Twitterus Avis Fucus or “Brown Twitter Bird”. It’s origins and legacy, as explained by me, PBG. Gather ’round, chirren.

Yesterday, there was a complete firestorm of what I like to call “Colored Angst” that swept far and wide through “Negronia” (that’s my word for The Black Community, which I got from either DJ Stylus or Sister Toldja. don’t remember which now that I’ve been saying it so long). Here’s the tea:

As it happened, there was an article published on Slate.com Monday by Farahad Manjoo about how Black people use Twitter and something he referred to as “Black Tags”. Yeah, whatever. He had this lil’ guy as a picture to go along with his article, which I found amusing in the way that we in Negronia usually find non-blacks’ attempts at “analyzing” and “figuring us out”:

"For shizzle?"

Original graphic by Eben Meyer

I wasn’t the only one who took some sort of exception to this little fitted cap brown bird being used as a representative of the Black Twitter Populace. I found out that @InnyVinny of InnyVinny.com (of course) thought Mr. Manjoo was well ummm…missing the mark with us, like so many before him. So she wrote this article –>> here <<– shouting out to all around The Innanets that “BLACK PEOPLE ARE NOT A MONOLITH” and included a nice array of Brown Birds to reiterate that point. Even Danielle at The Black Snob had her say so on the issue.

Ya’ll know me. I immediately snatched up a Brown Twitter Bird of my very own from InnyVinny.com.

"My head wrap is more conscious than yours."

After I got my Brown Bird with the Shaharazad Ali/Miss Cleo style head wrap on, I began to think about all the things that we as Black people, the “Brown Twitter Birds”, tend to “chirp” about. That’s EVERYTHING, from the very mundane to the most profound, all based on our wide variety of experiences day to day. So I decided to give “Brown Twitter Bird” a voice with this tweet here:

The rest, as they say, was Twitter History. DJ Stylus put a motion before the Council of Negronia (that means he just tweeted some shyt) that the funniest Brown Twitter Bird tweets be collected and blogged for posterity. I immediately assigned myself the monumental task of acting as the Official Scribe of Brown Twitter Bird. *snapz & wing flutterz*

In the tradition of Friday’s Funniest Tweets here on DirtyPrettyThangs.com, I present to you Brown Twitter Bird’s Funniest Tweets!
Enjoy:

As you can see, even in humor, the tweets of the Brown Twitter Bird span the vast, beautiful darkness of Negronia’s cultural landscape. This is who we are on Twitter and everywhere else: rich, diverse, attractive, repulsive, insightful, silly, up and down and all around. There hasn’t been a box built yet that can contain the Black Experience, stop trying. Seriously.

In my search for these tweets, I came across quite a few that weren’t too happy with Brown Twitter Bird. So what? There’s always somebody not happy with something. I’m glad we were able to snatch that Brown Twitter Bird up, give him some flavor with the help of Photoshop and tell the entire Innanets who we are, in our own way.

My favorite Brown Twitter Bird? This fly chick (#seewhatIdidthere) by Huny.

"Hey, boo. Hay."

Now, I hear that #BrownTwitterBird made it to the top trends for a little while yesterday. If anybody saw that, please testify in the comments section. Also, if you saw any other tweets I didn’t post here but you think are worthy, please link in the comments as well! Click here to check the stats on the #browntwitterbird hashtag.

Keep tweeting, Negronia!! According to this absolutely laudable post from Dr.Goddess, President Obama has signed the Brown Twitter Birds into law…

"We hold these truths to be self-evident. All Twitter Birds are created equally. Yes, even ya'll. Amen." Original Graphic by http://lidia-anain.com/

So hopefully that means we’ll get some protection from PETA or something. You know how diligent they can be!

~pbg