The African-American Art Shaping the 21st Century

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/19/arts/african-american-art-inspiration.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Desus Nice: This rise of black social media is kind of overlooked. Before there was Black Twitter, message-board culture in 2000 was huge. That’s where we were just hanging.

When you go to a job, you have orientation and you talk to everyone and then you see the other black employee. And then y’all do the head nod, and figure out the little culture right there — that’s kind of what we were doing on the internet.

Okayplayer, the website, was one of the most influential — people are probably going to go back and look at that as one of the most influential websites on the internet for our culture.

Questlove made Okayplayer. We used to call him Poppa on it. There were so many rappers, so many poets. People were making graphics.

But Heben and Trace and a lot of people who are really popping right now, on Black Twitter, we all started there. We were babies! Just writing little posts.

And it’s not so much that website, but I think the experience of black people niching out their own little section on social media, that definitely shifted . I would even say it made black culture more singular; before everything was more regional. New Yorkers had their own slang. But now you can have a meme and every black person in the United States — or in the world — can understand it, because of social media.