Member-only story
Why Black People Need Our Own Twitter
Community is the superpower of Black personhood that White supremacy can never access. We need to lean into it.
I woke up at 5:30 this morning to see my favorite hellsite transmitting White supremacist trash.
Twitter Spaces was hosting a room called “Are there too many Black women in public?” The host was White. I was on the shitter. At the time I took a snapshot of the room on my iPhone, four of the other speakers were White. There were 71 listeners during that predawn hour using the Space as a substitute for morning radio.
“If America is racist, then why is it that African immigrants do so much more better than African-Americans?” one of the White speakers wondered as I tuned in. That five-second clip was all I needed to hear. Rush Limbaugh’s decrepit soul — with unfinished hate in his heart — had arisen and was haunting the creation Jack Dorsey decided to step away from on Monday. I hoped the approaching dawn would vaporize the possessed making such arguments.
A community is a story. I want to be the custodian and creator of Black folklore. I want to make the bricks that pave our streets and build our community’s houses.
But White supremacy is a sturdy monster. Those 71 listeners ballooned to more than 3,000 by the time political commentator Benjamin Dixon created his own Space in response, titled “Are There Too Many White Men in Public.” One by one, Dixon allowed those to react to the much larger, more hateful room. I spoke and got 11 new followers. Photographers commented. Johnny Silvercloud chimed in with his science and talked about how Black personhood does not have the freedom of space. Black and Democratic elected officials, adorned with blue checks, reminded us that Black power and its allied movements were acquiring more power and that what we were seeing was an empire flailing. Many of the commenters had popped into the racist room and were now reporting both on the comments the White people were making and the Defenders of the Race who were playing verbal handball with their oppressors. They would hurl truth and it would bounce back to them; they would have to slap…
