Three Viral Controversies Changed My Mind About Black Social Media
After three viral controversies, I’m asking a harder question about Black social media: when did disagreement become an invitation for Black humiliation?
When did disagreement become an invitation for Black humiliation?
I have a master's degree in digital media.
I've spent years studying how people communicate online—how algorithms reward outrage, how engagement shapes conversation, and how social media influences culture.
Ironically, I never expected my own career to become a case study.
Over the last six years, I've found myself at the center of three separate viral controversies.
In 2020, I led the campaign calling out Philadelphia's PlayPenn Theatre over racism, exclusion, and leadership. What started as artists demanding accountability became a national conversation covered by WHYY, American Theatre, PhillyVoice, and other publications.
A few years later, my play Harriet Tubman: Love Slave sparked another national debate. Public figures, including columnist Charles M. Blow and writer Michael Arceneaux, criticized the work, helping fuel conversations that reached CNN, HuffPost, and thousands of people online.
And now, for a third time, I've found myself in the middle of another viral conversation.
After questioning transparency surrounding an official social media account connected to Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker's administration, I was blocked by Press Secretary Leah Uko. I shared my experience online, and the conversation quickly spread. While looking into it further, I also came across Reddit posts from other users describing similar concerns about comment moderation. Those posts don't prove anything on their own, but they suggested I wasn't the only person asking questions.
Three completely different stories.
Three completely different issues.
Yet every single time, I've watched the conversation follow the same script.
The issue changes.
The comments don't.
Instead of debating the argument...
People debate my masculinity.
My sexuality.
My appearance.
My mother.
Apparently wearing a bonnet disqualifies me from asking questions.
Apparently asking difficult questions makes me "anti-Black."
Apparently questioning institutions means questioning my manhood.
As someone who studies digital media, that's the part I can't stop thinking about.
Not because it happened to me.
Because it keeps happening.
We've become incredibly good at humiliating one another online.
Especially in Black digital spaces.
We've mastered the clapback.
The drag.
The quote tweet.
The viral "read."
Our humor is brilliant.
Our creativity is unmatched.
But somewhere along the way, I wonder if we started rewarding humiliation more than dialogue.
The funniest insult often gets more engagement than the strongest argument.
The algorithm rewards performance over persuasion.
And when identity becomes easier to attack than ideas, identity becomes the target.
Disagree with me.
Tell me I'm wrong.
Challenge my work.
Challenge my politics.
Challenge my questions.
That's healthy.
That's necessary.
But answer the argument.
Not the bonnet.
Not my masculinity.
Not my mother.
The screenshots attached to this article aren't here to earn sympathy.
They're here as evidence of a pattern I've now witnessed across three separate controversies spanning six years.
Different issues.
Different audiences.
The same playbook.
I don't claim to have all the answers.
In fact, I'm asking a question.
Why are we becoming so comfortable with Black humiliation online?
Because if public humiliation has become our default response to disagreement, then we're not just changing how we argue.
We're changing who we become.
Suggested "Further Reading"
PlayPenn (2020)
WHYY — Theater artists speak out against PlayPenn leadership
PhillyVoice — Does Philly Theater Have a Race Problem? (2017)
Philly Inquirer — PlayPenn is addressing racism and sexual misconduct after its summer implosion
Harriet Tubman: Love Slave
On Reimagining Harriet Tubman: Art, Memory, and the Politics of Discomfort
When historical figures are flattened into icons, we lose their humanity. This op-ed examines reimagining Harriet Tubman, the politics of embodiment, and why discomfort in art is not disrespect but inquiry.
In recent weeks, Harriet Tubman: Love Slave has generated both engagement and criticism. The backlash is not surprising. When artists approach sacred historical figures through contemporary lenses, the response often reveals less about the work itself and more about what we believe history is permitted to be.
This is not a defense rooted in provocation. It is an argument grounded in scholarship, artistic lineage, and media literacy.
Harriet Tubman has long occupied a mythic space in the American imagination. She is often rendered as immovable, fearless, divinely ordained. Reverence, however, can become erasure. When we flatten individuals into icons, we remove the interior life that made their choices radical in the first place.
Harriet Tubman: Love Slave interrogates the conditions that shaped her. It situates intimacy within the legal architecture of enslavement. To examine love under captivity is not exploitation. It is inquiry.
The title reflects the violent legal reality of chattel slavery, in which Black women’s bodies were commodified. Sanitizing that language for comfort would be historically dishonest.
Some criticism has centered not only on the title but on the work’s use of rap, percussive rhythm, and contemporary movement language. For some viewers, the presence of hip-hop cadences or embodied choreography feels incongruent with a nineteenth-century figure. That reaction itself is revealing.
Black expressive forms have always functioned as counter-archives. Spirituals, blues, jazz, spoken word, and hip-hop are not departures from history; they are continuations of it. Rap, in particular, operates as a modern extension of oral tradition, compressing narrative, resistance, memory, and coded testimony into rhythm and breath.
To place Harriet Tubman within a sonic and physical vocabulary that resonates with contemporary Black culture is not an attempt at sensationalism. It is an assertion that historical memory is not frozen in sepia tone. It lives in the bodies and languages of those who inherit it.
Movement, including moments that some have reductively labeled as “twerking,” must also be understood within the politics of the Black body. Throughout American history, Black women’s bodies have been surveilled, regulated, hypersexualized, and simultaneously desexualized. Respectability politics often demands stillness and restraint in order to secure legitimacy. Yet Black performance traditions have consistently reclaimed the body as site of agency, pleasure, and resistance.
To deny historical figures access to embodied expression in performance is to reimpose a rigidity that history itself did not grant them.
The question becomes: who determines which aesthetic forms are appropriate for historical memory? And why are certain contemporary Black forms deemed irreverent while Eurocentric reinterpretations are celebrated as innovative?
Reimagining is not revisionism. It is critical engagement.
I hold a Master of Science in Digital Media Management from the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, where I studied narrative framing and the political economy of attention. In digital ecosystems, backlash follows predictable patterns: a provocative headline circulates, context compresses, commentary accelerates, and nuance struggles to keep pace. Cultural works become symbols within algorithmic debate.
Yet few critiques have engaged the dramaturgical questions at the center of the production:
What does intimacy look like under surveillance?
What does marriage mean within legal non-personhood?
How does personal attachment complicate revolutionary action?
These are not tabloid inquiries. They are scholarly ones.
Theatre has historically been a space where societies examine their anxieties. Greek tragedy reworked myth to confront power. Shakespeare destabilized monarchy through psychological interiority. Black playwrights across generations have reinterpreted American history through speculative and revisionist lenses.
To demand comfort from theatre is to misunderstand its function.
If this production provokes debate about how we remember, who we sanctify, and what forms of Black expression we deem permissible in sacred narrative space, then it is participating in a long tradition of cultural argument.
Art is not a monument.
It is an argument.
And arguments, when grounded in rigor and lineage, belong in the public square.