when we saw the momentum build online, remember, one
Speaker 1: of the things that social media does, and black twitter does,
Speaker 1: is wipe away the constraints of having to depend on
Speaker 1: the narrative given by white people. Right. So, you know
Speaker 1: Hillary Clinton, remember, everybody thought that Hillary Clinton was the
Speaker 1: shooting for that race, and right, and the only people
Speaker 1: who weren't saying it was like the people online saying,
Speaker 1: I think I'm gonna just support this brother and see
Speaker 1: what's happening. And then we saw so many people do
Speaker 1: it that we saw that it was possible. And the
Speaker 1: same can be true with Stacey ables and definitely, you know,
Speaker 1: uh Democrat winning and becoming a senator in Alabama, like
Speaker 1: no one would have thought that was possible. Black people,
Speaker 1: specifically black women in Alabama, and they did that and
Speaker 1: they're organizing. was done a lot of it online. We're
Speaker 1: knocking also off in Georgia as well. I'm sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, I wholeheartedly agree. And even going back Um,
Speaker 1: as far as Barack Obama's election. Um, there are a
Speaker 1: number of case studies that look at how the Obama
Speaker 1: campaigns made effective use of social media messaging and, honestly,
Speaker 1: presidential campaigns and gubernatorial races and Senate races, Congressional races,
Speaker 1: those all follow a certain part, a chapter two of
Speaker 1: the Obama playbook, because what the Obama campaign showed was
Speaker 1: how you could go directly connect with people who feel
Speaker 1: like they are disenfranchised, who know that they are disenfranchised,
Speaker 1: energize them and get them to a part of the
Speaker 1: political process. That is the way that Barack Obama was
Speaker 1: able to win. He was able to push past Um,
Speaker 1: sort of those people who were disenchanted and jaded with
Speaker 1: the systems as we knew it, and get through on
Speaker 1: a message of hope. Hope, are you kidding me? Hope
Speaker 1: does not pay bills, hope does not necessarily move people
Speaker 1: to take time off of work to go out and vote.
Speaker 1: So effective messaging and being able to communicate with people
Speaker 1: where they are used to receiving messages and also where
Speaker 1: they see those messages supported by people they know and trust.
Speaker 1: That is what makes the difference, and that is why
Speaker 1: we were able to see, uh, some victories in Georgia,
Speaker 1: with Georgia flipping blue, with mobilizing voters in Alabama. But
Speaker 1: I think that it is shortsighted to say that that
Speaker 1: is the only driver. And you know, we can look
Speaker 1: at jerrymandering and all of the redistricting that's being done
Speaker 1: now and see exactly where the next part of the
Speaker 1: playbook has to come in into play. Let's talk for
Speaker 1: a second here, just you know, about people who try
Speaker 1: to infiltrate these conversations and influence and change them. You know,
Speaker 1: it's one thing to have bots, but then we also
Speaker 1: have people that try to permeate these conversations and pretend
Speaker 1: to be black and they try to talk but, you know,
Speaker 1: a little black slag. They try to put a little,
Speaker 1: as efforty would call it, put a little slanguage on
Speaker 1: their conversation. How much of a threat are those types
Speaker 1: of people to the conversations at large happening on black twitter? Uh,
Speaker 1: not much because, like, black people know, like you know,
Speaker 1: when it's a white person pretending to be black. Um,
Speaker 1: you can tell. And then you know when they try
Speaker 1: to spread disinformation, you can tell when it's you know,
Speaker 1: a person who is susceptible to disinformation is going to
Speaker 1: be susceptible to any kind of disinformation, right. But the
Speaker 1: people who you know are smart, like you on the Internet,
Speaker 1: when you look that twitter, right, you can go google
Speaker 1: everything somebody tells you. So you know, I always say
Speaker 1: man like you gotta be able to distinguish between the
Speaker 1: dumb people and the smart people, because there is no
Speaker 1: fine special fun for dumb people, right, there's no stupid
Speaker 1: fun Um. You know that. It's the same size and
Speaker 1: the same uh, it's not italicized or anything as the
Speaker 1: people who know things, right. But the good thing is
Speaker 1: you're on the Internet, right, and it's not like that
Speaker 1: opinion or that disinformation or that stupid thing that people
Speaker 1: say is not, you know, sandwich between something that a
Speaker 1: smart person says or something said by somebody who actually
