The Illumination of Black Twitter: Charles Mills, Race, and Digital Media Theory

Article / Journal

Author(s):
André Brock

Year: 2025

Abstract:
Social networks are simultaneously information and media platforms, but Blackness becomes understood differently depending upon which frame is deployed. While Black media creators have been lauded for their inventive enlivening of digital and social media technologies, Black information users are often considered as lacking technical, written, or mainstream cultural literacies. Mills’ works – from “Alternative Epistemologies” to The Racial Contract to one of his last “The Illumination of Blackness” – go beyond philosophy to inform media theory and science and technology studies. For example, Black Twitter shattered deficit models of Black digital expertise through discourse, affordances, and networked culture. I contend that Black Twitter illuminates the “racialized optics of modernity” (Mills 2021: 18) and of computation through Black standpoint epistemologies mediated by digital practices and discourses. I find that Mills anticipated that Black aesthetics and philosophy are well-suited for alternative visions of digital practice, design, and use.

https://mediatheoryjournal.org/2024/12/12/andre-brock-the-illumination-of-black-twitter/

Post created by: Lymor Wolf Goldstein