sharks + planes as formerly seen on Twitter

This has been an issue in quite a few online lefty spaces I've been in, and for the bigger picture I am in no way able to say why it happens because I myself am usually pretty far from the particular pulse of black culture, online or off. (Not really by choice as much as being too tolerant of being the only black voice in a group...)

It's not explicity for black people and some could even argue the show is more for white voyuers, but not having an equivalent of black twitter does hit sometimes. It's part of the reason why i still hang on to my Twitter, IG, and FB.

I've really enjoyed moving to cohost and fedi. They're much more positive overall, but in addition to not wanting to lose contact with certain friends, there's not really an equivalent or corollary to "Black Twitter". I cant even fully verbalize what that would look like for cohost, but i know it's not here yet.

I'm also at a loss for how to "fix" this. It's not exactly something that can change by coding around it, although @chimerrir makes some good points above me.

If i had to make a suggestion, we may have to make something similar to a black students union. Not even a fully official group or account, but some way to concentrate the black users we do have and make the black content more easily discoverable. Even if it doesnt increase the amount of melanin users, we'll at least have more black posts we can see on the site.

I learned two things from the conversation around this new animated TV special about the least developed recurring Peanuts character:

1. Charles Schulz fought tooth and nail to get Franklin into the comic strip in the first place, because out of segregation-era prejudice against African Americans a lot of newspapers believed Black people were not their target audience. (Imagine not being the target audience for the news.)

2. After 50 years, the Black community still hasn’t forgiven Lee Mendelsohn and Bill Melendez for putting Franklin on the other side of the Thanksgiving table as the other kids, in a terrible folding chair, in the 1973 animated TV special A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

Apparently this entire new Peanuts special, a collaboration between Charles Schulz’s son and grandson and “Jump Start” cartoonist Robb Armstrong (whose surname Schulz gave Franklin in homage), is built around these two specific things.

Here's some context from Frankin's first and second ever appearances in the comic strip:

That second-ever appearance has a tremendous understated poignancy to it that you’d only pick up if you understood all the shit that was going down in America on that day in 1968.

"Is your whole family here at the beach, Franklin?"
"No, my dad is over in Vietnam."
"My dad’s a barber…he was in a war too, but I don’t remember which one."

It’s pretty powerful, in a way I totally would have missed as a kid, that bonding over two specific cultural things, both of them quintessentially American—the personal relationship between civilians and the trauma of a faraway war, and the connection between the love of baseball and a nuanced understanding of personal failure—is what turned a chance encounter between this little white Boomer kid and this little black Boomer kid, three months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, into a lifelong friendship.

And not knowing the timing of Franklin’s first appearance, with the racist foundations of the institutions of American civilization coming under ruthless scrutiny by the people it most oppressed, at a level of visibility as of yet unseen since the days of the Civil War, I also would have totally missed the poignancy of Charlie Brown and Franklin’s first conversation being Franklin noticing that Charlie’s sandcastle is crooked and Charlie admitting that he has a reputation for building things poorly.

You wouldn’t pick this up reading through Peanuts strips in order from a printed anthology or an online archive, but you absolutely would in a newspaper, where so many of the real life stories you already read before you got to the comics page would have also been on these topics.

Franklin was initially created to judge America, compassionately, for its sins. There’s a gravitas to his tendency to quote the Old Testament.

"Do you like baseball, Charlie Brown?"
"My problem is that I like baseball too much."

This has been an issue in quite a few online lefty spaces I've been in, and for the bigger picture I am in no way able to say why it happens because I myself am usually pretty far from the particular pulse of black culture, online or off. (Not really by choice as much as being too tolerant of being the only black voice in a group...)

All this talk of Omelas reminds me how Strange New Worlds' big solution to the child torture utopia was, "If you have a starship, you can just fly away."