MONIQUE I. LISTON
5. BLACK TWITTER AND BLACK FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY
Illuminating Ways of Knowing
INTRODUCTION
Every year, Time magazine publishes its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Through the selected excerpt, the iconic Oprah Winfrey, one of the most influential black women on television, wrote the entry on Shonda Rhimes, a black woman who has impacted television in different yet similarly powerful ways. Rhimes’s current television showpiece, Scandal, stars Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope, a Washington D.C. crisis management expert loosely tied to the real life work of Judy Smith. Ironically, Judy Smith has never been listed on the Time 100 even though the creator of her sensationalized television trope has been listed and profiled. This irony is representative of the relationship the American public has with television. Perhaps this is a dystopian fantasy realized, but it appears that the American public’s relationship to television is stronger and more influential than its relationship to lived experience and reality. “Television. Love it or hate it…it reflects and shapes our knowledge of contemporary life across the economic, political, social, and cultural spectrum,” reads the back cover of Josh Hartley’s critically acclaimed 2008 text Television Truths. In this text, Hartley discusses the ways in which television is a component of “knowledge paradigms” in which the creator, the show, and the audience are constantly negotiating meaning. I write this paper to attempt to build a connection between this contemporary social phenomenon and the reality of Black women’s existence in the United States. Scandal as a social phenomenon is important to contextualize. As Frantz Fanon so eloquently states in the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks, we must root our social analysis temporally because our present condition will unquestionably be the roots of our future. If we do not give value to our experiences at this moment, then we are forced to pass that failure on to future generations. Giving value to Black feminist epistemology provides the opportunity to develop methodological resistance to the “matrix of domination.” The presence of a Black feminist epistemology affirms the humanity of a marginalized group. It gives credence and respect to a shared method of creating, validating, and sharing knowledge. Patricia Hill-Collins (1990) writes,
L. M. Nicosia, & R.A. Goldstein (Eds.), Through a Distorted Lens, 71–80. © 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. M. I. LISTON
Afrocentric [Black] feminist thought offers two significant contributions toward furthering our understanding of the important connections among knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. First, Black feminist thought fosters a fundamental paradigmatic shift in how we think about oppression. By embracing a paradigm of race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression, Black feminist thought reconceptualizes the social relations of domination and resistance. Second, Black feminist thought addresses ongoing epistemological debates in feminist theory and in the sociology of knowledge concerning ways of assessing “truth.” Offering subordinate groups new knowledge about their own experiences can be empowering. But revealing new ways of knowing that allow subordinate groups to define their own reality has far greater implications. This process is about empowerment. Recognition of Black feminist epistemologies in use humanizes Black women’s lived experiences. This process of humanization and affirmation of self-dignity allows Black women to value their sphere of freedom through experience, dialogue, care and personal accountability and it creates the space for Black women to develop and curate conceptual tools to resist oppression. I want to be very clear, I do not write this analysis as a sort of Black voyeurism that gazes upon the Black experience with awe and wonder as an experiential museum exhibit. I write this as a member of an oppressed social group. This chapter will explore the discussion of ABC’s television show Scandal on Twitter as an example of Black feminist epistemology, as presented by Patricia Hill-Collins. Black women and men on Twitter show the tenets of Black feminist epistemology through expressing and validating their shared experiences. The Twitter platform allows for an ongoing dialogue, a key axiom of Black feminist epistemology. Information shared between users represent the ethics of care and personal responsibility that exemplify how Black feminist epistemology engages and challenges knowledge validation processes. This research is important for contextualizing the “matrix of domination” and how marginalized communities create and challenge knowledge beyond the dominant culture’s methods. In this chapter, I argue that Black Twitter is a loosely constructed mbongi, or a space, where knowledge is created, validated, and critiqued. I will demonstrate that by looking at the relationship this space has to the popular television show, Scandal. To do this, first I will provide a brief synopsis of the show. Secondly, I will discuss Black Twitter and its relationship to the show. Lastly, I will discuss how Black Twitter uses Black feminist epistemology to create and maintain a sphere of freedom for Black women’s social and political discourse. Through this chapter, I will be able to discuss the opportunities for pedagogy to include this epistemological framework, thus illuminating an oft-dark- shadowed community. This “hidden” yet readily apparent practice is an example of 21st-century knowledge that operate above and beyond traditional or mainstream narratives.
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