Black Fascism Theory: Davis, Jackson, and the Facade of Incipience in Musk’s Twitter

This is an excerpt from my final essay written while at college. It pertains to the state of Twitter circa December 2022 and my thoughts on the impact on Black users of the app going forward.

Black theorists who have studied the effects of fascism on the Black community have long deciphered the tactics utilized by the free world. Since much of American history has been fervently anti-Black, the theories they propose are informed more by an intersectional layering of race, class, gender, and so on that encourages deep analysis into how those issues have subsisted for so long.

Contrary to their popularity within the broader field of race theory, Black theorists such as W.E.B. DuBois, Angela Davis, and George Jackson have extensive histories of theorizing fascism. While many of them cite other theorists such as Karl Marx as influential to their own findings, they propose their takes on the effects of American fascism as paradoxically unique and universal.

Italian cultural critic and philosopher Alberto Toscano culminates these sentiments within Incipient Fascism: Black Radical Perspectives, displaying how African Americans have long felt the sting of fascism before the Trump age. According to Davis, fascism takes on two forms — incipient and preventive — and targets Black people differently seeing that the very existence of Black people in America has consistently been viewed as a threat.

The incipience fascism presents allows those to think that it has never existed before, and the preventive measures are applied when it is challenged or opposed. In a fascist system,

“accrual of contempt [for the oppressed] is [a] fundamental survival technique”.

Without it, there is no one to make an antagonist, redirecting the attention of the ones exploited by capitalism back to their perpetrators.

During the first days of his ownership, Musk dissolved several of Twitter’s employee resource groups including “Blackbird”, which was the group that many of the Black employees of Twitter were filtered into.

On October 28, 2022, a tweet containing data presented by the Network Contagion Research Institute found that the usage of the “n-slur” drastically increased the day Musk officially closed the deal to acquire the platform.

Musk made a tweet doubling down on the claim in early November that Twitter’s moderation had remained unchanged, and he even went further by claiming that hate speech on Twitter has decreased significantly, which was proven to be a blatant lie.

The dissolution of Blackbird and other ERGs that catered to other minority groups at Twitter was done as a way for the company to recoup its failing profits. However, nothing progressive has come out of the massive layoffs and abolishment of these groups, which typically involved participation from Human Resources and aided with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts.

Musk has yet to tweet about this.

It’s a sickly poetic sentiment considering the workers at Twitter are already faced with cruel and unusual labor requests and unpredictable mass layoffs that have spurred two labor-based lawsuits against him. Blaming the presence of Blackbird and other ERGs for adding to Twitter’s continual failure does nothing but add credence to the findings of theorists like Davis would understand how fascism in America affects Black citizens in terms of their class status.

The precedent it sets resonates on a much larger scale: the voice of Black people holds little weight in the grander scheme of how Twitter should be run. This sentiment extends outside of the workplace as Black users on the platform are dealing with similar disregard.

As mentioned before, engagement data shows that usage of the n-slur increased by five hundred percent once Musk officially became the head of the platform.

Coupling this with his unceremoniously disbanding of Blackbird and his suggested “anti-woke” political agenda, it’s difficult to believe that, after getting rid of the divisions of Twitter that specifically catered to the Black community within the Twitter workspace, the user experience of Black users would matter to Musk.

In “Thank You, Black Twitter”: State Violence, Digital Counterpublics, and Pedagogies of Resistance, activist, and academic Marc Lamont Hill discusses how, during the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown, Black Twitter acted as a separate news-sharing entity within Twitter, and how many Black people within the space had to rely on the network of other Black people on the platform to learn of updates regarding the situation.

This has become a trend exacerbated by the summer of 2020 and the presence of Black Twitter has escaped from the confines of just Twitter, making it a substantial information network for Black Twitter users.

Hill calls Black Twitter a “digital counterpublic” that remains a digital symbol of Black resistance through a rejection of traditionally white respectability politics and a habitual combatting of Black erasure.

It is, then, notable that it was Black Twitter that spread the word of Blackbird’s forced disbandment.

Musk will not be significantly (financially) impacted by his mishandling of Twitter. With his massive acclaim and net worth, it may prove to be a temporary stent in his economic development, but sinking 44 billion dollars into a project this turbulent will certainly cause some stress and leave a permanent stain on his entrepreneurial reputation.

Still, it is nothing compared to the Black lives he has already tampered with. The employees who spent years of their lives doing their best to better the platform for Black people just to be discarded so carelessly will never have the immense privilege Musk has to make such a mess of a global resource that Black people have historically leaned on to provide them what the non-digital world refused to.