Black social media replaced newspapers as the engine of black political mobilization.
Evidence
Now Black Twitter (thousands of people who tweet regularly about issues of race in the news and popular culture) and Facebook offer alternative sites for the work that black newspapers once provided. Without black social media, the cases of Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander would have never gotten any traction. Martin, for example, was killed on February 26, 2012. Two weeks later, the Sanford police turned over the case to the state. But Zimmerman wasn’t arrested until six weeks after that. It was only after outrage rose on Twitter and Facebook that the story garnered national attention. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 372
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in post-Ferguson context: Trayvon Martin’s case and the organizing logic that later produced Ferguson and Black Lives Matter.