Speaker 1: knows things. And and I always tell people like you,
Speaker 1: Wan't you just talk to people, look for people who
Speaker 1: know things and let's take their information on the subject
Speaker 1: in which they know because, like you know, there's like
Speaker 1: I love Lebron James and I think he is one
Speaker 1: of the smartest basketball players in the world, but I'm
Speaker 1: not listening to Lebron James Give me financial advice, because
Speaker 1: Lebron James got a billion dollars right. So listen to
Speaker 1: smart people who know things about the things they are
Speaker 1: talking about, like the old addicts. You don't take recipes
Speaker 1: from skinny people. Yes, exactly. One thing that Michael brings
Speaker 1: up that I appreciate, but I also sometimes have some
Speaker 1: trouble with. Like you can find anything on the Internet,
Speaker 1: and one thing that we are now seeing a lot
Speaker 1: of problems with is, although you can go and you
Speaker 1: can verify information that you find, you really have to
Speaker 1: be careful about that verification because there are folks who
Speaker 1: spend their whole lives creating information sub ecosystems where they
Speaker 1: put out info that helps confirm the misleading beliefs that
Speaker 1: you are beginning to accept. Right. But one thing about
Speaker 1: black twitter, and I think that sort of inoculates us
Speaker 1: against this, is if you look at the structures of
Speaker 1: black twitter and how black twitter really came to be,
Speaker 1: it was first people were there because people that they
Speaker 1: knew we're there. And if you go back to that
Speaker 1: level of personal communities, when someone is spitting misinformation and
Speaker 1: you start talking to other people in your life, away
Speaker 1: from the keyboard, offline, about what they are spitting. That's
Speaker 1: where you start running into some of the dissonance that
Speaker 1: makes you go search out the information that you need
Speaker 1: to find out what the truth is. And Sofia Noble's book,
Speaker 1: her algorithms of oppression, she talked about very extensively how
Speaker 1: you can't just tell folks to go google something because
Speaker 1: Google is an ad company, right. They get paid to
Speaker 1: bring you information based on how different subscribers are turning
Speaker 1: over ad dollars. So we really have to to take
Speaker 1: some care with people, and I think about that specifically
Speaker 1: with folks who are older and folks who are younger.
Speaker 1: You know, my mom had questions for me about five
Speaker 1: G and I had to sit down and have a
Speaker 1: patient conversation with her, a non judgmental one, about what
Speaker 1: this was all about, even though people in her social
Speaker 1: groups were talking about things they heard on the Internet.
Speaker 1: I also have to have the same sort of conversations
Speaker 1: with my ten year old niece about what she sees
Speaker 1: on the Internet and what is real and what is not,
Speaker 1: and that even though you can go to a website
Speaker 1: and find something that says X, Y Z, that may
Speaker 1: not necessarily be so. So we have to talk about
Speaker 1: Um some of that information and parsing it and making
Speaker 1: sure that it is what it purports to be as well,
Speaker 1: to that point about misinformation. After the break we're gonna
Speaker 1: bring this conversation home. Michael, I want to talk to
Speaker 1: you about your book that you've written. That is all
Speaker 1: about giving people the real information, the real history. This
Speaker 1: book is a real already it's probably already banning C
Speaker 1: R T. are you on the bandle ship? If not,
Speaker 1: it's going to be coming. That's how you know it's good,
Speaker 1: because they're trying to ban it. Be on the scenes.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back bringing it home. We're talking about,
Speaker 1: you know, black twitter. I want to talk about the
Speaker 1: future of it in a second, but first, Meredith, what
Speaker 1: do they say? What do they say on clubhouse? I
Speaker 1: want to dovetail if I could, if I could piggyback
Speaker 1: off or something. You can expand. We talked about seeking truths,
Speaker 1: seeking understanding about what our history is and how many
Speaker 1: different digital potholes have been set up to obstruct us
Speaker 1: from getting those truths. And Michael, you're you know, you're
Speaker 1: fighting back against that. You know personally, you know you're
Speaker 1: using black twitter to educate people about, you know, these
Speaker 1: untold stories of American history. The book is black. I'M
Speaker 1: gonna say black is history, the unwhitewashed story of America.
