Old Struggles, New Platforms: Black Athletes, Black Twitter and the Fight for Social Justice by Ameer Hasan Loggins a Dissertati
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Old Struggles, New Platforms: Black Athletes, Black Twitter and the Fight for Social Justice By Ameer Hasan Loggins A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Ula Taylor, Chair Professor Na’ilah Suad Nasir Professor Michael Omi Fall 2018 © 2018 by Ameer Hasan Loggins All Rights Reserved Abstract Old Struggles, New Platforms: Black Athletes, Black Twitter and the Fight for Social Justice by Ameer Hasan Loggins Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Ula Taylor, Chair Since the death of Michael Brown Jr. on August 9, 2014, the social media platform Twitter and its Black usership have become central actors in the production and dissemination of news, political action, and protests challenging anti-Blackness. This dissertation explores what I call the Black Twitter Turn as a pivot away from what I term selfsploitation as its primary identifiable cultural currency. The Black Twitter Turn has transformed Twitter into a place to pushback and challenge dominant white racial frames rooted in white supremacy. It also serves as a site for making Black voices and concerns audible and unavoidable as both a community and as a media force. Black Twitter has provided community for working-class folk, Black freedom fighters and also for those considered to be Black elites (athletes and celebrities), furnishing them all with a safe-space to publicly protest anti-Blackness, becoming a homeplace of resistance. 1 Table of Contents • Chapter 1: Introduction 1 • Chapter 2: Trumpian America 11 • Chapter 3: Multiple Modalities of Silence 27 • Chapter 4: Black Twitter and the Breaking of Silence 43 • Chapter 5: The Heritage of the Dissidents: Black Athletic Activism 68 • Chapter 6: Conclusion (Black Twitter as Homeplace for Resistance) 81 • Bibliography 85 i Chapter 1: Introduction On August 9, 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr. was fatally shot by a white police officer, 28-year-old Darren Wilson, in the city of Ferguson, Missouri. Sadly, the death of Brown was nothing new to the Black community. Black people in the America have been dealing with law enforced forms of terrorism since Slave Patrols (Hadden). Michael Brown became yet another tragic example illustrating the growing concern around the deaths of Black men, women, and children by those paid to protect and serve1 the communities that they patrol and police. Social media, and specifically Twitter, however, pushed police brutality into a new realm of surveillance and the death of Mike Brown signaled its power as a transformative medium. It was 4:06 am pacific standard time and Ferguson, Missouri would not allow me to rest. I could not take my eyes off of the around-the-clock coverage of what could have been seen as a race riot in a presumed post-racial America. My focus alternated between technological devices of conveniences that have become necessities for most Americans. One minute my attention was on the television, the next it was on my smart phone. My intake of information was fluid, as my concentration on all things Ferguson shifted between the punditry of correspondents on traditional media networks such as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, and timelines of the millions of voices on the social media network, Twitter. The flow of information and opinions surrounding Michael Brown’s death was paralyzing. The real-time news reporting and footage, jostling with the second-by-second updating of Twitter timelines, both gripped my attention, and informed my opinion on Ferguson Missouri, a location that had been violently forced into the historical annals of race, class, gender, power dynamics and policing in the United States. As I was observed Ferguson, I conjointly participated in the construction of the narrative that surrounded the city, a place that I had never visited, regarding an unarmed teenage Black male that I had never met. Undoubting, #Ferguson was the first mass protest/rebellion/riot/occupation/movement/uprising (depending on who you talk to) in America surrounding issues tethered to the deadly policing of Black bodies in the era of social networking and smart phone technology. There is no quantifiable reason available to fully understand why Mike Brown was the critical moment and not the death of Oscar Grant in 2009 or Trayvon Martin in 2012. While the #BlackLivesMatter2 hashtag was created in July 2013, post the death 1 In February 1955, the Los Angeles Police Department, through the pages of the internally produced BEAT magazine, conducted a contest for a motto for the police academy. The conditions of the contest stated that: "The motto should be one that in a few words would express some or all the ideals to which the Los Angeles police service is dedicated. It is possible that the winning motto might someday