Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
Excellence defines eras. We can always look back on a given decade, and we’re reminded of its significant contributors by the artifacts they left behind. Whether it is to entertain, inspire, provoke or enrage, we look at certain people who belong to a specific place and time.
Eddie Murphy in the ’80s.
The Chicago Bulls in the ’90s.
Jay-Z in the ’00s.
We can have all kinds of debates and discussions around the degrees of their significance, but there is no doubt about their impact on culture. Without Eddie Murphy, a generation of Black comedy would still be on the margins. Without the ’90s Bulls, the NBA doesn’t become a global brand, and kids in China wouldn’t be walking around wearing Michael Jordan’s jersey and sneakers 25 years later. Without Jay-Z, hip-hop doesn’t scale from millions to billions.
We’re just starting to scratch the surface of the decade of Black Twitter. Its impact is being put into sharp relief as the platform that birthed it slowly writhes and withers away. The voices it created and the communities it empowered are still being discovered.
We did it, y’all. As Black people, our generation accomplished the thing that our ancestors and forbears gifted us. We took the sparse bits and pieces of the technology of our time, and we made something magical like slave songs reimagined in juke joints that took our nascent expressions of subdued freedom and gave birth to the blues. Twitter was a microblogging site that presented us with a blank muse, 140 characters (originally) and the ability to pierce the veil separating us from the world and make them hear our voices.
The 2010s, as a decade of Black self-expression, begins with our confidence and joy ignited by the era of Obama and ends with our collective demand for agency, respect and our portion of what America owes us following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. It was an emotional rollercoaster that took us through good days, bad days and halfway days with one place and space for us to speak freely and in our own voices: Twitter. We took what the day brought us and turned passive commentary into its own form of art.
Black Twitter was an ecosystem of comedy, consciousness and chaos that took the middling ideas of marginalized people and turned them into the cultural moments of the era. We could make a comment on Monday, and it would be a punchline on “Saturday Night Live” by that weekend. We weren’t just making commentary but defining an era from the bottom up.
But era-defining excellence ends or it evolves.
There’s an art to knowing when it’s time to leave. Exits are hard to figure out, but we all feel it when the vibe is dry and the thrill is gone. The virtual Electric Slide that was being Black on the bird app is over. It’s time for us to accept it and move on. We gave them a decade’s worth of game and sent a few of our own into the cultural stratosphere along the way. We made connects. We made money. We made it happen.
If you want to doubt the efficacy of our movement, look at all of the states that are trying to ban “woke” stuff. The people who decried our ability to organize and hold those accountable who disrespected us and others as “cancel culture” are literally passing laws to try to cancel the culture. There’s no greater testament to our power than their fear.
Our strength was so palpable, so real and so threatening that the (formerly) richest man in the world took a break from shooting shit into space to pay $44 billion to try to shut us up. But that’s always been our history. We make culture, and by hook, crook, the rope or financial hijinks, they come to shut us down. They’ve burned down our churches. They’ve leveraged the law to dispossess us of our neighborhoods. They’ve profited from the art that they stole from us. And that’s what they did to Twitter and, by extension, its powerful Black voices. That’s why it’s time for us to go. Twitter doesn’t deserve us anymore.
No one wants to spend their free time arguing with extremely online, right-wing white supremacist trolls who operate unchecked and unbothered while being encouraged to be their worst selves by their billionaire benefactor. What Elon Musk offers as “free speech” is merely a license to attack people and groups he deems unworthy of protection or existence. He took a place where we could be relatively free and safe and incinerated our ability to simply exist there. We knew what was coming, but we didn’t know just how bad it would be.
That initial shock and grief of losing the platform sent us scrambling for a substitute, like trying to find a rebound for a relationship that ended unresolved. It might look and feel like what you had because you want that old thang back, but it’s driven by the fear of absence rather than its actual value in its presence. But it’s gone. There’s never going to be another Black Twitter. Try as they might. There will be other avenues for expression, commiseration and organization, but that’s all still a big TBD.
Whether it’s Spoutible, Spill, Bluesky or Thread, they can replicate the domain, but they’ll never have another decade like ours.
It’s just impossible to scale organic cultural movements. You can drop turntables and microphones in the hood, but you’re not going to get hip-hop again. There’s a time when the moment meets a movement, and the zeitgeist simply existing at the same time creates something unimaginable and priceless. You can pay $44 billion for the venue, but you can’t buy the vibes.
Get off Twitter. Touch some grass. There are probably some new restaurants to check out in your neighborhood. You have kids. Talk to them. But the era of logging onto the bird app to create culture for free is over. You don’t have to go to Threads or Spill, but you can’t stay on Twitter anymore.
We made it valuable. We made it legendary. We coined new terms, minted new stars, celebrated in moments of joy and organized in times of struggle. We did what our people have always done. We made something out of nothing. Black Twitter has been unrivaled, undeniable and undefeated. We did that.
Now, it’s time to do the next thing.
What that is? I don’t know. And I’m not going to wager a guess because we’re just too unpredictable.
Corey Richardson is originally from Newport News, Va. and currently living in Chicago. Ad guy by trade, dad guy in life and grilled meat enthusiast, Corey spends his time crafting words, cheering on beleaguered Washington, D.C., sports franchises and yelling obscenities at himself on golf courses. He’s penned work in the past for Very Smart Brothas and The Root.
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