People of color are the only reason why Vine was good
Vine was an escape from the unbearable whiteness of Hollywood
Last summer, when I felt like if I watched one more video of a police shooting I’d lose it, I turned to Vine for solace.
I watched one so many times I can recall it from memory. A handful of Black tweens are playing around and singing the Marvelette’s 1961 classic “Mr. Postman” to their letter carrier. The kids are having fun — they all have big cheesy grins on their faces. Wherever they are looks safe, clean, and cared for. The letter carrier, also Black, is pleased to see them and reacts like he sees these same kids enough to know them all by name.
To me, something about this video came to represent an idyllic slice of Black life, where it’s okay for Black kids to just goof around and be kids. After a summer of Trayvon, Mike, and Tamir, I needed this and Vine delivered.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that media is still pretty white. But while most roles in Hollywood probably won’t be going to people of color any time soon, content creators of color flourish on web platforms like Vine.
Silicon Valley owes people of color a great debt. We are basically the reason why anything on the internet is good.
What would Twitter be like if not for Black folks? It would just be a bunch of boring journalists trying to be funny and Game of Thrones recaps. Like most things on the internet, Vine was only good because of us.
One of my biggest gripes about the way people think about Blackness is how one dimensional our lives can look on screen. Just look at the way Donald Trump talks about Blackness. In his mind, the lives of Black folks are an urban hellscape from which we can never wake up and the only emotion we feel is hopelessness. It sounds absurd, but most TV and movies aren’t much better at allowing room for the richness or nuance of our stories and experiences. Where TV fails, Vine succeeds. Because of the lack of gatekeepers and barriers to entry, creators used Vine to show slices of Black life that felt much more authentic than anything coming out of a Hollywood studio.
The best Vines are the ones that celebrate the full range of Black experiences from the mundane to the absurd. While chronicling the mundane, just waiting for her mom in a parking lot, Georgia teenager Peaches Munroe sparked a largely uncredited cultural phenomena showing off her freshly waxed eyebrows.
Vine also fully chronicles the absurd, like a young tumbler turning flips in a Krispy Kreme, which is probably my favorite Vine of all time.
Nicholas Fraser, the genius behind the “Why you always lyin’” Vine, said he was just goofing on his friend’s habit of exaggerating the truth when his backyard Vine became a viral way to call anyone out, eventually making its way to the Republican presidential debate.
Vine can also be used as a tool of subversion. There was nothing Brandon Moore could do while he watched his friend get arrested, so he created a Vine making fun of the arresting officers hideous boots, unintentionally starting a viral meme in the process. The subtext is clear: maybe you can arrest us off of some bullshit, maybe you can kill us without consequence, but we can still clown your busted ass shoes on the Internet.
Platforms come and go, but Vine was an online space where content creators of color flourished by telling authentic stories. Shutting down Vine will be a blow to these creators who already have limited options and platforms as it is. The heads of Twitter can do whatever they want with their product, but they’d do well to remember that Black users are their lifeblood. Or to put it another way — who you finna try, Twitter?
