This Week in Blackness,the George Zimmerman acquittal,and the production of a networked collective identity

The contemporary US racial landscape

Critical race theorists (Bobo et al., 1997; Bonilla-Silva, 2010; Kinder and Sears, 1981) have argued that after the Reagan-era conservative-led backlash to the social justice gains of the 1960s and 1970s, the United States saw the rise of a “new” more subtle, but no less destructive form of racism. The ascendance of neoliberalism and the integration of free market logics into broader cultural paradigms—particularly the prioritization of individual freedom and autonomy—have been key to this transformation. The resultant shift has displaced issues of race and racism from public and into private arenas of life, as “colorblindness” has become the dominant racial paradigm. This forecloses space for addressing ongoing structural inequalities and undermines assertions of a collective Black experience or identity, particularly one based on a shared social status of marginalization.

Individualism has been central to the reimagining of race in the post–Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Civil Rights Movement language and discourses—such as Martin Luther King Jr’s admonition that people should be judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”—have been rearticulated by conservative forces as mantras of neoliberal individualism. Imbricated with a prioritization of the individual, the egalitarianism advocated by King has been transformed into a means of sustaining white privilege and power in seemingly race-neutral ways (Bonilla-Silva, 2010: 26–28; Delgado and Stefancic, 2001: 23–24). Policies meant to ameliorate racial inequalities can now be opposed because they are “group based” rather than “case by case” (Delgado and Stefancic, 2001: 35–36), and racism and discrimination have become “problems to be confronted only at an individual level” (Omi and Winant, 1986: 129; emphasis original). Refracted through the lens of neoliberalism, race has effectively become “privatized,” shifted from the public to the private realm of social life. Racial identity has been divorced from politics, histories of oppression, or economic opportunities and transformed into merely an individual characteristic (Gallagher, 2003). No longer a basis for political action or collective identity, racial difference has become “emptied out and resignified as culture commodities indicating mere ‘lifestyles’” (Gray, 2005: 142–144).

The neoliberal rearticulation of race as solely a personal characteristic or taste culture has become the foundation for the discourse of “colorblindness,” which sociologists (Carr, 1997; Gallagher, 2003) have found to be the dominant racial logic among white Americans since the 1990s. While it is still possible to acknowledge race in a superficial way, using race to assert collective identity or to articulate group demands “violates the cherished notion that as a nation we recognize the rights of individuals rather than group rights” (Gallagher, 2003). Thus, the obscuration of difference has become conflated with the realization of racial equality, positioning any who assert race as an important social or cultural category as the true proponents of injustice. The language of colorblindness and its denial of contemporary racism have come to saturate US political culture, and these discourses have become even more recalcitrant with the election of President Barack Obama, who was often praised for his ability to “transcend” race. Many saw Obama’s election as proof that King’s dream had come to fruition, declaring the United States had entered a “post-racial” era. However, the death of Trayvon Martin brought the ongoing racial tensions of US culture to the surface.

On 26 February 2012, Martin, an unarmed Black 16-year-old, was shot and killed while returning to his father’s house from a nearby convenience store. George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watchman armed with a 9-mm handgun, saw Martin and believed his presence in the neighborhood to be suspicious. After phoning local police, Zimmerman followed Martin, despite being instructed not to do so by the dispatch operator. By the time police arrived on the scene, Martin lay dead from a gunshot wound to the chest. Zimmerman claimed self-defense, saying that he had been attacked and feared for his life. The police accepted his account, and Zimmerman was not arrested or charged. In the weeks that followed, public outcry mounted as many Americans doubted the veracity of Zimmerman’s account. By early March 2012, there was a national campaign to bring charges against Zimmerman, and on 11 April 2012 he was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. The subsequent trial and acquittal laid bare the deep racial divides in the United States. Polling from the time that showed 78% of Black Americans thought the case raised important questions about race and 86% were dissatisfied with the verdict, compared to only 28% of White Americans who saw racial implications in the case and 30% who were dissatisfied with the verdict (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2013). The Zimmerman acquittal demonstrated that, despite prevalence of “colorblind” discourses, the lived experience and perspectives of Americans still differ dramatically along racial lines.

