Authenticity on “Black Twitter”: Reading Racial Performance and Social Networking

This article investigates the complex rhetorics of racial authenticity online, intermixing ethnography and critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) to understand African American users’ investments in enacting race in their social networks. The piece uncovers “acting white” as a significant discourse that shapes online identity and group performances. Examining rhetorics of racial authenticity including insider knowledges in relation to “acting white” and “acting black,” I map Twitter users’ negotiations with individual and collective notions of racial ingroup markers. I put forth the finding of “performance in the negative case,” as interviewees discuss their lack of participation in their ingroup based on diverse perceptions of racial authenticity. I argue that a full understanding of racial authenticity, performative participation, and nonresponsiveness opens up identity and race formulations to include complexities of what is and is not expressed via interaction and performance.

Exploring Black Immigrants’ and Nonimmigrants’ Understanding of “Acting Black” and “Acting White”

Immigrant and nonimmigrant Black adolescents’ perceptions of “acting Black” and “acting White” were compared using a concurrent mixed-methods approach. Using the Maryland Adolescent Development in Context Study data set, 39 second-generation African and Caribbean adolescent immigrants and a matched set of 39 nonimmigrant Black peers responded to the question “What does it mean to act Black/White?” Their responses were examined for differences and change over time. Quantitative analyses revealed that all Black youth shifted in their perspectives of acting White and acting Black but immigrant youth differed significantly from their nonimmigrant counterparts. Analysis of secondary qualitative text further highlighted respondents’ development and change at Time 2. These results underscore a racial cultural orientation process under the tridimensional model that acknowledges Black immigrants’ acculturation to African American culture in the United States.

Race and the Feminized Popular in Nietzsche and Beyond

I distinguish between the nineteenth‐ to twentieth‐century (modernist) tendency to rehabilitate (white) femininity from the abject popular, and the twentieth‐ to twenty‐first‐century (postmodernist) tendency to rehabilitate the popular from abject white femininity. Careful attention to the role of nineteenth‐century racial politics in Nietzsche's Gay Science shows that his work uses racial nonwhiteness to counter the supposedly deleterious effects of (white) femininity (passivity, conformity, and so on). This move—using racial nonwhiteness to rescue pop culture from white femininity—is a common twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century practice. I use Nietzsche to track shifts from classical to neo‐liberal methods of appropriating “difference.” Hipness is one form of this neoliberal approach to difference, and it is exemplified by the approach to race, gender, and pop culture in Vincente Minnelli's film The Band Wagon. I expand upon Robert Gooding‐Williams's reading of this film, and argue that mid‐century white hipness dissociates the popular from femininity and whiteness, and values the popular when performed by white men “acting black.” Hipness instrumentalizes femininity and racial nonwhiteness so that any benefits that might come from them accrue only to white men, and not to the female and male artists of color whose works are appropriated.