[ Musical tones play ] Welcome to "The First Twenty," I'm James King.

At the turn of this century, and with the prevalence of cell phones citizen-journalists are challenging the institutional narrative with one based in community.

By doing so, what does that do to those who bare witness for us?

We're pleased to present "Social," a film by Dehanza Rogers that explores, not only trauma in our culture, but also the joy and love that, in many ways, sustains us.

Particularly, via social media.

Enjoy.

♪♪ ♪♪ Narrator: Social media is this web we invite into our homes.

It's a curation of our own stories, experiences, and views of the world.

The "social" in social media has meant so much more since the pandemic.

From weekly Zoom board game nights, playing with friends across the country to scrolling and more scrolling and more scrolling through random collections of ideas, people, and unique content.

♪♪ But sometimes that scrolling takes you to moments of viral pain, where the injustices of the world are laid bare, some of the worst moments you could imagine.

And then somehow, some way you find yourself in a moment of transformative joy.

You find artists who become your favorites.

Find content creators who take up space.

And then there are some who have found the humor in how hard the last few years have been making the pandemic less pandemic-y.

Sometimes there's no rhyme nor reason why you end up where you do.

But that's the great thing about social media.

You never know where scrolling will take you.

[ Triumphant music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ So if you, if you write the number there, then you immediately get to take, write an X anywhere in the yellow box.

Oh, that's right.

That's right.

That's right.

And that's super valuable.

Calm down.

Jesus.

Are you talking about me, calm down?

No, please.

This one?

So that... Daye are you?

No.

Calm down.

Are you telling me to calm down?

Him!

[ Laughs ] Nice.

Geeze Louise.

This guy.

The hobby is a fun hobby.

I mean, I love the hobby because it keeps you going.

It keeps your mind fresh and it gives you challenges.

And it's so much fun to play board games.

Starla: It has changed our lives and we know the impact we've made and the reach we have around the world would never have happened without social media.

When, you got fans in New Zealand and Australia.

I was interviewed by a group in Brazil who follow us.

They were so happy to get me on their show.

And you know, we've got people in Poland.

So it's like right here from Omaha, Nebraska, we're reaching people around the world, literally.

And you really see, you know, they send us messages on social media all the time Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.

We get all these messages saying how much they, you know, they appreciate that we're out there and you know, it just it's amazing what they say is that "I'm glad you're out there because this hobby needs it."

And we -- they love what we're doing for the hobby.

And to tell you truth, it's selfish.

Yeah, we want, we gonna to do it because we don't want to see just us going into rooms anymore.

In order for other people Black, Hispanic, etc.

to feel like this is for them to, they need to see themselves.

White people have the luxury of seeing themselves in these games.

We want that luxury as well so that we can say this is for us too.

And that's what we fight for.

We want to see ourselves on the game box covers.

We want to see ourselves at the conventions.

We want to see ourselves working for the game companies.

That way, everybody feels like they are part and it's not one person runs it and owns this hobby.

And then we also would like themes that, you know, you know, give out to the Black experience of Black history.

And not just Africa.

Not just Africa.

We're talking about African Americans in this country.

They think if it's Black, it's got to be African.

No.

Yeah, or it's gotta be slavery.

You know, you got to be slavery.

That's a whole 'nother story, though, that's a whole 'nother story.

No one wants to be colonized.

No one wants to be enslaved.

At the time there was this belief, whether it was as genuine or know some people's genuine.

Some people they knew was BS, but there was that the colonizers are doing the colonized a favor.

That they're barbarians.

We have culture and we are rescuing them.

Where, you know, I know we're conquering you, we're taking your labor, we're taking your resources, but we're giving you our culture.

We're giving you are at the time, religion, Christianity.

We're, you know, lifting you and bringing you went to the center of civilization, so to speak.

And that infuses so much of how we tell our story, and it leads us to just erase different ways of being.

It leads us to question and doubt the sanity of people who resist.

How would you resist, how would you resist the light in persistent darkness?

That's exactly what people did.

All of the time.

Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly.

You can go up and down.

You can go through the America's all over the Americas, all over Africa and anywhere where there was colonialism happening, you had slave rebellions, you had resistance.

You, you can't tell the story without it.

And if you tell the story without resistance, you're telling it wrong.

Point blank.

Full stop.

Now the good thing about it is that there's one Polish company that has been really working, you know, heavily with us and that's Board and Dice.

Yes.

And they had a little issue with one of their designers just going off the deep end with racism.

And they knew that they had to do something to change that.

So they joined with us, we're diversity and inclusion consultants with them.

And then they also support us in everything that we do.

And that's Board and Dice.

Now we got all of their games and the deal with their games is that they're all, where are they?

They're in the what?

Mexico area?

There's the Central America and all that stuff.

But they said they told us if they ever do a game that involves, you know, the African continent or just Black folk, whatever, they're going to come to us first and they have they come to us with other games and say, "Hey, how does this look?

Are we doing it right?"

And that's what we like.

They let us kind of read the stuff before it goes out so that we make sure that they're not being offensive and more publishers need to invest in that.

Yes, they do.

I don't think they're "just games."

I never did.

I think they're cultural products and they participate in the presuppositions for good and ill of the larger culture in which we live.

♪♪ ♪♪ Girl: I want my dad!

Stop!

Stop!

-Sit up.

-No.

-You're acting like a child.

-I am a child!

Call my mama!

Call my mama.

[ Yelling ] Child: What are those for?

-It's for you.

-Come over here, honey.

-[Crying] -It's not gonna hurt.

Child #2: [Crying] No!

Don't put those on!

Don't put handcuffs on!

Please!

Black women scholars and, like, Black feminist thinkers that I follow on social media, there is a refusal to reproduce those images by like continuing to circulate them, and I think that that speaks to really trying to raise people's consciousness about how, about how desensitized we've become to watching, you know, Black girls trauma.

