 Okay, folks, we're going to get started. My name is Carrie Anderson. Welcome to the Berkman Klein Tuesday luncheon series. A few brief administrative updates. I just wanted to let you know that this event is recorded for Prostari. We also live webcast. Keep that in mind when you ask questions. I'd like to welcome Jenny Korn, a Berkman Klein fellow working on race and media. This year with us and she was kind enough to introduce us to Catherine Knight Steele. And I'd like to just introduce Jenny. She'll have a brief intro and then we'll get started. Thank you. Hey, y'all. I am so thrilled to be introducing Dr. Catherine Knight Steele. I want to say hi to all the people online, too, because I know y'all are out there. So hello to all y'all. Catherine Knight Steele is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Maryland College Park and the director of the Andrew W. Mellon funded African American Digital Humanities Initiative. As the fat director, Dr. Steele works to foster a new generation of scholars and scholarship at the intersection of African American Studies and Digital Humanities and Digital Studies. She earned her PhD in communication from the University of Illinois Chicago. We have a table full of comm UIC folks over there. I'm including that. Thank you. Her research focuses on race, gender, and media with a specific focus on African American culture and discourse in traditional and new media. She examines representations of marginalized communities in the media and how traditionally marginalized populations resist oppression and utilize online technology to create spaces of community. Dr. Steele has published in new media journals such as Social Media and Society and Television and New Media. And in the edited volumes, Intersectional Internet and the upcoming edited collection, A Network Self, Birth, Life, Death, edited by Zizi Papatarezi. She is currently working on a book manuscript about digital black feminism. I also want to say that Dr. Steele is an amazing person besides her scholarship being super strong. She's also very kind and supportive of all scholars. And she has mentored me. We have published together. And I'm grateful to the Berkman Klein Center for strengthening the relationship with critical scholars and also for focusing on race here at Harvard. Let's hear it for Kat! Thank you. Thank you so much to Jenny for that introduction and for the invitation to be here. I wanted to also thank all those that made it possible for me to be here through their labor, both whether that was here in person today or previously, or through labor that is unseen, that is unasked for, that's unpaid for sometimes, that we often don't acknowledge in spaces like this, but that make it possible for to have lunch here, to have a building for us to work in, to have a center and an organization. So I'm very grateful, particularly to be able to be presenting about black women and black technology in a space like this. And I think it's really important. So I know I have a short window of time, so I'll get started. For years in internet studies and new media research, people of color and specifically African American users were discussed only based on their lack of access to digital technologies. So when I started graduate school digital divide research predominated almost all the scholarly inquiry about the habits and technology used by persons of color. In the late 2000s, those scholars like Andre Brock and Anna Everett argued that black users were operating in largely unknown spaces online and therefore being missed in a lot of the quantitative ways that we were studying those spaces. In 2012, Pew Research confirmed what a lot of us already knew to be true, which was that black and African American use of social media was actually much higher than that of their white counterparts. These users often engage with social media using their smart phones, which you have to go back to 2012 and imagine that that was mind-blowing for some folks, right? This use, though, explained in part why digital divide research that focused on broadband access and computer use often missed their presence. But in the years that followed, communication scholars, scholars of black rhetoric, of discourse, of black social movements, and internet studies have pushed our scholarship to try to understand things like how social movements function online, all the work of Freelon, Nakil Wayne, and Clark, or patterns of oral culture in their migration to online space like Sara Florini's work, or litigations of black publics and counterpublics online like Rachel Kuo's work, or some work that I've done in the past. While this is really important in engaging research, some of it, though, assumes a homogenous online black user group, or unintentionally uses black men as a proxy for blackness writ large. But black women operate in spaces online in digital ways that far surpass the possibilities that were imagined for them. In this talk, I worked through some of the ideas that are guiding my thinking in my forthcoming manuscript about principles, practice, and product of black feminist thought online. Through the close reading of multiple online texts and multiple social media platforms, analysis of both content and form, I argue that the use of online technology by black feminist thinkers has changed the outcome of black feminist writing, but also has changed the technologies themselves. In this talk, I begin by providing an argument for the study of black feminist thought and practice as a humanities endeavor that situates practice in the historical use and mastery of communicative technology by the black community broadly and by black women more specifically. Cultural practices and ingenuity transform their discourse, and it allows black women to think about reformation of technology to meet their needs. Black women's technological capability and utility of online platforms in the crafting of intentional discourses of resistance is predicated on their historically unique position of having to exist in multiple worlds, manipulate multiple technologies, and maximize resources for purposes of survival in a system that is created to keep them from thriving. So phrases like, listen to black women and ask black women have become especially popularized in progressive circles online, particularly following the 2016 election of the 45th president. But black women voted in groups at a much higher number, not in that way. And so there's this notion that we should be listening to black women. Liberal and progressive politicians and writers, though, instead of spending time in figuring out how to maintain what is clearly the core and most reliable voting block of a democratic base, have been enveloped in think pieces over the last years to lamenting the party's inability to reach white working class men. Exposed to the same rhetoric and often living in very similar economic conditions, see Tana Kisi Coates for this idea, black women have been able to see through bots, Russian propaganda, online distribution of fake news, distortions, to do the radical work of making a decision that potentially might not have been their primary or first thought or their first decision, but was effectively the only decision that they were left with to do the greater good or the greater work in a society. But