Speaker 1: But for the title, because I know the publisher can't
Speaker 1: put as fuck, so they put black a F history
Speaker 1: and that's coming out in January. What was your breaking point?
Speaker 1: You Go, you know what, I gotta write a book.
Speaker 1: I'm tired all of this. Um, sick of it. Y'All
Speaker 1: keep twisting and remixing the truth. Were my keyboard. So Um,
Speaker 1: I was home schooled and so it wasn't until recently that,
Speaker 1: you know, when, when all these conversations about the confederacy
Speaker 1: and all of these founders and Jefferson, when all those started,
Speaker 1: I realized, Oh, people just don't know stuff about history.
Speaker 1: Like you know, I didn't know how little the average
Speaker 1: American knows about history. And then, like it was a
Speaker 1: couple of years ago when I realized, Oh, they learned
Speaker 1: about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and
Speaker 1: all that stuff and how great they were, and then
Speaker 1: like six seven years later they learned about slavery and
Speaker 1: that's why they can't like comport that this the founding
Speaker 1: fathers were also human traffickers. And so what this book
Speaker 1: is is the story of black people in America. And
Speaker 1: so we ain't talking about James Garfield's political campaign. We're
Speaker 1: talking about what black people were going to our perspectives
Speaker 1: and the unwhite watched, the UN erased stories that we've
Speaker 1: been missing from our history books. Like, for instance, like nobody,
Speaker 1: like when I used to ask people about head rights
Speaker 1: and they always say what was that? And I was like, Oh,
Speaker 1: y'all didn't know. Like the first people that came to
Speaker 1: America got fifty acres for every slave that they brought here.
Speaker 1: So people were thinking like, Oh, the slaves came here
Speaker 1: to do the white people's working, to make them wealthy,
Speaker 1: and I was like no, the slaves is what made
Speaker 1: the white people wealthy. Right Um, but nobody knows about
Speaker 1: head rights. And it was how the blue blood families
Speaker 1: of this country gained their wealth, not from owning the
Speaker 1: stuff that slaves produced, but the actual bodies of the
Speaker 1: slaves is what gave them their power and their intergenerational
Speaker 1: wealth that is still persist to this day. So, like
Speaker 1: that's what this book is about. Like these untold stories
Speaker 1: that like they just skipped over when you were in
Speaker 1: the sixth grade social studies class. When we talk about
Speaker 1: that misinformation, you know I am made product of public
Speaker 1: schools and when I think shout out to Birmingham in street,
Speaker 1: Middle School ramp in high school. I know that White
Speaker 1: Book publishers are part of the issue when it comes
Speaker 1: to misinformation and omissions from history and CRT is boiling
Speaker 1: up now and they want to take more history out
Speaker 1: of the textbooks and referred to the enslaved. What was
Speaker 1: they trying to refer to? The enslaves ass and the
Speaker 1: Texas Um, voluntary involuntary immigrants. It's some remixed ask word
Speaker 1: to try to take the pain and the truth out
Speaker 1: of what actually happened. How do we create more fair
Speaker 1: representation of the contributions of black people in American history?
Speaker 1: And you know, and and how? And what role does
Speaker 1: entertainment play? And that as well Hollywood. You know, some
Speaker 1: of the things that we have to think of are
Speaker 1: using the tools that we have available to us. That
Speaker 1: is one thing that black people in the United States
Speaker 1: have done since time immemorial and black people throughout the world.
