DOIN’ IT FOR THE CULTURE: DEFINING BLACKNESS, CULTURE, AND IDENTITY ON BLACK TWITTER

Abstract

This dissertation broadly explores the intersections and tensions among race, social media usage, identity, and culture. More specifically, its purpose is to examine how Black Twitter users interact on Twitter through the portals of three trending hashtags from 2015: #BlackExperience, #ThanksgivingWithBlackFamilies, and #AskRachel. The hashtags #BlackExperience and #ThanksgivingWithBlackFamilies sparked conversations about the lived racial experience of Black people, racism, food, culture, Black pride and Black family holiday traditions. The hashtag #AskRachel started a robust conversation about what constitutes Blackness and Black culture in response to the Rachel Dolezal story. The interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks and relevant literature guided the methodological approaches and interpretation of the tweets analyzed using textual analysis and the focus group interview responses conducted with 11 Black undergraduate and graduate students at a midwestern PWI. This dissertation’s findings extend previous research on Black Twitter that argues hashtags and signifyin’ are gatekeeping strategies to protect Black cultural identity. Additionally, this dissertation reveals Black Twitter plays an imperative role in cultivating narratives about Black identity and culture for a subset of Black people on social media and that participation in conversations about Black culture and Black identity works to produce a validation of Black racial authenticity for its users. ix This dissertation is situated within the current environment of citizens using social media to foster civic and political engagement, dialogue, and debate over controversies and issues that matter to them. Thus, the implications of this dissertation suggest Black Twitter plays a critical role in creating a space for racial formation, identity construction, community building, cultural awareness and resistance, and racial dialogue. Even more so, the need and desire for Black spaces in the digital era surpasses earlier models of geographically-rooted local communities and is now being funneled through a range of social media to enable community formation across state and even national borders. The contributions of this dissertation could be situated within research on social media and race, Black Twitter, Black feminist thought and racial formation.