these popularized phrases like, listen to black women, that allow black women for their decision-making capability don't actually do the work of explaining the centuries of wisdom, labor, and ingenuity that have put black women in a position to do the thankless and often long suffering work of saving America from itself. Rather than focusing on why a large portion of the country could be fooled by Russian bots on Twitter, maybe we should be asking black women why they were not. Certainly black women are on Twitter, they're on Facebook, and they're on social media in higher numbers than their counterparts. They're exposed to trolls, they're exposed to hate groups, and fake news stories often in higher rates than others. So what if liberal politicians, progressive writers, and academics ask black women how they made decisions? What if we inquired about social media practices that don't inculcate black women from exposure, but instead provide them a skill set to navigate trolling and to navigate hate speech online? What if we tried to learn how the history of black women's technology use and their long honed skills in intra and intercultural communication better equip them to be purveyors of social media, making decisions for themselves and for society? I mean we have to ask ourselves the question, are black women really magic? The phrase black girl magic became a popular hashtag and rallying cry used to celebrate the everyday ways that black women thrive in spite of the boundaries erected to keep them from doing as such. But the originator of this phrase, Kashan Thompson, pointed out that it was not merely meant to point out exorbitant exemplars of business and celebrity or outside of the ordinary moments of visible success. So while the phrase was used for Oscar wins or Super Bowl halftime shows, black girl magic is also indicative of the ordinary, very everyday magic of just existing as a black woman. It was a way for us to celebrate how black women were doing things that white Western culture was deeply committed to teaching us we were incapable of doing, mothering, being students, cooking healthy meals, working out, organizing for justice. The phrase did often bring visibility to writers and to business women, but it's also reserved for these semi-private moments that are captured online. Students posting pictures of themselves at graduation, a group of women gathering for brunch on a Sunday afternoon. Made it to work on time after getting the kids off to school and having a 30 minute workout, black girl magic. But also winning a grand slam title while eight weeks pregnant, black girl magic. So black girl magic isn't indicative of some supernatural inexplicable power possessed solely by black women. Rather it's the shorthand that we use for centuries of practice that black women have had at doing everything for everyone while maintaining dignity and not sweating out our edges. This book seeks to unpack the magic of black women, particularly in their use of online technology to create possibilities for themselves. By examining the discourse of black feminism as it is understood and discussed online, I hope to yield a path where we can start to talk about how black feminist principles and their practice is actually revolutionary. I make connections to this form of black feminism and the driving force behind its proliferation. I argue its ability to be profitable. Digital black feminist discourse has brought black feminist thought to the masses and therefore created a lot of possibilities. But simultaneously that profitability has also erected some boundaries. However, prior to an explanation or critique of a modern or digital black feminism, we have to first deal with a question that I raised earlier. How is the unique history of black women in the US and diaspora created a skill set unlike their counterparts? Equipping them with the ability to maximize profitability not just in terms of monetary gain, but in terms of justice seeking, survival, and education as well. Gender in the colonies that would become America initially mirrored a lot of what the slave-holing colonists would have experienced in Europe. English slave-holding men expecting their wives to work the field and to participate in domestic labor. The system of slavery in the early colonies though upended these norms. Slavery necessitated not only a creation of racialized norms, but have exaggerated gender norms as well in this superstructure of economic state. Slavery required racialized gendered norms and expectations for white men, for white women, for black men, and then inevitably for black women as well. In Shamas' history of colonial Virginia, explains that enslaved black women didn't originally occupy this mammy stereotype that has come to be a lot of our imaginations of what slavery fit. In fact, enslaved black women who nursed intended children were also field workers. Few worked in the home or had much access to domestic labor prior to the 18th century. So what this suggests is that white women's roles is often a little bit different than we might have imagined as well, with them still being largely responsible for household labor and domestic chores on smaller plantations. The use of enslaved black women for household work emerged in the period that followed. And that's significant because it's not based on economic necessity. There weren't new household activities that required black women's labor in order to complete them. And this is proven by this early arrangement. Rather, it's driven by a need to separate and cultivate a separation between what is acceptable white women's labor and what is acceptable black women's work. This separation is a key driving force in the maintenance of white supremacy and patriarchy, with black women being relegated to the lowest high position on a hierarchical ladder in a pre-antibelan period in the U.S. So white femininity becomes an important tool used to make the continued case for enslavement of black women and men. A perceived fragility and need of protection for white womanhood has to contrast with black womanhood in order to exist. So white womanhood is not created in the period of slavery in the U.S., but Western conceptions of what a white woman should embody, fragility and protectionism, right, is idealized in this period of time in order to juxtapose her with a black woman slave who was at various points constructed in two very dichotomous ways, as a Jezebel who's sex-craven and not respectable or as a mammy, an asexual pinnacle of strength who bears all pain with a smile. Likewise, the cold domesticity creates a separation between the private world of the white woman, the home and the public world of the white man. But the role of black women as keepers of the white woman's home and their own home as a source of income and later as an income earner in a public economy upends this entire system that idealizes normative. It contrasts with the prevalent system of values that intertwine patriarchy, white supremacy and the advancement of U.S. capital. So being an enslaved black woman during and then being a black woman post-slavery requires the ability to shift between norms, to occupy each norm expertly and then to hide that expertise so as not to disturb the system in which one operates, not to result in further labor or