Individualism and digitally networked sociality

While digital media are often praised as potential spaces for resistance and counter-discourse production, these possibilities are somewhat tempered by the fact that the individualism at the heart of neoliberal racial discourse has also shaped the fundamental organizing logics of digital media. Lisa Nakamura (2008: 2–3) points out that the Internet became mainstream in the 1990s, concurrent with the solidification of neoliberalism as the dominant discourse. Thus, it is not surprising that scholars have recently pointed to the individual as the constitutive element of the predominant forms of digital sociality.

Scholars like Rainie and Wellman (2012) have argued that digital, social, and mobile media have facilitated and accelerated a shift away from clearly bounded groups or communities to loose and shifting networks of individuals, a phenomenon they have termed “networked individualism.” Instead of the group being the center of social life, the autonomous individual is at the center as she reaches across geographical and temporal distances to form complex networks with others who have similar interests or beliefs. When it comes to politics and activism, Bennett and Sergerberg (2012) have noted a similar move away from collective logics—with their reliance on collective identities—to “connective” logics that are based on “personalized content sharing across media networks.” This research highlights the ways neoliberalism—with its prioritization of the individual—is inscribed into the very structure of our digital media interactions. Networked individualism and its attendant connective logics can be thought of as the techno-social manifestation of what Nick Couldry (2010: 11–12) has called “neoliberal rationality,” in which “Agents whose needs and interests once seemed necessarily linked become visible only as individuals, linked, if at all, by diverse networks.”

Because the prioritization of individual freedom and autonomy has been central to the transformation of US racial logics and the ascendancy of colorblindness, networked individualism is not an uncomplicated terrain for Black users. Within the paradigm of both networked individualism and contemporary racial discourses, race can potentially be reduced to a personal characteristic around which an individual user might shape her network. Black users could create predominantly Black networks or even networks that explicitly center on issues of race or “Blackness,” but without that necessarily reflecting or reifying race as a salient social category. “Blackness” instead would function more akin to a taste culture than a socio-cultural group, no more tied to social hierarchies of power than fandoms or hobbies that serve to anchor other networks.

However, digital networks are discursive formations as much as they are technological ones. In his theorization of power and counter-power in the networked society, Castells (2007) argues that networks are “programmed,” that is imbued with certain goals, values, and normative practices. This programming, he argues, is generated from “ideas, visions, projects, and frames” shared by members of the network. Although it exists within the technological structures that promote networked individualism as the primary social operating system, TWiB! has instead programmed its digital and social media spaces with cultural logics and communicative practices derived from longstanding Black counter-public traditions. Viewed through a lens that attends to cultural specificity, TWiB! can be seen as a network programmed to constitute a shared, albeit fluid and heterogeneous, Black collective identity.

TWiB!

Since its inception in 2008, TWiB! has grown into a large multi-media platform. White created the franchise in a deliberate effort to produce media that provide diverse representations of Blackness and offer nuanced cultural criticism and political critique that privilege Black perspectives. Run until 2013 out of White’s Brooklyn apartment, TWiB! now produces, in addition to the original video series, seven podcasts covering a range of topics including politics, popular culture, sex positivity, and sports, as well as thisweekinblackness.com that offers written news and opinion pieces. TWiB! also offers an increasing range of video content, including an eight episode television series, A Black Show, for Free Speech TV. Podcasts are the cornerstone of the TWiB! Franchise, and TWiB! Prime, which covers news and current events, is their flagship show. Through these media, TWiB! has provided extensive reporting and commentary around political issues, including on-site coverage of events across the country such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) Leadership 500 Conference, the Black Congressional Caucus Conference, and the 2012 Democratic National Convention. TWiB! has attracted a range of high profile guests including Jesse Jackson, Melissa Harris-Perry, Ben Jealous, Lizz Winstead, Tim Wise, and Michael Eric Dyson.

