Abstract
The Black Panther movie release in early 2018 has been a phenomenon not only in the entertainment industry but also in American society. Film critics and major media have claimed that this award-winning movie has played significant roles in the African American community. Nevertheless, little research has been done to confirm such effects. Using publicly available data from Twitter as a proxy to measure black racial identity, we found that there were significant differences in the prevalence of Twitter users having black identifiers (i.e., African/Afro American, black, woke) in their bios before and after the Black Panther movie release, F(2, 858) = 92.097, p < .001, and between black male and female users, F(1, 858) = 19, 239, p < .001. How these findings illuminate the association between the Black Panther movie and black racial identity, which may then shed more light on how the former may affect the latter through the lens of social identity theory is discussed.
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Notes
- 1.
In this study, African American is used interchangeably with Black.
- 2.
It should be noted that one million is an arbitrary multiplier. Its advantage is to provide whole numbers for analysis rather than discussing fractional percentages with multiple decimal points.
- 3.
We also performed two-way between-subject ANOVA with cutoff points on January 29th, 2018 – the premier of the Black Panther movie – and mixed ANOVA with observed dates treated as a repeated measure. These analyses yielded similar results. Both factors were significant at p < .05, while the interaction was not.
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We would like to thank the Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS) for material support and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
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Firmansyah, F.M., Jones, J.J. (2019). Did the Black Panther Movie Make Blacks Blacker? Examining Black Racial Identity on Twitter Before and After the Black Panther Movie Release. In: Weber, I., et al. Social Informatics. SocInfo 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11864. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34971-4_5
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