#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.

YouTube Doesn’t Care About Black People

In 2015, Journalist and YouTuber Akilah Hughes published an article calling out YouTube’s lack of diverse representation in the promotion and recognition of its content creators. Referencing Kanye West’s infamous “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” statement, the article titled “YouTube rarely promotes Black YouTube stars even during Black History Month” offers an informal content analysis of YouTube’s official Twitter account during February of 2015.

Hughes found that during Black History Month the company produced only 15 tweets about Black YouTubers (of which it was noted that many were well known musicians and not just YouTube content creators) in contrast to “167 tweets promoting white creators, many with smaller, more niche followings.” (Hughes).

While many decry the usefulness of 21st century call-out or cancel culture, almost exactly a year later, on March 31, 2016 YouTube selected 100 Black Content Creators to be flown out to an event titled #YouTubeBlack as a response to this and other criticisms around YouTube’s failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within and outside of the site. Hughes went on to cover the event in another article titled “Last year I accused YouTube of failing to promote black talent. Here’s what happened next”.

Specifically citing the original Hughes article, YouTube CEO “Susan Wojcicki confirmed . . . that my [Hughes’] article had circulated internally at Google, and stated that the company wanted to make right a situation that was a clear break from their values”. Hughes goes on to write that “#YouTubeBLACK mark[ed] the first time a major social [media] platform has directly, in person, addressed the plight of being black online — and sought out ways to support this dynamic and growing demographic.” Through creating a series of workshops, mentoring sessions, critical reflection, and plans for how to navigate the specific plight of being Black on YouTube, the event was lauded as an important and necessary step in the right direction.

Black YouTube vs. #YouTubeBlack

In this sense, #YouTubeBlack was an event created in response to criticism that the site faced due to its lack of promotion of stars of color. This was especially demonstrated through the lack of diversity in opportunities for progression on the site, like YouTube’s Maker Studio, and the site’s advertising and marketing materials. As we see the rise of Black web series, comedians, musicians, beauty gurus, etc on the site, we also see the rise in interest that the platform pays Black creatives.

While Black content creators are using YouTube to build community and culture, the YouTube platform is actually leveraging the popularity of these creators to promote the site under the guise of addressing this inequity through events like #YouTubeBlack.

In defining the difference between Black YouTube and #YouTubeBlack, Black YouTube can be defined as a reflection of an African American CyberCulture while #YouTubeBlack is a reflection of Corporate Culture. Within the site, Black community members create and define the bounds of Black YouTube. Youtube creators from all genres and followings can self-select into identifying themselves as Black YouTubers and engage with the Black YouTube community and cyberculture. However, through the creation of #YouTubeBlack, YouTube as a corporate subsidiary of Google, gets to decide who will be represented and included/excluded from #YouTubeBlack.

With that being said, most of the content creators who are promoted and included in #YouTubeBlack events are already popular and/or well-known Black YouTube celebrities. These Black YouTube Celebrities are professional influencers and YouTubers that are able to financially benefit from or leverage their YouTube careers. Therefore, YouTube is also able to benefit from promoting them. Specifically, past YouTube Black events have included creators such as Shannon Boodram, Shameless Maya, and Whitney White aka Naptural85 with the most recent 2021 class of creatives including YouTubers with subscriber counts in the hundreds of thousands.

#YouTubeBlack Homecoming

There have also been many changes in the structure of the event since the inaugural 2016 #YouTubeBlack. After 2017 the event moved from being hosted in California where the Google headquarters and many of YouTube’s offices and studios are hosted, to the 2017 event being held in Washington D.C. Expanding from an event where YouTube executives listen to the demands of Black YouTube content creators, the event now also included activities where content creators could give back to the community and their fan base. This engagement with the Black community was demonstrated through the annual change in location that also reflected an important aspect of Black culture i.e. the attendance of HBCU (Historically Black College and University) homecomings.

Especially in our current moment in time, media events like Beyonce’s Coachella Performance, have resulted in a greater recognition of HBCU homecomings as a recognizable signifier of Black culture. In particular, Howard Homecoming is both a signifier of Black culture and community as Howard is an institute of higher education which signifies upward mobility and community uplift.

After Howard Homecoming, in 2019 #YouTubeBlack was hosted in Atlanta, GA from October 21–22nd, the home of Spelman and Morehouse (or Spelhouse) homecoming. As the Black Mecca of the New South, Atlanta is also a geographic signifer of Black culture and due to certain tax breaks (as well as the creation of Tyler Perry’s Studios) Atlanta has also positioned itself as a hub for media production i.e. television, film, and music. Therefore, it is incredibly significant that #YouTubeBlack events are being hosted at Howard University (an HBCU located in Chocolate City aka the Black Mecca of Washington, D.C.), Atlanta, and other hot-spots of Black culture and creativity.

In this sense, #YouTubeBlack has burgeoned from a corporate response to YouTube’s lack of promotion and protection of Black content creators on the site, to a movement for highly successful Black content creators to meet fans and mentor the next generation of content creators. Through combining an opportunity to interact with popular Black content creators and the signifiers of Black popular culture, #YouTubeBlack is one of many marketing strategies that YouTube uses in order to promote the platform and align with calls for corporations to recognize racial equity.

#YouTubeBlack as Pseudo-Event

By focusing on leveraging YouTube celebrity and the popularity of Black culture, #YouTubeBlack has intertwined a social movement with a media spectacle, becoming what some researchers describe as a “pseudo-event”. Pseudo-events are generally defined as media events that are created in order to garner news and attention. Reflecting on the fact that the event itself was created as a response to negative press coverage, #YouTubeBlack is an excellent public relations strategy for the platform. Therefore, the creation of this pseudo/media event and hashtag does the work of promoting the YouTube platform just as much, if not more than, promoting Black YouTube content creators.

Through the intentional choice of location and the curation of creatives when it comes to #YouTubeBlack, the event raises some concerns around the corporate commodification of Black community and culture in order to signify care and community work.

It is not lost on me that most of YouTube’s community work with creators does not create a greater platform for smaller creatives, but continuously focuses on promoting individuals who already have a large platform and are already affiliated with YouTube’s Google Partner program. In addition, my own research and recent lawsuits note how the YouTube algorithm chooses to promote socially acceptable and normative creatives over creators who identify as queer, disabled, etc.

Especially as online platforms like YouTube act as spaces of recognition and representation for marginalized communities, I would argue that we must continue to question the intent and purpose of corporations creating place and space for BIPOC communities to gather. Therefore, I will continue to use this platform to write and think about ways that we can hold social media platforms accountable to actions that truly demonstrate care and concern for the unique issues that intersectionality marginalized creatives face online.