From its name to its content, TWiB! foregrounds “Blackness” and rejects colorblindness. TWiB!’s work is characterized by an ongoing negotiation of the tension between collective and individual conceptualizations of racial identity. TWiB! seeks to assert “Blackness” as a salient social and cultural category grounded in a shared socio-historic position, while striving not to fix or homogenize “Blackness.” White, who oversees all of TWiB!’s projects, is quite clear that the simultaneous foregrounding and disruption of “Blackness” have always been central to his vision. Clearly stating the fundamental incompatibility of colorblindness with TWiB!’s mission while emphasizing the diversity of Black people, White explains,

… I made a very conscious decision. When I created This Week in Blackness … I wanted it to be clear that you can come from and embrace a position of “Blackness” and racial identity, self-identification, and yet still all these [different] things are still things that are of interest to you and in your background. Thereby shattering the stereotypes around what is “Black.” (TWiB!, 2013a)

A full analysis of the negotiation between Black commonality and Black heterogeneity in TWiB!’s work is beyond the scope of this article. However, it is important to highlight the ongoing and contingent nature of TWiB!’s representation of “Blackness” even as they assert Black commonality.

TWiB! exploits digital media’s affordances to function as “a network” in the dual sense of the term—as a digital “broadcast” network distributing content and as a digital network of people and technologies. The resultant multi-media, trans-platform digital space blends longstanding practices of Black independent media production with the kinds of social spaces that Black Americans have long used to construct shared beliefs and worldviews.

TWiB!: broadcast network and digital social network

TWiB! functions as a “network” in the dual sense of the word—as both a broadcast network and a digital social network. This configuration brings together public and private traditions of Black counter-public and counter-discourse production in ways that reflect the blurring of the public and private that has come to characterize digital media networks (Marwick and boyd, 2010). In both capacities, TWiB! serves as a digitally enabled iteration of long established practices of counter-public formation through the use of Black independent media and in everyday Black social spaces.

First, TWiB! can be thought of as a broadcast-style independent media network producing content for distribution and circulation. Conceptualized this way, TWiB! can be located within the long and rich history of Black independent and community media, particularly newspaper and radio. Beginning in the 1820s, Black newspapers created and circulated oppositional frameworks, rearticulated Black identity, and spread information (Squires, 2000: 78). With the advent of radio in the early 20th century, Black media producers took these practices to the airwaves. Since the Civil Rights Movement, Black radio has been an important site for political dialogue and debate (Barlow, 1999: 296). Catherine Squires (2000: 78–82), in her study of Chicago’s Black talk radio station WVON-AM, finds that the station is continuing the legacy of the Black press via radio by providing a Black counter-public. She argues that WVON seeks not only to address “Black” issues but all issues while privileging and centering Black perspectives and interpretive frameworks.

TWiB!’s primary content is podcasts, a predominantly audio digital medium (although video is increasingly common) that is characterized by portability and seriality and employs many of the same conventions as radio. Indeed, podcasts operate using the one-to-many logic of broadcasting (Sterne et al., 2008), and podcasters often employ the language of broadcasting—referring to “broadcasts” or going “on air”—as do platforms that provide access to content—such as TuneIn Radio or Blog Talk Radio. The similarities are perhaps most evidenced by the fact that the most popular podcasts are downloadable episodes of radio shows such as This American Life and Radio Lab.

Podcasts’ similarity with radio contributes to TWiB!’s ability to cultivate a sense of collective identity. Many radio scholars (Breiner, 2003; Douglas, 2004; Loviglio, 2002) have pointed to radio’s ability to constitute listeners as an imagined community. Susan Douglas (2004: 24), building on Benedict Anderson’s work, argues that radio has cognitive dimensions that “make radio’s role in constructing imagined communities … much more powerful than what print can do.” She points to the intimacy of radio, arguing, “listening often imparts a sense of emotion stronger than that imparted by looking” because, “While sight allows us some distance … sound envelops us, pouring into us whether we want it to or not, including us, involving us” (Douglas, 2004: 30). The similarity between podcasts and radio imbues TWiB!’s podcasts with some of these same possibilities for building a sense of collectivity and connection.

