Shayla Lawson Photo: Nicholas Nichols I did. Not hard. More like the way I learned all the steps to the dance break in Sisqó’s “Thong Song,” watching the BET Countdown every day after school for as long as the song charted. I was ready—in case the song ever played in the high school cafeteria—to shuffle toward an imaginary dance floor as soon as I heard That girl so scandalous, like my white JNCOs were full of sand.
Even before it was my job to know Twitter, I studied it like a groupie. I did this the same way I approached black barbecues and house parties I was way too awkward to be at—standing in the back, pantomiming the slick dance moves I saw other people do, waiting to practice them later in the privacy of my own room. I didn’t know all the words to the hit songs but tried to come in real strong at the harmonies.
Maybe I am a little wistful about missing out on Black Twitter’s earliest stages as an agent for communion and change. When I finally joined Twitter it was 2013, and my first poetry book was coming out. I was in an MFA program and the students in my cohort were using the platform to connect with small presses, journalists, editors, agents, and other writers, and I realized I should be doing the same.
It can be hard to tell if you meet me, but I suffer from pretty strong social anxiety. I survive my misgivings about always saying the wrong thing and trying to decode everyone’s micro-expressions by performing. I can exude confidence and charm and humor even when I don’t feel like it, especially with the buffer of a couple of cocktails. During a networking evening at a conference in Washington, DC, I ran into a group of well-known authors, some of them Twitter-famous.
Black Twitter is by no means a monolith. What I’m describing is one of the many ways people use the social platform to communicate. I’d be remiss, for instance, if I did not mention the number of offline political movements that began as hashtags: #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #MuteRKelly, #Dark- SkinRedLip. Black Twitter contains so many conversations of short-form liberation. But the part of Black Twitter that often lives on in infamy is its minstrelsy.
blueifiwasnt I hope we can teach our kids that social media support is fleeting.
blueifiwasnt I don’t care about any of that; It’s about doing what is right and putting it out there.
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