be adopted as the official motto of the Department." The winning entry was the motto, "To Protect and to Serve" submitted by Officer Joseph S. Dorobek. (BEAT magazine, December 1963) 2 According to Beyond the Hashtags, a 2016 study that examined 40 million tweets related to Ferguson and Black Lives Matter, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter gained considerable prominence on Nov. 24, the day a grand jury declined to charge Officer Darren Wilson in Brown’s death. Before that date, #BlackLivesMatter had appeared in 2,309 tweets. Its tweet total 1 of Martin, it was rarely used through the summer of 2014 and did not come to signify a movement until the months after the Ferguson protests and the death of Mike Brown (Freelon et al. 5). Mike Brown’s death, and the protest that ensued in #Ferguson, was the tipping point3, and began what I call the Black Twitter Turn. Black Twitter, and its critical pivot away from alleged quotidian Black life, has proven to be a major development in the visibility, sustainability, and viralability of Black forms of sociopolitical protest. The Black Twitter Turn can be viewed as an awakening, a turn away from the utilization of Twitter as a platform that viralized the likes of Amber Cole, and the condition and style of gymnast Gabby Douglass’ hair during the 2012 Summer Olympics.4 Both Cole and the mean-spirited descriptions of Douglass’s hair had been common place cultural currency prior to #Ferguson. In fact, Black users of Twitter, and other social media platforms, were largely invested in capturing and catapulting odd happenings and problematic behavior that fed into archetypal anti-Black stigmas, stereotypes, stock characters, and unflattering portrayals which propelled this social media platform into an unrespectable site for some people invested in traditional notions of uplifting the Black race. A prime example of this was the phenomenon known as Lil Terio. In 2013, Lil Terio (born Terio Harshaw), a six-year-old first grader from Georgia became an Internet sensation. His popularity spawned from a Vine (a six-second video clip). In the clip Terio scored a basket on his cousin Maleek’s basketball goal and, feeling jubilance in the moment, began a celebratory dance. “Oooh,” cooed Maleek, recording his little cousin’s wrist- swooping dance routine on a camera phone. “Kill ’em!” Six seconds later, the video ended, and rocketed to 103,319 that day, the study found. Tweets and retweets pushed #BlackLivesMatter in front of a diverse audience in the months after Ferguson. 3 The term “tipping point‟ in its most basic meaning refers to a critical point when unprecedented changes occur rapidly with irreversible effect. It entered the academic lexicon when it was used by the political scientist Morton Grodzins in 1957 in his sociological studies on racial segregation to describe the critical threshold at which point the white population would leave an area where more and more black people were present. 4 In 2011, Amber Cole, a then a 14-year-old Black girl was caught on video performing oral sex on another student at Frederick Douglass Highschool in Baltimore, Maryland. As TheGrio.com reported, “It’s not clear whether the girl knew she was being videotaped, but judging from tweets after the video went viral, it’s almost certain she didn’t consent to having the footage posted online.” The unedited video of two minors engaged in a sexual act was at one point was the top trending topic on Twitter. The 14-year-old Cole’s Twitter page was bombarded with taunts, scolding and ridicule, with a large portion of the scorn, taunts, and rating of her skills at performing fellatio were coming from the Twitter accounts of adults. In 2012, at the age of 16-years-old, Gabby Douglas made history by becoming the first American gymnast to win gold medals in both the team and individual all-around competitions, and the first Black gymnast to win Olympic gold in the all-around. Unfortunately, post winning her second gold second medal, Douglass discovered that negative attention was being focused on her hair, which was described as nappy, messy and unkempt. A few days later, as the state of Gabby’s hair continued to be a trending topic on Twitter, Douglas’s mother said that these constant criticisms were impacting her daughter’s confidence. 2 Maleek uploaded it to Vine. Terio's 16-year-old cousin had no idea that the clip would blow up into a social media phenomenon. The viralability of Terio’s six-second-dance routine became so in vogue that it caught the attention of high profile celebrity athletes. This lead to the birth of the "’Oooh, Kill 'em’ Movement” (Carson pars. 3-4), a sensation that lead to professional athletes mimicking the moves of this six-year-old as a personal expression of both their childlike euphoria as they accomplished a goal while on the field of play, and conjointly, their connection to what was trending within non-mass media generated spaces such as Black Twitter.