Black Online Discourse, Part 1

Abstract

Black digital practice reveals a complicated mix of technological literacy, discursive identity, and cultural critique. Taken together, it offers glimpses of the multivalent Black communities’ political, technocultural, and historical commonplaces to the outside world. These can be understood as three topoi shaping Black digital practice—ratchetry, respectability, and racism. This chapter examines ratchetry and racism as interlocking libidinal frames powering Black digital practice. Black digital practice, which the author once characterized as ritual drama and catharsis, can also be understood as digital orality—an online space encoded by folk culture and racial ideology, and undergirded by a libidinal discursive economy, producing pungent, plaintive commentary on matters political.