Furthermore, TWiB!’s podcasts are in the style of talk radio and involve heavy audience participation, enhancing their ability to constitute a sense of community. In the early days of US radio, the inclusion of audience participation–based programming brought the voices of the “average” American to the airwaves, not only constituting an imagined community of listeners but also providing a series of performances that demonstrated “who ‘the American people’ were, what they sounded like, and what they believed in” (Loviglio, 2002: 91). It is not uncommon for White to open phone lines during live shows, taking listener calls. But, far from representing a series of individuals who “happen to be Black,” TWiB! callers largely reject colorblindness and its emphasis on the individual, instead constructing themselves as members of social group whose lives are shaped by the experience of structural racism.

TWiB!’s use of the talk-show format includes audience members not only as performances of “who Black Americans are” but also as co-creators of those representations. Squires (2000) argues that the talk-show format “allows the audience to participate in constructing social texts and assigning meanings” and therefore is “an opportunity for a dynamic process of joint creation of texts and reciprocal information sharing between audience, guests, and … staff” (pp. 77–78). Thus, radio not only constructs a sense of community and provides performances of who the members of that community are, the talk radio format also allows audience participation in this process, making these performances to some degree the result of collective meaning-making.

Operating as a digital network, TWiB! possesses a level of interactivity and geographical reach unavailable to previous generations of Black media producers. During TWiB!’s live broadcasts, the chatroom that accompanies the livestream on TWiB!’s website provides a space for listeners to give commentary and to interact in real time, and hosts often interject comments from the chatroom into on-air discussions. The chatroom is of such importance that TWiB! sells t-shirts listing the chatroom alongside the names of the three hosts of TWiB! Prime—“Elon & Imani & Aaron & the Chatroom”—effectively giving it the status of co-host.

In addition to functioning as a broadcast network, TWiB! is also a network of people and technologies. The line between TWiB! the broadcast network and TWiB! the social media network is blurry at best. TWiB! has a strong presence on several social media platforms, but particularly on Twitter, where there are accounts for TWiB! the organization, for each of its shows and for each of the hosts. Much like the chatroom, these social media channels function as interlocutors in the conversations happening during the live broadcasts. Comments made on Twitter using TWiB!’s official hashtag #TWiBnation are often interjected into the shows. Additionally, social network interactions often become topics for discussion on the podcast, and vice versa.

The social media networks that serve as channels for listener feedback and participation have developed into networks where TWiB! hosts, staff, and listeners engage daily in interactions not directly tethered to the podcasts. Thus, they can be understood as digital versions of the kinds of everyday social interactions that Melissa Harris-Lacewell (now Harris-Perry) (2006) has argued are “spaces where African Americans jointly develop understandings of their collective interests and create strategies to navigate the complex political world” (p. 1). Harris-Lacewell demonstrates how important ideological work, such as the construction of worldviews and collective identity, happens in everyday talk and interactions occurring in Black social spaces (Harris-Lacewell, 2006: 78). Similar dynamics play out in TWiB!’s social media networks, as TWiB! hosts and listeners engage in everyday talk via social media channels.

The dual nature of TWiB!, as both broadcast-style network and digital social network, inflects TWiB! with the characteristics of not one, but two, longstanding practices of Black counter-public formation. By blending together two different traditions for creating Black collective spaces, TWiB! functions as a digital extension of spaces where Black community and collectivity have long been forged. This effectively programs TWiB!’s digital network using the communicative norms, values, and discourses of Black media and Black social spaces that predate the neoliberal racial discourses of colorblindness that emphasize individualism. Consequently, TWiB! creates a powerful matrix in which to negotiate discourses and representations of “Blackness,” making TWiB! invaluable in the wake of the George Zimmerman acquittal.

Digital affordances and collectivity

At almost 1:00 a.m. EST on Sunday 14 July 2014, just hours after the Saturday night announcement of Zimmerman’s acquittal, White and Mitchell went livestreaming online with an unscheduled broadcast of TWiB! Prime. The show was announced via White’s personal Twitter account to his roughly 20,000 followers as well via his Facebook and Google+ profiles. At approximately 11:30 p.m. EST, using these social media accounts, White announced TWiB! would soon go live with a call-in show. Shortly after midnight, he tweeted that TWiB! was now live and gave the number to the phone line as well as the link to TWiB!’s website where people could listen and participate in the chatroom. Within 30 minutes, as heavy traffic repeatedly crashed TWiB!’s website, White tweeted directing the audience to listen through popular podcast mobile apps, TuneIn and Stitcher Radio.

