About

Brown Twitter Bird is a cartoon character and Twitter hashtag that arose from a Slate article in 2010.

Origin

Slate decided to post an article about “How Black People Use Twitter” in August 2010, the article was regarded as something between offensive and ridiculous by many black bloggers and so the mockery began. (The Slate article made the mistake of treating black people as a monolith and the mistake of making condescending assumptions about how black folks relate to technology.) Since the article used an image of the (normally blue) bird that representes twitter, but instead with brown feathers, and a stereotypically "black" baseball cap, many people online began creating parodies of this image. Some of these images mocked common stereotypes about blackness, other customized the twitter-bird to match their personality. This was accompanied by a wave of tweets on the subject.

External References