Speaker 1: I specifically referred to our history in the United States,
Speaker 1: because when I wrote about black twitter, I used what
Speaker 1: the opening salvo was of the first black newspaper that
Speaker 1: was published in the United States, and that was my
Speaker 1: twist on it. It was we wished to plead our
Speaker 1: own cause, we wish to tweet our own cause, and so,
Speaker 1: in the same way that Michael Talks about this being,
Speaker 1: you know, just another medium, the facts are there. We
Speaker 1: have used every medium that has existed, uh, to tell
Speaker 1: the stories as they were, not as people wanted them
Speaker 1: to be. So Black newspaper publishers wrote about what it
Speaker 1: was like to be black in that era. They covered
Speaker 1: the civil rights movement when white newspapers would not want to.
Speaker 1: My hometown paper, the lettings and Herald leader, had to
Speaker 1: publish a front plage apology in the early two thousands
Speaker 1: about their failure to cover the civil rights movement, or
Speaker 1: they neglected, actually is the word, that they neglected to
Speaker 1: cover the civil rights movement and reologize for that error.
Speaker 1: But we were there, using our cameras, using newspapers, using magazines, radio, um,
Speaker 1: even programs in church right to tell the story of
Speaker 1: our people in its entirety. It's one of the reasons
Speaker 1: I'm writing a book on Black Twitter, to make sure
Speaker 1: that that history is there and that it's accurate. And
Speaker 1: so we use the tools that we have to present
Speaker 1: these narratives alongside the ones that people are told. They
Speaker 1: sometimes disrupt the narrative, they counter them Um they give
Speaker 1: you a completely different picture or a more complete picture,
Speaker 1: and that is the way that we get down to that.
Speaker 1: We also refuse the way that people want to talk
Speaker 1: about our stories. So one of my personal commitments is
Speaker 1: to not say C R t. It is critical race theory.
Speaker 1: It is an actual theory. It applies to how we
Speaker 1: think about power and economics and race and all of
Speaker 1: those things working together. I don't take the shortcuts, because
Speaker 1: that's what people do when they're trying to re spind
Speaker 1: the narrative, and I say we spell it out, we
Speaker 1: tell it how it is, and that is the way
Speaker 1: that we take back our history and present the truth. So,
Speaker 1: as you write this book on Black Twitter, this would
Speaker 1: be a great place for us to end with the
Speaker 1: two of you. What does the future of black twitter
Speaker 1: look like? Because we understand its power, we understand it's worth.
Speaker 1: Now you know I am very much a web one point,
Speaker 1: oh aged individual I came up in the a o
Speaker 1: l chat rooms and then the yahoo chat rooms, which
Speaker 1: had the voice feature, and then there was a little
Speaker 1: bit of my space and before I skipped over Angel
Speaker 1: Fire and Black Planet. That was sprinkling there as well. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: where were you on in the dorms? Oh No, I
Speaker 1: was in gibbs hall, but I went to the Coleman
Speaker 1: Library to get on the Internet because that dial up,
Speaker 1: that dial up in the dorm was atrocious. My roommate
Speaker 1: was always on the phone. Long distance relationship as an
Speaker 1: the internet. Where does it go? You know, I know
Speaker 1: for a minute during the shutdown there. You know, these introduced.
Speaker 1: There's there's been the introduction of APPs like clubhouse and
Speaker 1: twitter spaces where you can have real time voice conversations
Speaker 1: and quasi tech talk, fireside chats. Sometimes they're ratchets, sometimes
Speaker 1: they're eloquent and very, you know, helpful conversations. But where
Speaker 1: do you all see the evolution? You know, Meredith, I'll
Speaker 1: start with you. You know, as you know, there's rumors
Speaker 1: that Elon Musk was gonna buy twitter and now he
Speaker 1: might not. He May. The end there was rumors that
Speaker 1: Donald Trump might come back to twitter. Then they're talking
Speaker 1: about adding a button where you could moderate and switch
Speaker 1: stuff up. If those things come true, any of those
Speaker 1: things come true and black people migrate from the platform,
Speaker 1: you know, where do we go? What? What happens next?
