Abstract
The public sphere has historically structured some discourses and identities as highly visible, while backgrounding others. As a result, it can be very demanding for women of color to participate in online political dialogue. Using focus groups, this chapter examines the strategies of care that Black women who engage in online political debates employ for themselves and each other. Results show that when faced with dominant structures of oppression (such as erasure/invisibility and outright attacks), these women create safe spaces for discussion and mutual support. The chapter elaborates on how Black Twitter can be understood as a counter to the mainstream, how these women network to have their views asserted, and how they labor to support different Black identities.
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Notes
- 1.
One might think about the ways that women of color (WoC) had to write themselves into national progressive narratives such as #MeToo and the Women’s March, in spite of the WoC who founded and work within these movements.
- 2.
The author has a manuscript under review that details a different set of data (Black women and post-racial resistance online) from the conducted focus groups.
- 3.
I use the terms “African American” and “Black” differently to connote the former as peoples in the U.S. who inhabit African ancestry while “Black” refers to the larger diaspora of people (Hall, 1990; Steele, 2017). Some participants, for example, were from parts of the Caribbean and Africa, and so identified as “Black” rather than necessarily “African American.” I also capitalize “Black” when referring to people and use lowercase “black” in reference to more abstract terms, such as “black culture” (Gates, 2018).
- 4.
According to research (Cook & Campbell, 1979), the voluntary nature of self-report surveys can lead to participants under or over-inflating salary.
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Maragh-Lloyd, R. (2020). Civic Debate and Self-Care: Black Women’s Community Care Online. In: Bouvier, G., Rosenbaum, J.E. (eds) Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41421-4_5
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