unwanted violence against the body. But as technology becomes synonymous with expertise, efficiency and skill, so too does it become connected to white masculinity. In an early colonial South where enslaved Africans were often given more independent labor and technical skill, technical skill was actually ascribed to the black body. Enslaved black men and women were trained as artisans, as craftsmen, as seamstresses, as cooks, as cultivators of land and goods for sale in the marketplace. Their technical agricultural skill was used to generate a successful tobacco industry in South Carolina. Their technical knowledge of planting and harvesting made plantations in South Carolina and Virginia possible and uniquely profitable. Wood counters this claim that black workers were sought as unskilled labor by saying, it seems safe to venture that if Africans had shown much less competence in an aptitude for the basic tasks of frontier management like clearing boats and clearing land, herding cattle, working wood, cultivating deals, their importation would not continue to grow. It's worthwhile to suggest that with respect to rice cultivation, it's particular know-how rather than lack of it that makes black labor attractive to English colonists. So the divorcement of technical skill from slave labor was not a fact, but a useful misdirection created to justify claims of inferiority. This divorcement though persists in the way that we think about labor today. The idea that labor that's done by black women, that's done by women more broadly, that's done by low income earners is in fact unskilled work, worthy of less pay, fewer benefits, less respect. It's just not true. But the expertise and examples of the continued expertise throughout history can be seen in this masterful shifting in our communicative technologies as well and the communicative structure of oral cultures that persist and prevail in black spaces today. I've previously written about barber shop talk and hidden enclave communities and how black folks utilize lingering oral communicative structures to hide from dominant groups. And even when this kind of work is praised by linguists and communication scholars, it frequently focuses on ideas of signifying or dozens play, which get ascribed to black male culture. But consider the complications for black women navigating cultural word play and orality while simultaneously crafting defenses that designate their communicative endeavors as non-threatening to both black masculinity and whiteness. So tools like gossip, for example, escape the radar of their black male counterparts in spaces like beauty shops where talking about hair or celebrity can hide speech from both groups expertly. This seems an important juncture to explain that I'm interested in most in communicative technologies, whether that be the voice, the pen, the typewriter, the computer, the smartphone. But I can't divorce this from a larger assessment of how other technologies make black feminist discourse possible. So domestic technologies that are manipulated by and crafted by black women are used in the course of their labor, but are tools in creating spaces for linguistic play and communal development and interdependence and independent identity management. Technology of trades often foster economic possibilities that again create spaces separate from dominant groups where this important communicative work can then happen. It's also a good point to mention that I'm not a historian, but I am deeply interested in the history of black feminism, of communication and of feminist communication. I'm interested in how beginning with a history of this allows us a different lens through which to examine black feminist discourse online as a natural outgrowth of a particular set of skills and obstacles acquired over time. But allow me for the sake of time to jump to this century. My previous work in that of other scholars, particularly those of black culture online, has explored practices of black users of social media. So scholars like Brock and Florini have charted how impactful black techno culture is on social media more broadly. Kishana Gray coined the term black cyber feminism to think about how black women utilize social media in order to bring concerns about their portrayal and mainstream media practices. But to date, the field has not yet examined how black feminist discourse is altered by the use of technology, nor how black feminist practices has changed engagement with social media more broadly for the society. With this project, I argued that the crafting of black feminist discourse is specifically connected to the technology through which it is devised and disseminated. But that likewise, black people and black women more specifically possess unique communicative and technological capacities as a result of the violence and disenfranchisement enacted upon them systematically. For this project, I relied principally on Andre Brock's CTDA, Critical Technicultural Discourse Analysis, as a method, with applying the principles that he outlines both to digital technology as well as other communicative technologies like the voice, like the written word, and like that which happens on television, not originally how Brock conceptualized it. So if he's watching that, I'm taking liberties. CTDA is an approach that's similar to critical discourse analysis, but it provides a holistic analysis of the interaction between technology, cultural ideology, and technical practice. So as Brock explains, CTDA is designed to be open to any critical cultural theoretical framework as long as the same approach is applied both to the semiotics of information and communication technologies, hardware and software, and the discourse of its users. So what distinguishes CTDA is that instead of examining discourse as something that happens separately from the ICTs in which it happens, the same theoretical framework should be applied to both simultaneously. I can speak more about this in our discussion, but in this case, I apply CTDA to the discourse of black feminist writers and communication technologies that they use in order to create and disseminate their message. And I use a critical approach that's based principally on the interrelationship between three different black feminist theories or points of departure in the literature. The first is intersectionality and the matrix of domination as articulated by Patricia Hill Collins. Intersectionality has gotten a lot more discussion online lately. I know it's new to some folks, but it has a very long history in black feminist thought. I utilize Patricia Hill Collins' formation of the matrix of domination because what I argue, and I did this in Safiya Noble and Berdisha Tine's intersectional internet, is that that matrix of domination is met with resistance discourse at each level. So at each level in which black women find themselves met with oppression, there is a matching set of discourses that resist that oppression at each level and that is made possible in part by online rhetoric. Collins separates those levels into the personal biography, the group or community and the level of the cultural context, and each is useful in understanding the changing nature of digital black feminism. The second point of departure for me is Anna Everett's idea of black technophilia. I