Speaker 1: I mean what happens next is what has always happened
Speaker 1: with black people in any sort of technology. Where the
Speaker 1: technology is, there will my people be also a right.
Speaker 1: We are going to be wherever the web goes. Um,
Speaker 1: we were there in the beginning and we're going to
Speaker 1: continue to be there. We're gonna be in the metaverse.
Speaker 1: We're already in the metaverse. I think the challenge right
Speaker 1: now is, as technologies evolve and develop Um, that we
Speaker 1: work on making those changes so that we don't extend
Speaker 1: the same racist practices into those new spaces. The other
Speaker 1: thing that I think when I get this question about
Speaker 1: what's next for black twitter, is that I remind people
Speaker 1: that all of the media forms that we had before today,
Speaker 1: the major ones, have not gone away. We still have radio,
Speaker 1: we still have print, we still have television. We are
Speaker 1: going to have social media in some way, shape or
Speaker 1: form in the future, whether it's this platform or another one.
Speaker 1: We're still gonna be there. They'RE gonna be the folks
Speaker 1: who just you know, I'm probably gonna be one of them.
Speaker 1: Like twitter is my platform. I don't dig snapchat. clubhouse
Speaker 1: wants too much of my information to use. I'm probably
Speaker 1: still going to be on twitter. So black twitter, regardless
Speaker 1: of whether Elon Musk goes through with this purchase or
Speaker 1: donald trump comes back or whatever, you can't out to
Speaker 1: black people. WE'RE gonna be wherever we want to be,
Speaker 1: using the technology the way that we want to use it. Michael,
Speaker 1: you're always having to reach the people to spread a
Speaker 1: message as well. How do you see this? How do
Speaker 1: you see this going in the future? Yeah, so I think,
Speaker 1: you know, it's hard to predict where technology is going.
Speaker 1: But one thing you know about black people, where its music,
Speaker 1: whether it's poetry, whether it's fighting, whether it's TV, black
Speaker 1: people are going to find a way to tell our
Speaker 1: story to each other. And so, wherever it goes, like
Speaker 1: it's probably gonna be somewhere in the metaverse or in
Speaker 1: the you know, the digital reality or virtual reality where, like,
Speaker 1: you know, black people might create a wor kindom where
Speaker 1: white people can't come and it's really like, you know,
Speaker 1: you gotta have one of those tattoos on your lips
Speaker 1: or you know, you gotta, you know, we gotta hear
Speaker 1: how you sound on the phone before you can talk,
Speaker 1: before you can come in. But wherever it is, black
Speaker 1: people are gonna be dead. Black people going to lead
Speaker 1: the way and then there's gonna be some white people
Speaker 1: on the side trying to get in to the club.
Speaker 1: And that is the history of media in America. That
Speaker 1: is the future of media in America and media in
Speaker 1: the world. Black people are going to transform it into
Speaker 1: a thing that helps us connect with each other. There's
Speaker 1: already something starting to happen in the world of, you know,
Speaker 1: Oculus and Meta. You know, I have a VR headset
Speaker 1: and there's an APP all space vr where, you know,
Speaker 1: there's black mixers and talk shows and round tables and
Speaker 1: debates and relationship talk. So I think as that technology
Speaker 1: becomes cheaper and easier for people to build and design,
Speaker 1: then we'll probably see more opportunities for black people in
Speaker 1: those spaces. This has been a wonderful, wonderful conversation. Thank
Speaker 1: you all, both for coming on and going beyond the
Speaker 1: scenes with me today. Thank you. Thank you. Listen to
Speaker 1: the daily show beyond the scenes on apple podcast, the
Speaker 1: IHEART radio APP or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch
Speaker 1: the daily show weeknights at eleven t central on comedy
Speaker 1: central and stream full episodes anytime on paramount plus. This
Speaker 1: has been a comedy Central Podcast