#YouTubeBlack: Social Movement or Media Spectacle?
As an internet educator and full time Black person, I spend most of my time keeping an eye on how social media platforms engage with BIPOC (Black, indigenous, People of Color) communities. Specifically, I like to analyze YouTube and how the site creates spaces for Black and queer people to gather. In following all of the ways that YouTube says that it serves Black and LGBTQIA+ creatives, the promotion of events like #YouTubeBlack has particularly sparked my interest.
In tracking its development, I have seen how #YouTubeBlack morphed from a response to the plight of unseen Black content creators into a week-long pseudo-event that promotes the YouTube platform and Black YouTube celebrities. Specifically, the distinction between who is included in the community of Black YouTube and hashtag #YouTubeBlack demonstrates how a movement can become a mediated spectacle.
And although the event lives up to its proposed promotion and recognition of Black YouTubers, technically it is being promoted because it promotes the platform itself i.e. YouTube. Therefore, I think it is important to unpack and question the actions that sites like YouTube and Google take to perform solidarity with communities of color.