love this because what Everett suggests here is that black folks are technophiles, not technophobic. And that black communicative strategy has enabled a quote heterogeneous mass of people to somehow overcome their profound dislocation, fragmentation, alienation, relocation, and ultimate commodification in the Western slave democracies of the modern world. Let's just stop and look at the beauty of that sentence. But Anna Everett describes Twitter, for example, as an antagonistic display of truth-telling and vital viral activity. So technophilia helps us understand not examining what black folks do online from a place of deficiency rather than examining it as a place of mastery. The final interjection here is Joan Morgan's hip hop feminism. Black feminism is designed to call attention to multiple experiences of women of color and how they integrate real life experiences and define themselves in their own terms. But my first introduction to black feminism was not through the academy, it was through the work of Joan Morgan who coined the term hip hop feminism to refer to a generation of black feminists who live seemingly within a contradictory space of abhorring patriarchy while embracing the culture of hip hop. So hip hop has been criticized, and I don't need to do it here, for misogynistic lyrics and sexism and celebrations of consumer capitalism. But what Joan Morgan explains in her text is that the manifestos of black feminism while they help me understand the importance of articulating language to combat oppression don't provide me a language to explore things that are not black and white. They were things that were shades of gray and that shade of gray is very much represented in hip hop. I argue that that shade of gray is also very much reflected in the discourse that we find in digital black feminist spaces. And it's these shades of gray that are deeply interesting and valuable and forward-leaning as research goes. As is the case with most qualitative inquiry, it's in the contradictions and complications that the story unfolds, and that also is the case here. So together, Collins, Everett and Morgan helped me paint a picture of the perfectly contradictory space of digital black feminist rhetoric. From these critical approaches, I construct a new theory of digital black feminist principles, practice, and product. I know we don't have all the time, so I'm going to introduce them to you and I hope that we can talk more about these in our discussion. I first outlined these five top principles of digital black feminism as a part of a larger study of the black blogosphere between 2012 and 2004. In that study, I analyzed nine blogs with about 1,500 posts and 40,000 comments that were archived. And through the application of Catherine Squire's vocabulary of counterpublics, enclaves, and satellites, I argued that the common notion of counterpublics was not actually a useful concept to thinking about what work black women and black feminists were doing in spaces. That the notion of enclaves more accurately depicted a space that was intentionally separate from the dominant group and did not bring that rhetoric into the full view of the mainstream. Since that time, both Sarah Florini and Andre Brock have simultaneously argued that Twitter might at times also provide bits of an enclave space or a satellite community, one that is aware of the dominant group and interacts on occasion, but does not do the work of the counterpublic by its purpose, by its goals, by its intentions, and by its mission. So I outlined these five distinctions that black digital feminist rhetoric makes in these enclave spaces. They are the prioritization of agency, the reclamation of a right to self-identify, the notion of having complicated allegiances with groups that one might not ordinarily find with other black feminist communities, the centralization of non-gendered binary spaces for discourse, and in being informed by a dialectic of self and community interests. Trust me when I say this is probably another hour-long presentation, but I would really love to give some examples of each of these if time permits at the end. Now, the primary thing that we can take away from this is the contrast that it makes to traditional notions of black feminism and how this gets articulated online. One of the easiest examples that I can usually point to in a two-minute period is the interaction between scholar Bell Hooks and Brittany Cooper and Laverne Cox online regarding Beyonce. Somehow Beyonce always makes it into my talk. But Bell Hooks wrote a think piece about Beyonce being a terrorist. This was at the time when Beyonce first announced herself as a feminist with her self-titled album. And the conversation that ensued online showed a direct contrast between a traditional trope of black feminist rhetoric and what we were experiencing from digital black feminist online. And how black feminist online were crafting a space to engage in a nuanced concept and nuanced conversation, rather, about not whether Beyonce herself was a feminist, but who has the power to determine what black feminism looks like and how that can be applied to individuals. Do people have the agency and the rights to self-identify even when their values seemingly may contrast with what larger populations deem as being appropriately feminist or feminist enough? So this conversation was kind of one of those occasions where that came to the front. For the sake of time, let me move on, though, to my current project where I begin with these principles as a guide but applying my new analytic and less concerned about the distinctions between types of alternate publics and therefore these two additional tropes kind of present themselves. One is the conflation of the notions of private and public and professional and personal and popular where we have digital black feminists who see their black feminism as a professional enterprise, which interacts with the popular culture as well as their personal identity politic who are very equipped and willing to make money in that space and in fact promote the fact of making money as a result of their black feminist ethos. This again contrasts with a very traditional notion of black feminist rhetoric and connects to the celebration of capitalist enterprise. So the idea of getting your bag is important and someone keeping you from doing that is actually an antithesis to my black feminist ethos as a digital black feminist rhetorician online. All right, so I take the title of this talk from a quote from historian, Susanna Leibstock who says that in recent years, it's become commonplace to equate gainful employment for women with liberation. Even in the present, this is far too simple for free black women, the high rate of gainful employment and the high incidence of female headed households as well were badges of oppression. Neither was chosen as a position of strength. Both were the products of chronic economic deprivation and of a shortage of men. Yet, there was an autonomy of a kind, she argues. When black women of our time say that they have always been liberated, they have a point. What does it mean to say that black women have always been liberated when I've just spent the last 20 odd minutes explaining how systematically black women have been oppressed since their construction in black