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I pretended Id end the sequence trying to land a backflip, knowing that I never could.
I never practiced my moves in the mirror but I thought I looked good.
All limbs and rhythm and no direction.
This is me on Twitter.
I first heard about Twitter around 2008.
I was at an MTV taping of aMaking the Bandreunion special at a studio in Times Square.
(I didnt own an iPhone, the smartphone was still in generation one.)
Id just moved to Brooklyn from Kentucky with a pair of well-worn cowboy boots and skinny starter-locks.
She rolled her eyes.
Oh, she said, surprised.Theyre all on Twitter.
Diddy came out on stage to the sound of dancehall air horns and his own eponymous song.
He hopped from one side of the stage to the other, convulsing in a Harlem Shake.
He catapulted wads of black T-shirts that read NO BITCHASSNESS from a cannon.
The crowd loved it.
The Young, Black, and Bloggerful posted live tweet after live tweet on their iPhones.
From that point on, Twitter has always been a place for a swag I do not carry.
When I say swag, I mean I cant pull off a Sisqo backflip.
When I say Twitter, I mean Black.
Black Twitter has, essentially, become Twitter.
What was listed for its demographic?
95 percent Smart Black People.
I wondered about the implications of a companys onboarding materials calling for the exploitation of smart Negroes.
But I needed a paycheck.
(I still dont know what that means.)
When I say Twitter is Black Twitter, Ive collected the receipts.
Even before it was my job to know Twitter, I studied it like a groupie.
Where everyone is gorgeously aloof and perfectly pressed.
Some of them were probably recent arrivals from the South or Midwest.
It wasnt the same.
I needed more; an international online grid of black voices would have helped me.
When I finally joined Twitter it was 2013, and my first poetry book was coming out.
Twitter will humble you.
Theyre the people you always expect to see on the Twitter dance floor.
I liked this path because it let me be quiet.
I was there, on Twitter, but I didnt feel the compulsion to become someone.
It can be hard to tell if you meet me, but I suffer from pretty strong social anxiety.
I survive my misgivings about always saying the wrong thing and trying to decode everyones micro-expressions by performing.
I thought I had made it.
This version of Black Twitter manifests itself frequently.
Black people are often exceptional cultural performers.
Without noticing it, we code-switch into what we are told to be.
This is the exact reason I avoided Twitter to begin with.
I am always worried this is the way people feel when they read my feed.
I created my best imitation of what an interesting black tweet should say.
I posted the tweet and waited for the like count to go uptwenty people.
Not only did I feel bad at Twitter, I felt like a fraud.
I wanted to sit down and write that while listening to Sun Ra and Mozart.
Im not good at thinking through what I want to say by saying it.
Black Twitter is by no means a monolith.
What Im describing is one of the many ways people use the social platform to communicate.
Black Twitter contains so many conversations of short-form liberation.
But the part of Black Twitter that often lives on in infamy is its minstrelsy.
That 95 percent Smart Black People marketing demographic enmeshed in the white gaze.
The problem isnt that they want to join us.
They refuse to acknowledge the political damage this does to what we are saying.
One version of this conversation is Twitter alliance, the other is Twitter erasure.
It wasnt that I needed the book to succeed to support my ego.
I wanted to appear Twitter-successful.
I was putting myself in the mindset of being a marketing strategist for myself.
What my former colleague didnt know was that I had already tried to buy followers.
I hovered my mouse over the options for what my new Twitter following should look like.
I finally settled on a modest one thousand.
How long would it take to become Twitter-famous?
The companys FAQ page said about a week.
We will retry in two to three days.
If we dont succeed, we ll give you a refund.
They gave me a refund.
I couldnt even pay people to follow me.
I have not yet become Twitter-famous.
Twitter is a battle I have tried to fight and have lost in so many ways.
But I think thats alright.
Perhaps I still havent figured out yet, out there, what I want to say.
But if youre out there, too, maybe we can talk about it.
Twitter at me, America.
