In 2010, Dr. Marcus Collins was making a name for himself in Houston’s music scene under Matthew Knowles’ Music World Entertainment imprint. During this time, he collaborated with the gospel group Trinity 5:7, playing a crucial role in networking and marketing musicians. Notably, a young PJ Morton was heading to Houston for a performance, and it was Collins’ strategic use of Twitter that forged a new relationship and bolstered his marketing efforts. Although it’s just a brief anecdote, it serves as a compelling illustration of Twitter’s significant impact within the Black community.
Bringing people together is just one of the many impacts of social media. Beneath the surface, Black users have built an unshakable community on X (formerly known as Twitter). To capture the power of Black Twitter, Director Prentice Penny created Black Twitter: A People’s History, a three-part docu series now streaming on Hulu. This series details the origins and evolution of Black Twitter, inspired by Jason Parham’s 2021 Wired article, A People’s History of Black Twitter. “For years, Black Twitter had an unequivocal gravitational pull on the internet,” Collins explains. “This community represented the collective zeitgeist regarding cultural happenings and social discourse. If you wanted the ‘real,’ you went to Black Twitter to see what the people really thought.”
Collins, who joined Twitter in 2009, was much more of a voyeur in the early years of the platform, but the emergence of Black community within the space would quickly change that. “I think you’ll find around like 2011 for me, that I followed the right person that became my gateway into Black Twitter. I can’t remember who it was, I want to say Van Lathan. But the tweets were so good at just capturing the zeitgeist through my perspective, that journalists weren’t capturing. Journalists were reporting the facts, and [Black] Twitter was spilling the tea. I enjoyed it because exactly what comes to my mind, that’s what was showing up in my newsfeed. It would capture exactly what’s going on in my subconscious.”
The documentary highlights some of our hypervisible influencers and journalists including Lathan, Brandon Jinx, Naima Cochrane, Amanda Seales, and others, who chime in on the unintentional genius of the virtual community and its impact, noting popular movements such as #OscarsSoWhite, #NegroSolstice #ThanksgivingClapbacks and #BlackLivesMatter. However, Black Twitter isn’t an isolated phenomenon; it’s deeply rooted in and a direct extension of our culture. Think of Black Twitter as the seeds that grow into the tree of Black culture, continually influencing and shaping each other in a cycle.
Though now a long ways away from working in the music industry, Collins found his second wind in academia, working as a professor of marketing at the University of Michigan and authored the book For The Culture, where he provides the vernacular on what we call the “culture” today. “Throughout my entire career, I’ve always heard people say, ‘let’s get our ideas out in the culture. What’s happening in culture? We’re doing it for the culture.’ And I found myself using the same language so I stopped and thought about it,” Collins reflects. “I didn’t have a really good definition for it, and if I ask five people to define it, I’ll get five answers. I think that’s a conflict. We all know the importance and the sway of culture. I would argue there’s no external force, more influential human behavior, than culture full stop. But if we can’t define the thing concretely, if you don’t have a good lexicon to describe it, how do we ever fully harness its power? How do you ever fully operationalize its sway? So I thought that it needed a better Rosetta Stone for us to describe the thing and then use it in our work, and in our day to day lives.”
Collins elaborates on how Black Twitter has served as a cultural crucible, where meanings are negotiated and new trends are birthed. “Here, cultural producers negotiated and constructed meaning and collectively decided what’s in and what’s out. The outcomes of this social enterprise would reverberate across the internet and find themselves reproduced at the dinner tables, bars, and group text threads,” he says. Collins also points out what Black people have done with Twitter and meme culture have created a deeper subtext and meaning to the things we say. This is evident in the enduring popularity of memes featuring icons like Nene Leakes and references to HBO’s The Wire, showcasing the multipurpose nature of our expressiveness.
“It’s a look, it’s an expression, and this is what makes memes so powerful, because memes are vessels of cultural meaning and cultural information. It comes from Richard Dawkins, who talked about genes, being vessels of biological inflammation in our bodies. And so that your genes will replicate in an effort to have a sort of a concerted effort in our bodies. And the same thing goes with memes he called it mêmes which is French for ‘the same.’ And they are these communicative vessels that are full of cultural meanings. So if I show you a meme, without even saying the word, you already know what I’m talking about. It’s like the meta text—‘if I send you this, know that I don’t want no beef,’ and it’s [a photo of] J. Cole.”
The docuseries highlights how Black Twitter’s influence extends beyond its own community, shaping broader cultural practices. “Even if you weren’t engaged in Black Twitter, you were likely still influenced by it because the production of Black Twitter would later be adopted into the broader cultural practices to become our language and our mannerisms,” Collins adds, sharing that various aspects of our identity, such as clothing choices, mannerisms, and language, serve as tangible representations of our deeply held beliefs and cultural affiliations. He points out that marginalized and underrepresented communities, like those on Black Twitter, often drive innovation out of necessity. “The cultural producers of Black Twitter fueled the internet with language, memes, behaviors, and hot takes that went from subculture to popular culture.”
Essentially, the essence of Black Twitter is a fusion of various elements that have collectively sculpted its unique identity. This digital community, born from shared experiences and ideas, has been a witness to both celebratory triumphs and heartbreaking tragedies, many unfolding in real-time on social media platforms. From the gripping saga of Zola (now immortalized in an A24 film), to Rihanna’s iconic “Savage” era, and the unforgettable moment when Keke Palmer uttered, “sorry to that man,” as well as the somber reflections on the tragic passings of Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, and Mike Brown, these moments have left an imprint on the collective consciousness of Black Twitter.
Despite facing adversity, humor has always been a cornerstone of our resilience, serving as both a coping mechanism and a reflection of our cultural spirit. “This is what we do. And when I think about some of the some of the most profound cultural producers in Black culture, many of them have been comedians,” Collins explains. “Whether it was Richard Pryor, at least in my lifetime, or Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence. It all comes from comedy. I think comedians have been so important for us to make sense of the world around us. That like Twitter became a place where the jokes were going to be had.”
Throughout every cultural moment, movement, or holiday, Black Twitter has consistently united in solidarity. Whether it’s sharing laughter, offering support, or organizing for change, Black Twitter embodies a vibrant, living community. At its inception, many people were unsure of what to do on Twitter, but once Black people entered the scene and made it their own, it left non-Black people wondering where to locate Black Twitter in the App Store, yet its presence and impact are unmistakable. While the platform may have evolved (now as X), the essence of Black Twitter remains unchanged.
This sentiment encapsulates the organic and fluid nature of culture, as decisions and trends emerge collectively and often subconsciously among us. Even in the absence of explicit articulation, our cultural codes provide an implicit understanding, fueling the rise of Twitter as the influential cultural force it has become. As Collins puts it, “That’s how culture works. There’s no memo or drum majors that tell us what we’re going to do, we just sort of collectively, unconsciously, socially coordinate and decide what we’re going to do, whether it’s implicitly through where we taught, or explicitly through the way we demonstrably speak.”
Stream ‘Black Twitter: A People’s History’ now on Hulu.