womanhood in the US? I'm curious about that. I'm curious about what it means to begin our research and our ethos by understanding that black women's liberation can actually be unpacked in ways that allow us to create possibilities for ourselves. To unsettle the notion that black women's oppression is their defining feature and leave room to analyze how badges of oppression are actually intricately related to positions of strength. To make it possible to actually do both of those things at the same time. It's a reworking of our orientation, a reworking of our framework and a reworking of the lens through which we choose to interpret and do important analytical work. And I'll stop there so that we can have an appropriate conversation. That's a really tiny list of citations. I'm happy to pass it on. If folks want to see it later. I want to say one quick thing also. I was just at a great conference with Jessica Marie Johnson who shared this with me as well. Citations often miss the important conversations that guide our work as well. So I feel obligated from henceforth to also talk about the brilliance and conversations that guide my work that are not directly cited but that you should be citing. These are brilliant women, women of color and allies who are doing work at intersections of race and digital scholarship who weren't directly cited in my talk but follow them on Twitter, follow their blogs, read their academic work and cite them. Thanks. Yes, take photos. You got to do what she said, take photos. Okay? All right, so we're going to open up now for questions and answers. So who would like to start with a question? The friendly room. And there are online folk who are definitely listening because I've been hearing from them. Go ahead, Kathy. Hi, I'm Kathy, a fellow this year and a huge Jenny fan. I had a question about the gray area when you were talking about hip hop and feminism and just really curious to learn more about that. Sure, yeah, so Joan Morgan's book is called When Chicken Heads Come Home to Roost. It's a fantastic book that is partially autobiographical. She was a journalist and was just talking about discovering or coming to notions of what it meant to be a black feminist but consistently dealing with the contradiction that that supposedly should have for what her interests were, for how she felt connected to her culture, for what felt right to her relating to her racial identity. So she talked about being a huge hip hop fan, for example, and this idea that people were telling her, if you love hip hop, you can't be a feminist and if you're a feminist, you can't love hip hop. And particularly, she's talking about black feminism. I want to make sure that that's clear because I'm not talking about white feminism. So I am particularly talking about black feminism. And so what she came to was that there's this huge gray area of people who have poor patriarchy, who seek to fight that, who want to make it visible and known and want to deconstruct it in its multiple forms and in its intersection with white supremacy. But in doing that, cannot divorce themselves from their cultural identity and the complications of that cultural identity, not regarding hip hop as being wholly problematic. So not willing to throw that out in order to ascribe to some kind of identification as a feminist. This is the same kind of conversation that happens again and again in the digital black feminist spheres as well right now regarding a lot of different ideas. One that I'm writing about right now has to do with Cardi B. And you know, Cardi B is, okay, there's a picture. Cause I didn't even check, that's Cardi B. At the top, that's Livia J at the bottom. But there's a huge conversation about the music and the embodiment of black femininity and the representation of black womanhood by Cardi B by scholars online. And actually a really large embrace of the figure of Cardi B as a sexual independent agent as an agent of her own economic advantage, right? Who's made decisions about herself that may contradict respectability politics in some ways but actually promote notions of independence and sexual agency. And there's a disconnect sometimes between that conversation and the conversation that happens with traditional black feminists about what that kind of lipstick feminism as some folks put it, the implications of that on black women and their larger representation. And so that's that kind of shade of gray. I think most it becomes embodied though it happens in all these spaces in the relationship with capitalism as well. And so this is the large overarching critique that a lot of traditional black feminists have made of this newer generation of black feminists is that their wholehearted embrace of capitalism is problematic. I would argue that that's not actually an accurate read on what's going on is that digital black feminists have a really complicated relationship with capitalism as many of us do, right? Many of us in the academy do as well, right? And so this kind of hypocritical idea that digital black feminists are interacting with capitalism in unproductive ways through their blogs or through their capitalist enterprise when scholars like us travel across the country and get paid to do talks and get put up in hotels for doing them as a part of our black feminist work is not raised as a similarly problematic part. So that's the shade of gray. Hi, I'm Maggie Williams. I'm from Northeastern University, the Communication Studies Department. So you talked briefly a little bit at the beginning about sort of touching on the election, the recent election. And so I was wondering how can or is digital black feminism used in the context of activism and social justice? So thank you for your question. I try to not talk about the election and then there was just like no way to not do that because I think that it's really important that we refocus our energy on figuring out what did work and what doesn't work. It seems to all get most of the attention, right? And so I start the talk in that way in the hopes again that we refocus our energy on figuring out who has figured this out and why have they figured it out and what is it about us that hasn't figured it out yet that maybe we can focus on? So that our attention isn't that we missed this group. It's that this group missed out because their history, because their history of privilege actually has inculcated them from having to make difficult decisions or see through ideas of hatred as it's spewed at them in online spaces. And so what I think that digital black feminism, what black women with the interaction of black women in the rest of the world online can teach us is how to navigate these spaces. And this is what I mean by the idea that the way that, and this goes back to Anna Everett's notion of technophilia, it goes back to Andre Brock's work as well, that the way that black folks interact online is actually an exemplar, and not an exception, that black folks interaction with technology actually teaches us what the capacities of social media are when they're stretched beyond the point where they were imagined to go. So hashtags do things for black spaces online that they were never intended to do by their creators, that black folks have done things with groups and lists that were never intended to be done by the creators, have manipulated technologies in ways that all of us can learn valuable lessons from in terms of what can be done, but also have really valuable lessons about what happens when we push technology to its limit and what the implications of that are on the self and on the body and on violence that's been enacted upon the body. So notions of surveillance and online violence as well, are there lessons there for us about what happens when we do push these technological boundaries beyond their limits in terms of social activism? I don't do a whole lot with the Black Lives Matter movement, though that's the question. You didn't ask me that, but that is the question that a lot of folks asked. I think that what movements like that did were make apparent what had already been happening online for a long time. So I just had a conversation with an undergrad this week about when did I start looking at social activism or when in the last five years did social activism really spring up? And I said the first, I remember that was the Gina 6 case and that was what, 2002? 