Do you feel like studio executives or other showrunners are looking at Black Twitter for threads to turn into movies or shows? Do they also have Black Twitter in mind when creating and greenlighting shows?
I’ve never had those conversations with my showrunner friends, especially Black ones. I think trying to guess what Black Twitter will like or respond to is a fool’s errand, and you will be clowned immediately if you’re like, “They’re going to mess with…”
My philosophy is just do whatever you want to do and you’ll figure out how they respond to it. You know what I mean? I’ve never had conversations, like, “This viral thread will be a hit.” By the time it gets to showrunners or people like that, it’s already a thing that social media is talking about. Now we’re just figuring out how to creatively turn this into something else. Is it a limited series? Is it a ongoing series? Is it a movie?
Do you have an all-time favorite Black Twitter moment?
Zola is one of my favorite moments. It was like we were having a real watch party about a real person, which is what we had done for shows like Scandal. I just remember refreshing it. I’ve been writing a long time and I could never write a twist like that. It was just like, “This is crazy.” We got to participate in this as a culture. Then to watch what it became, I was just like, “Only Black culture or Black Twitter could do something like this.”
The Alabama brawl was one of my favorite recent ones. Also when the Queen died, Black Twitter had zero chill. Black Twitter was teaming up with Irish Twitter, diaspora Twitter, and diaspora Black Twitter. But even seeing the way Black Twitter participated on the platform during the pandemic on Verzuz. They were commenting on Teddy Riley’s audio not working and just the jokes and the bits. I remember the Xscape/SWV one being like, “Xscape up here sounding a little rusty.”
I don’t know how to equate a space where Black people get to do that. The closest thing is Essence Fest, where we’re all together for the same thing. There’s no issues. We’re just together celebrating our culture.
What do you foresee as the future of Black digital spaces if Twitter were to crumble? Do you see people trying to replicate the spirit of Black Twitter somewhere else?
I don’t think you can replicate it because so many things were converging factors. The economy converging with the rise of Obama and our naivete about social media at the time. We were starting to consume so much social media. Now we’re like, “Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. A lot of social media’s not that good.”
I don’t think you could ever replicate it. It’s like, I don’t know, how do you replicate Martin Luther King meeting Rosa Parks? Those things just hit at the right time, at the right moment. I don’t think it’s TikTok. I think things are happening there, but I don’t think it’s going to be like that. Black people are always good at finding community.
When I see my kids, they just have a Black Twitter energy even though they’ve never been on Black Twitter because they’ve just grown up in a world where Black Twitter just exists. They’re hearing things like “Black Lives Matter,” hearing about “Black girl magic” and “Black boy joy.” Whereas I didn’t see that growing up. I grew up a child of the ’80s. Assimilation was the thing. This generation is not about that.
What would you define as a Black Twitter energy?
I would define a Black Twitter energy as anything that is unapologetically Black. I’m going to wear my hair natural if I want to and if a Karen is talking crazy to me, I’m going to call that out. You know what I mean? Where it’s like, “I’m not just taking it, swallowing it. I’m just moving how I’m moving. You can choose to deal with that or not, but that’s more going to be a you issue, not a me issue.” To me, it’s just being unapologetically our culture without worrying about anything else behind it.
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