Last week, Fareed Manjoo wrote a post for Slate called “How Black People Use Twitter.” Perhaps more controversial than the article itself was the accompanying image, the familiar blue bird Twitter logo, but brown instead, holding a phone and sporting a fitted cap (see below).
From NPR.org:
“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.”
Manjoo’s prediction that he would offend some folks certainly came true. The post sparked valid criticism that attempting to categorically “other” black Twitter users (while providing a stereotyped cartoon as a mascot) is a misguided attempt to “fetish[ize] something that is easily explained by human nature.”
Danielle Belton of The Black Snob says:
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.
Debates about racial identity and stereotyping almost always contribute something of value to our communities and society as a whole. But this debate produced something new and fantastic – brown Twitter bird parodies. Birds with afros. Birds with graduation caps. Birds with dredlocks. Birds in wheelchairs.
Started by Alicia Nassardeen of Instant Vintage, the parodies went viral. Folks across the globe used Nassardeen’s parodies as Facebook and Twitter profile pics and started making their own. Why? To prove the point that is the crux of the initial outrage: black people are not a monolith.
How creative. And how effective. Says blogger and comedian Baratunde Thurston:
That’s a form of activism, that’s a form of community organizing, that’s a form of reasserting a claim to your own identity,” he says. “And countering what you see as a damaging media message.
Twitter is a powerful social media tool. To be offended by the reworking of its icon into an overly-simplistic caricature of one’s racial group is natural. To use the very same powerful social media tool to parody this offensive caricature in a world-wide rejection of racial stereotypes is activism at its best. Hats (and graduation caps) off to the world-wide #browntwitterbird revolt!