2003, something like that, right? The Gina 6 case was wholly happening on Facebook. There was no Twitter at the time, but the organizing that was done by young people in colleges across the country to create actual buses of people that went down to Louisiana to protest on behalf of those young men was some of the earliest organizing that I saw happening on Facebook, right? And so there's this long history of this that if we studied, we could learn a lot of valuable lessons from. I think you said that Black women weren't as affected by fake news, bots, et cetera. And I was wondering first, so how do we know, is that just based on them not voting for Trump? Or is it because people, because they weren't targeted, maybe if they're more targeted, that won't work? And my other question is really, do you have more specific examples? Please, do I get pretty high level? Yeah, it was, yeah. So one example is like the actual resulting factors, but who's written about this lately? Sarah Florini, I think, wrote about the hashtag your slip is showing, right? And so there's this kind of history of Black communities having to spot fake purveyors of news or information or people who are trying to get into communities online. That was one example of how that worked, but there was a period where it was recognized that federal agents for one, but also hate groups were trying to pose as Black folks who were community activists in order to get involved in Black social movements online. And there's a whole body of work that kind of shows how Black activists and regular everyday Black folks began to spot, call out, and make clear who was not real using that hashtag as an example. And so while I don't do large quantitative analysis, that would demonstrate the extent to which how often Black women were targeted. What my work does kind of point out is the tool sets that they have to ward off that kind of targeting and how Black women have organized in order to not avoid it, but to thrive even while being pressed by it. So there are lots of examples, some of which I can't share because I don't have permission from some of the users yet and because it would expose them to further incidents of hate, but of Black women users online who have charted how they avoid trolls and hate accounts. And I will be writing about that with their permission very soon, but I don't wanna say too much more about it right now. I have two questions. The first one is kind of like a, oh, hi, I'm Levin, I'm a project coordinator here at the Berkman Client Center. My first question is around the sort of reactions, gifts and things like that and how ideas of Black face are starting to be promoted through, use of reaction gifts in some cases, and especially in regard to humor. And I was wondering if you had any initial thoughts about that. And then my second question was how the idea or the identities of allyhood, especially in white feminists or even other communities of color or sort of complicated by these digital Black feminist narratives. Thank you. So I know that there was a popular article that came out about the notion of Black face and memes, right? Black face and gist. And I think that there are some interesting thoughts about how we employ the image of Black personhood anywhere, right? On television screens online, et cetera, and notions of appropriation of Black bodies. I think the notion of Black face is interesting because it's about bodies and it's about if you're going to perform Black face and it is in fact you that's embodying Black face in order to do it. And so I think there is a slight disconnect to that extension of the argument that should probably be teased out a little bit more in terms of how we think about how we embody characters, personas or images online because I think without that missing thread that there's some theoretical work that's missing from that argument. But I do think it's an important consideration. I'm not there in terms of the notion of embodiment. In terms of allyship, I mean, what I should say is that my work focuses in kind of two veins. I am very interested in how Black women and their history shape the narratives about Black womanhood, but that I should be specific that Black feminism and Black feminist rhetoric is not always only used by Black women, right? So, and this is part of the notion of complicated allegiances and non-gender binary spaces of discourse, that there are white folks, there are Black men, there are lots of others who engage in Black feminist discourse communities online. One example that I really love to give was not about white allyship, but is about Black men is Damon Young and Panama Jackson, I'm very smart brothers, a blog that is and was founded by two men, but that does the work of Black feminism daily, right? That very regularly makes very important jabs at patriarchy and trying to dismantle those kinds of systems, recognition of privilege and et cetera. And so there are ways that other folks engage in the principles and practice of Black feminism who are not Black women, but it is always my ethos to centralize Black women in my conversation while not excluding those who also participate in that rhetoric. And so I think there is space for people to participate in the same kinds of practices online and participate alongside of or behind Black women as they do that work without centralizing themselves as the most important figures in it. Hi, my name is Vinita, I'm a 3L at the law school. You talked about the conflation of the public and private and to some extent I think social media generally has led to everyone kind of conflating public and private space. So I would love to hear you talk about the specific ways in which that has been either more important or has been different for Black women. Yeah, absolutely. So Dizzy Paparisi writes about this, right? And about the notion of the private sphere instead of the public sphere. What's interesting for Black women is that this notion of a separate public and private was never something, right? It was never actually something that was possible or afforded to certain populations, right? So who is it that's written about this? My mind's drawing a blank, but the notion of the absence of the concept of privacy. Zorino