Are You a Black Man?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

A recent image of 35 black men walking in suits. Look like a downtown atlanta an 90 degree heat right? And they were supposedly showing how black men can be distinguished, but what they ended up doing was getting clowned because 'half them suits don't fit you' The idea of modernity is a particularly american one, but for black people it becomes a cursoral, modern American one. What twitter has done, specifically, but other social media as well, has allowed us to talk back to those people rite and tell them that, hey, you know, you got ousik is, preacher so and so, wy. You should not be sitting up there talk

Paris Marx is joined by André Brock to discuss the history of Black people’s online activity, the internet’s association with whiteness, and what Black Twitter can tell us about the centrality of Black people to digital culture.

André Brock is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. He writes on Western technoculture, Black technoculture, and digital media. His award-winning book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, theorizes Black everyday lives mediated by networked digital technologies. You can get if from NYU Press, and it’s available through open access. Follow André on Twitter at @DocDre.

🚨 T-shirts are now available!

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald did portraits of the Obamas, while Kara Walker made “A Subtlety” at the Domino Sugar Refinery.
Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian philosopher and social theorist.
Janelle Monáe, Sun Ra, and John Jennings are notable people engaging with Afrofuturism.
Books mentioned: Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter by Charlton D. McIlwain and Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich.

Support the show