TWiB!’s livestream the night of the verdict provided the kind of synchronous listening experience that has traditionally made radio a powerful medium for the constitution of imagined communities. Like radio, the podcast provided the experience of “liveness,” the sense of being part of a group listening simultaneously in real time, that can create a powerful sense of connection (Breiner, 2003; Douglas, 2004). Furthermore, TWiB!’s use of the call-in format allowed the audience to participate in meaning-making processes around the acquittal. Although it is not uncommon for TWiB! to take phone calls for portions of shows, they rarely use the call-in format for an entire broadcast as they did the night of the verdict. The decision to take back-to-back phone calls allowed the 21 listeners who called in to actively contribute to shaping the discourse around this event, making the broadcast a collective effort. The callers’ inclusion not only constituted a series of performances of who the members of the TWiB! community are but also served as performances of Black collective identity by providing representations of Black Americans from diverse backgrounds all expressing similar experiences of marginalization.

TWiB!’s response to the Zimmerman acquittal closely mirrored Black radio’s well-documented function of informing and unifying Black communities in times of turmoil (Johnson, 2004: 355). Black DJs were key political and community actors during the tumultuous years of the 1960s and 1970s. In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, Black DJs across the country suspended their regularly scheduled broadcasts and “gathered people around the microphone to ponder and probe the unfolding American tragedy with the listeners” (Barlow, 1999: 214). In 1992, in the chaos that followed the acquittal of two Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers in the beating of Rodney King, ¹ Los Angeles’ (LA) Black-owned and operated radio station KJLH responded with an unscheduled broadcast of its news and current events program Front Page. Front Page went on air and broadcast non-stop for days, taking phone calls from listeners and providing the community with a forum to discuss events and with vital information as the civil unrest unfolded in the city (Johnson, 2004).

The night of the Zimmerman verdict, those listening to the live podcast through TWiB!’s website could also take advantage of the built-in chatroom. Throughout the show, White and Mitchell interjected comments from the chatroom into the discussion, allowing those who could not, or did not wish to, call in to still be part of the conversation. Beyond this, the chatroom allowed the listeners to interact not just with the show but with each other. Listeners talked among themselves, using the digital space to house the kind of social interactions that have long used as arenas where Black Americans “jointly develop the understandings of their collective political interests” (Harris-Lacewell, 2006). The chatroom simulated the way a group of people might have listened to KJLH during the unrest of 1992, gathered around, commenting and discussing among themselves.

Similarly, Twitter provided an additional channel for synchronous participation, allowing listeners to interact with the show and with each other. For listeners using Twitter, TWiB!’s long-time hashtag #TWiBnation and White’s personal Twitter account served as focal points of these interactions. The addressivity enabled by the @-reply feature of Twitter and conversational coherence created via the use of hashtags (Brock, 2012: 531–538) allowed TWiB! listeners on Twitter to converse about events and comment on the show.

In addition to the role of technological affordances in the construction of collective identity, the TWiB! network, in both senses of the term, engaged in discourse production around the nature of TWiB! and the realities of race. Hosts and listeners participated in collective meaning-making processes that defined the collective character of both TWiB! and racial identity. Such discursive work is representative of how the TWiB! network is programmed in opposition to contemporary neoliberal racial discourses.

Discursive construction of the TWiB! network and racial identity

The norms and values with which TWiB’s network is programmed were evident in the wake of the Zimmerman acquittal, and the resultant discursive space allowed both hosts and listeners to engage in collective meaning-making around the nature of both TWiB! and contemporary Black identity. The comments of TWiB! hosts and listeners revealed a clear conceptualization of TWiB! as a space of community, rather than a network of individuals. Early in the broadcast, White explained to listeners his rationale for going live that night, saying, “… we need to talk about it. Because I was just sitting there angry and I didn’t know what to do either. But we figured we’d allow for an outlet for people to kind of weigh in” (TWiB!, 2013b). Mitchell spoke to the sense of collective experience, saying that she hoped that listening to the show lets “people know they aren’t alone.” Speaking just days after the George Zimmerman acquittal, White explained to me that he feels that TWiB! has “an obligation to be there” for the community (White, 2013, personal communication). TWiB!’s response—10 days of unscheduled coverage of the event—was a clear manifestation of that sense of responsibility.