Hurston, the absence of the concept of privacy, this is written back in the 1930s and 40s, right? And that Black spaces that are and have traditionally had to be communal spaces. And so this notion of like a separation of what the public and the private self is and how to navigate that. One, Black people have always had to navigate presentations of self to different populations for notions of survival in ways that have not always had to be the case for those who possess certain kinds of privileges in society. But a complete separation of a communal and a public space is something that doesn't actually comport with the history of Africans living in diaspora in the US. Because their private spaces were in fact publicly open to other populations, right? The home itself during antebellum periods and slavery was not actually a private space. It was not a space that was owned and occupied solely by the people inside of it. And so the idea of public and private has always been troubled, I would say, in marginalized communities largely, but specifically for Black and brown folks in the US. And so what happens in a digital context is that skill sets transfer from these already long accumulated skill sets of knowing how to navigate multiple spaces of understanding that private spaces aren't actually private for me, that other people may always have access to, and that not presenting to myself in ways that are damaged control possible will have ramifications for myself are already skills that are possessed by a particular community of people. And so when we have to transfer that to online spaces, in the same way that we transfer orality to online spaces, right? So Aung talks about a secondary orality and how folks with digital technology are learning how to navigate secondary orality having relied wholly on a literate culture for some period of time. But if you never could rely wholly on a literate culture and always had to navigate orality as Black folks in the US have, then there are intuitive skill sets that are still possible. And it's why we see the use of Twitter become such a high use for African American populations who already have secondary orality skills who already have this private public navigation set managed in ways that we are, as a larger society, relearning how to manage in online ways. Hi, my name is Aki Young. I'm at the Harvard Kennedy School. I'm a Master's in Public Policy student. And I was hoping you could talk more about how you chose the blogs that you followed and you had said that if there was time, you would give a little more information about that. And I feel like, no. Happy to. So the blog study where the first five of these originated from was, as I said, a larger study about notions of counterpublics and enclaves and about orality more broadly. And to try to do, at that time, some kind of survey of the Black blogosphere was not possible. There was not a running list from which one could select. Here are the Black blogs that have selected themselves as being written by or for Black communities. And so instead, what I did was, one, for my purpose for that study, I weeded out all the blogs that named themselves as being political in nature. Because what I was looking at were lifestyle blogs and blogs that expressly did not say that they were here to develop some kind of political identity. Because the argument was and is that Black folks don't do that necessarily in their politic. That their politic happens in ways that are not actually publicly political. And so barbershop spaces or lifestyle blogs are actually where those spaces happen. So I used a couple of resources at that time that did exist. There was the Black Weblog Awards, which was an organization that actually did do the work of cultivating lots of Black bloggers at the time. And by Black bloggers, I mean those who were either identified themselves as Black and also identified that their audience was primarily Black. And the route also cultivated a list of the 100 top bloggers that you should know between the periods of 2010 and 2015. And so during that period of time, I worked from that list to develop a list of nine lifestyle, entertainment, relationship, sports blogs that again did not ascribe themselves as political, that had open comment sections where people could actually interact with one another. So we're not looking at personal blogs. We're looking at what we would call A-list blogs that accepted advertising, either or either accepted advertising or accepted high numbers of commenters on their site. So you had to develop some kind of avatar to interact or you could interact using your Facebook account or interact using some other account. And so I developed a short list of that and it actually came to nine. Don't laugh, you backed it all of those down in the year 2012. So that's where the, oh, it was 10, I'm sorry. And one got excluded during the course of the study because they closed their comment section. So it was an intentional sampling, right? That was not done by a randomized sample process. I did want to include bloggers who were well known and those who weren't. And those who talked about things from hairstyles. There were several hair blogs on there to their relationship blogs, which VSBs was originally categorized as but is now much broader in its platform use. So it was an intentional sampling, not meant to be representative of every black blog that exists, but about the possibilities of what could happen on blogs that didn't name themselves as political. Hi, I'm Debbie. I'm a program assistant in the Human Rights Clinic here. Thank you for this. I was wondering if your research talks about queer and trans black communities as well. Cause I know that that's a big part of the online space Yeah, so this notion of centralizing non-gender binary spaces of discourse came out of particular work that was around that area. So I'll give you an example of how that came to be a part of this list. There was a conversation that happened again, this time between Bell Hooks and Laverne Cox, I think at the new school, I don't know if anyone saw that that was a number of years ago where they were talking about performativity of femininity. And Bell Hooks was saying that there's a problem when black women and black feminists are prioritizing their appearance and their agentic use of lipstick or hair or heels to the detriment of the community, right? That me saying that I as an agent can do this thing and I should be able to do this thing is actually deeply problematic because it still has ramifications and implications. And Laverne Cox's response and then the response that followed in the blogs that I was reading was very similar and it was we never had the opportunity to do that before and now you wanna take it away. And it was an idea that what was happening was a grouping of black feminists saying you can't do this thing because it's harmful to a community but they were saying it outside of the realm of even imagining that non-gender binary folks exist, that trans folks exist, that their lives and their histories of matter in some way. And there was a really calling to the table of traditional black feminism by digital black feminists in that moment to say that your imagination of black womanhood, of representations of black womanhood is flawed. It is not