TWiB!’s listeners also indicated a shared vision of TWiB!’s function as space for community. As one caller that night, Vince from Charlotte, put it, “I think we are just looking for someplace to go. For someplace, for somebody else to feel the same way that I’m feeling right now. … just to understand that I’m not alone in this” (TWiB!, 2013b). Callers repeatedly expressed gratitude to TWiB! for livestreaming that night, and many listeners echoed these sentiments on Twitter. Long-time listener @AwakeBlackWoman tweeted during the broadcast that it was “Truly lifesaving to have #TWiBNation on the air, taking calls: Here For Us” (12:53 a.m. EST, 14 July 2013). Another long-time listener and TWiB! science contributor, @CoquiNegra tweeted to the hosts of TWiB! Prime the following day that TWiB! was “… the resource our community needed right now. Thank you” (2:19 p.m. EST, 14 July 2013).

Additionally, TWiB! hosts, callers, chatroom participants, and Twitter users, with few exceptions, interpreted Zimmerman’s acquittal through the lens of a Black collective identity. Many that night spoke of Black Americans’ shared status as marginalized or second-class citizens, which they tied to the history of Black oppression in the United States. Expressing the feeling that Black lives were simply not valued, hosts and listeners articulated the shared experience of living in as racialized subjects in the United States in the era of supposed colorblindness.

Many TWiB! participants, both on air and on social media, spoke of the verdict as undermining discourses that assert structural racism in the United States is a thing of the past. In particular, they pointed to the starkness with which racial divides in the country were reasserted. White articulated this sentiment on TWiB! Prime that night, saying,

… there is an extra amount of, I guess, bitterness that comes with this, because at the moment we are being served up that America is this meritocracy, racism is over, and all you have to do is pull yourself up and you’ll be fine. And we’re learning, day by day, night by night, that this is consistently not true. (TWiB!, 2013b)

Throughout the show, there was explicit discussion of the sense of isolation many listeners felt, seeing many of their fellow, primarily white, Americans untouched by this event. White asked (TWiB!, 2013b), “The question is who is feeling the pain? This feels like a dark night in America for us. There are tons of people who are paying no mind to this.” He continued, “There are two different countries under one umbrella here. And sometimes when you see stuff like this. It highlights it. You clearly see the two different spaces we live in.”

Within this discourse of Black marginalization was a palpable fear of what the verdict means for Black American children. Ten of the 21 callers that night framed the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his killer as indicative of the uncertain future and struggle Black children face. To many Martin became an avatar for Black youth in the United States, symbolizing an institutionalized devaluation of their lives. For example, callers, like the mother quoted in the introduction, expressed despair at watching their children grapple with the verdict. Listeners who called in articulated their fear and anger that their children are not allowed to be innocent and must instead deal with racism at an early age. B Cole from Minneapolis said of his son,

He is going to be 8 in November and he’s already asked me questions of, you know, “Why can’t I do this?” or “Why do white people look at me this way?” … It’s really sad, because my child has to live in a reality that he shouldn’t have to know right now. (TWiB!, 2013b)

Another caller, Sunny from Birmingham, AL (TWiB!, 2013b), encapsulated this experience, “My son asked me, ‘Mom, why don’t I matter?’” Similarly, a TWiB! listener on Twitter, under the username @lilsoulsista, tweeted using the TWiB! official hashtag #TWiBNation, “I’m having a baby girl in two weeks … & I’ve gone from elated to terrified” (2:26 a.m. EST, 14 July 2013).

The sense of alienation and the potential danger faced by Black children were contextualized within the history of Black oppression. Within an hour of the verdict being announced, both “Rodney King” and “Emmett Till” ² appeared as US trending topics on Twitter as many users attempted to position what they saw as profound injustice in a history of such trauma. Images of Till side by side with Martin circulated on Twitter the weekend of the verdict. On TWiB! Prime, Music Notes, a long-time listener who has been active in the social networks surrounding TWiB!, called from Seoul, South Korea. She spoke of a legal case from the 19th century in which a white man shot and killed a slave walking past his house. “In the 1840s, he was found guilty of use of unnecessary force and was forced to pay the slave’s family,” she explained, then adding, “Zimmerman isn’t even convicted.” To which co-host Mitchell added, “We were valuable when we were laboring property” (TWiB!, 2013b).

This historical contextualization of Martin’s death, particularly by invoking Rodney King and Emmett Till, worked to further the sense of collective identity. Stuart Hall (2003: 240–245) explicitly theorizes identities as positions or points of identification within historical narratives, making our identities (racial or otherwise) deeply connected to our relationship with the past. It is our memory that enables us to orient ourselves both temporally and within the social structure, thereby forming relationships with/to others and belonging socially (Assmann, 2006; Edy, 2006). Thus, the historicization of the Trayvon Martin tragedy can be seen as an attempt to make sense of Black Americans’ place as an oppressed minority within the United States. In this way, both Twitter and the TWiB! livestream became arenas in which to tie the death of Trayvon Martin to accounts of past collective oppression and resistance, thereby asserting that race is as central to contemporary society as it was in the pre-neoliberal past.

TWiB’s collective meaning-making process unfolded synchronously across TWiB!’s multi-layered digital structure. Perhaps the most striking example of this was an exchange between White and two other listeners who were participating from Korea and Germany. At about 2:20 a.m. EST TWiB! took a call from a listener who identified himself as Jack calling from Seoul, South Korea. From across the globe, Jack reaffirmed the sense of Black collectivity, saying, “No matter where you go in the world, any Black person who sees this case relates to it, relates to, you know, the injustice.” He continued that people often ask him why he does not want to return to the United States and stated pointedly, “This is an example of why I’m not in a hurry to go back home.” Minutes later, another listener, @HaggsBoson on Twitter, tweeted from Germany using the #TWiBNation hashtag, “Re: the caller from Korea. I’m in Germany and feel no desire to go ‘home’, for the same reason” (2:23 a.m. EST, 14 July 2015). Approximately 30 minutes later, White said on the show that he was “scanning the feed,” looking through the hashtag on Twitter. He came across and read the tweet from @HaggsBoson on air, which in turn prompted those in the chatroom to discuss their experiences and feeling regarding international travel and living abroad.

Conclusion

In the post–Civil Rights Movement era, race has become reimagined through the lens of neoliberal individualism and rearticulated as an issue to be addressed primarily in the private arena of social life, as an individual characteristic that carries little weight beyond taste or family heritage. This has foreclosed space for the assertion of a collective Black experience or identity, particularly one based on a shared social status of marginalization. Now, within the discourse of colorblindness, those who assert race as an important axis of social and cultural life are themselves cast as racist through their insistence on “seeing race.”

For Black Americans navigating this social context, alternative media spaces and Black independent media traditions have continued importance. Such media function to undermine the silencing of Black voices and experiences. However, digital media sociality and the architectures of social media networks can reproduce the neoliberal emphasis on the individual that undergirds colorblindness, allowing dominant racial logics to map neatly onto digital networks. This means that the use of digital technologies for the production of Black alternative media is a not an uncomplicated endeavor.

However, networks are discursive formations as much as they are technological formations, arising from a combination of technology and cultural programming. Although functioning within the material networks in which networked individualism has emerged as the predominant “social operating system,” TWiB! programs its networks with logics that reject colorblindness, with its privatization and individualization of race, and reassert a Black collectivity grounded in a shared experience of racialization. TWiB! accomplishes this in two ways. First, TWiB! employs practices of Black independent media production and interpersonal interaction, both of which have long served as a means for the construction of Black collectivity. This positions TWiB! not simply as a digital network of individuals but as a contemporary digital iteration of community-building spaces that predate neoliberal individualism and colorblindness, anchoring TWiB! in cultural logics that understand race as a collective social category. Second, TWiB!’s discourse production constructs TWiB! as an expression of Black collective experiences that are largely erased elsewhere. Thus, the programming of TWiB!’s network contests the prioritization of the individual that is at the center of both colorblindness and networked individualism.