expansive enough. It is not engaging with a larger notion of what it means to be and can mean to be a black woman and therefore it is not engaging with a specific history that means that lipstick and heels can be transgressive, right? They can actually be that agentic use of those things and not just for trans folks and for non-gender binary folks and that was the expanded conversation was that if we allow our notions of black womanhood and black feminism to be more expansive it's actually better for all of us to think about what complications that makes to what these initial tenants were that we set out that should not be pulled apart, so to speak, yeah. Hi, I'm Elizabeth Guggenheimer. I wonder if you can say more about your view of the relationship of black feminism to feminism or white feminism or however you would categorize it? Sure. Just broadly, what is the relationship between these two? Okay. Sorry? How you differentiate it? Oh, okay, so here's how I differentiate it. Feminism to me is white feminism because that is how it was established, right? So feminism was established to do the work of unsettling patriarchy and to think about gender, right, and to think about how women specifically in this country, if we're talking about feminism in a white Western context, how women and men's inequality functions and how it can be dismantled, so to speak, right? And there are various iterations as I think most of us know of white feminism. Black feminism was not called to do exactly the same work. Black feminism, many would argue, came before white feminism, but doesn't often speak or spoken about in that way. But black feminism imagines that bodies are not just gendered bodies, they are racialized bodies. They are bodies that deal with issues of socioeconomic status and of ability and of sexuality and trying to disentangle those things is deeply problematic and not even possible. And so while it may be possible for some of us to imagine ourselves as women, it is impossible for me to not imagine myself as a black woman. And so all of the implications of that are tied up in my feminism. They're tied up in the way that I interrogate the world and how the world sees me. And so that's the distinction between white feminism and black feminism. Black feminism preferences, notions of intersectionality and notions of this matrix of domination, that oppression exists at multiple levels and is therefore has to be resisted at those multiple levels and that I can't disentangle my race from my gender, that they are additive constructs rather than separate constructs. And so black feminism does not mean that other folks who are not black cannot have an ethos of black feminism. And I think that sometimes becomes a sticking point for folks is that they hear white feminism and think white feminists. And that's not the same thing, that there are very great many folks who identify and are identified as white who think about feminism through lenses of black feminism and other people of color feminisms. And that that's important, that there are many men who think about themselves through lenses of black feminism as well. And so it's just important to understand that I'm not saying black white feminists. I'm saying white feminists, white feminism. Many white feminists ascribe to white feminism without calling it that. But I believe it's important that we put that additive before it so that we call things what they are so that it doesn't become the stand-in for what feminism is writ large because black women made feminism. My name is Kendra. Thank you so much for your talk. I think it's been very amazing to hear. Every time someone asked you for an example, I feel like it makes everything a little bit clearer and sharper. Now I'm curious about another example from one of the things you were talking about. So I was really curious about the has complicated allegiances part of your initial study. And I was wondering if you might talk about examples of that and also about the celebration of capitalist enterprise peace. So there's a couple of examples from the original study that were about complicated allegiances. One was about religiosity. And so there is a, and remains this kind of connection between black feminism and some notions of religiosity. That's an interesting kind of relationship kind of in that shade of gray that we talked about previously where because of cultural upbringing and connections to cultural legacies that there are still allegiances to varying degrees to various religious ideas or organizations or bodies for many who espouse notions of black feminism that would contradict with some of the central tenets and teachings of those religious organizations. And the decision to not disentangle those two things is where the complicated allegiances lies in part. I also used an example and these are gonna contrast in pretty stark ways from black women's reading of Scandal on Twitter as well. And so the initial kind of live tweeting of Twitter or of Scandal at the inception of the show was interesting when the hashtags team Olivia and team Millie started to trend. And so for those not aware Scandal, Shondaland, Thursday night, you should be aware. But so Olivia Pope is this prominent black woman in primetime television who is running a show and on the show is running the country, right? It was inevitably kind of running the people around her, right? And Millie is the president's wife. Olivia just alongs the soap opera, you guys. So Millie said, right, okay. But the interesting part about the hashtag was black feminists who were arguing that they were team Millie and how profound it was to get to argue that in a way that didn't make them seem like they did not also simultaneously appreciate that there was a black woman running a show but that that was actually the beauty of that character was that I could dislike Olivia, that I got to be team Millie on Twitter or in my blog where that wouldn't be judged outside of my enclave digital black feminist space for having made an allegiance with the white female character on the show that was keeping Olivia at that time from her glory, right? And so at that point, it was this enclave space and discussion where I could have allegiances that were outside of black woman. There was a time and it still does feel like that where any black woman who's on TV, I'm team her, right? Who was that? Issa, who said that? I'm rooting for everybody black, right? So there was a time where that was the case on TV where it was like, there's a black show on, we're watching that show and that black character is who I have to relate to because there just aren't enough black female characters on TV, right? But this was a moment of saying that my allegiances in this moment can be based on personality and on the context of the show and on the complications of that character on the brilliant writing that was happening, right? Rather than a kind of start, I have to be Team Olivia at that moment. There's two very different ways that allegiances manifest, but it is again this notion of my allegiances don't have to be to the person or to the group that you think that they should be to and that in and of itself does not discount my feminism. Okay, so we have just experienced the brilliance of Dr. Catherine Knight-Steel. We should all give her a hand.