So I think that on the one hand, it can make people.

It can contribute to the idea that Black girls aren't children, because if you keep seeing these images over and over again, you start to think or some people start to think like, Oh well, there must be a reason for this.

So there must be, like, an explanation for these videos doing.

I think they are opening a space for us to begin talking about, you know, like why these videos continue to circulate.

Why do black girls continue to be violated in these, you know, public viral ways?

And so I think that that's at least the beginning by being able to have those conversations.

When I was teaching high school, I showed my students, my history students, a clip from the movie "Amistad" so that they can have a sense of like what the Middle Passage was like.

But before we watched it, like I, I prepped them.

I explain, like, okay, you're going to see some things that are going to be disturbing.

And, you know, like and then afterwards, we talked about it like, I gave them a space to process.

So one of my colleagues, who is not black, decided that she was going to use my activity in class, but she just showed them the clip.

And then it was like, okay, class dismissed.

And I'm like, that was not the purpose, so like, what I did was try to create a space for thinking and processing.

And I think that's what's missing a lot from the social media.

I mean, what my.

Yeah, that's what's missing from the social media.

That's more like what my colleague did is what we see a lot of times on social media.

♪♪ ♪♪ I talked to girls who told me that that was one of the things that they liked about being on Instagram specifically was that people would comment in and they were like, Yeah, people who don't even know you will comment and be like, "work it" or "that dress is fire" or, you know, stuff like that.

So it'll be, like, a million fire emojis or a million heart emojis.

But a lot of times, if there are, like, actual, like, you know, verbal comments, they will, you know, be encouraging, you know, like especially with prom, like, people say, "Oh, you look beautiful" or like "your melanin is poppin," you know, like stuff like that, like really specific kinds of compliments for Black girls.

Black people in general just have to deal with so much and so like to be able to hold on to joy.

Joy is a form of resistance, is a form of survival for Black people.

Joy is so important to Black girls and within Black girlhood because it allows them to hold on to their their childhood.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ It's helped me immensely.

I mean, it's been it's been kind of critical to my growth as an artist, to my exposure as an artist, to me connecting with other artists like, it's, it's like, I view it to be a necessary tool in my, in my bag as a as a photographer.

It helped me find my lane to specialize in Black cowboys.

You know, that's how I got got exposed to that culture.

That's how I got connected to that culture.

Then George Floyd got murdered.

And when George Floyd got murdered, social media exploded and there was all of a sudden this big conversation about elevating Black voices and supporting Black artists and at that point in, my career just went crazy.

It was it's the most tragic thing that it took the murder of a Black man for people to like, notice me as an artist.

But I hear it time and time again from other Black artists that that was the moment that they kind of really got recognized for the work that they had been doing for years.

And that was definitely the case for me, and that all happened on Instagram.

Big multinational brands, you know, approaching me to shoot campaigns.

I didn't even know what to charge because I had never made a dime.

It waned with some brands.

Some brands weren't really committed and really serious.

They they they looked at their Instagram feeds and kind of panicked because they were like, Oh, we don't have any black content, we need Black content.

And we have -- we need Black creators to create that content, because that's the conversation that's going on right now.

So I got hired by them during that summer and then never heard from them again.

But some brands like Wrangler really committed to like changing the entire face of their of their brand and really taking diversity more seriously.

When you go into white spaces, that are pristinely white, they have never even had like a light-skinned Black person and like not-- nothing and you start posting this content, people get offended because they've built their brands on white supremacy.

They get mad.

I mean, I just I just posted it.

Some content...

It's Black History Month.

So this is this whole month as my Super Bowl.

I get like 15 percent of my money in February.

A brand that I was working with posted this content and oh my god, the comments started out fine.

People were like, "Why do they got to be Black cowboys?

Why can't there just be cowboys?"

Standard stuff.

But the longer then they were like allies that came out and were like, "Hey, there need to be Black cowboys because this is an underrepresented community and you know, it's something that a lot of people don't know about.

Blah blah blah.

And they were like, then it devolved.

It started to get nasty, and they were like saying stuff like dog whistles, like 13-percenters, like Black people are 13% of the population, but they commit 51% of the crimes started to come in.

And then it devolved into conversations about genocide and and just like getting rid of these people altogether.

And a comment section on this went off.

And the brand didn't want to delete the comments because that's not a solution.

The brand started jumping in and saying, "We stand by our, our Black colleagues our Black athletes and the allies are in there fighting and then more racist people kind of piled in and I was just like.

I was -- I wish I could say I was stunned, I wasn't stunned.

I was just sitting there kind of watching it happen in real time, but.

That, that -- this work matters and this work is volatile, this work has a lot of importance in a lot of different spaces, and I forget about that.

I think it's just like a nice picture of a Black cowboy riding a horse.

But it unfortunately is a, is a statement, it's a stake in the sand, it says, like, look at this, look at this image, you know, support this image, love this image or hate this image, but you can't be neutral about it because it's punching you in the soul, you know, like.

Gordon Parks says a choice of weapons and my camera is a, is a weapon.

Work that I'm pushing out and social media is causing is stirring up emotions and people reverberating and echoing in that space.

It's kind of scary.

It's kind of like, more than I needed to be.

I'm just like, I'm just like old dad.

And I just like taking pictures.

You know, I'm not I'm not at all trying to like do anything other than this, I do what I love to do with the subject matter that I'm passionate about, but, like, the reaction to the work forces me to, like, take a stance and forces me to support it and advocate for it.

Isa: Not allowing tattoos in a professional setting It's not only a legacy of fascism, but anti-Indigenous colonialism and white supremacy.

So it's time to introduce one of my least-favorite-people ever Adolf Loos.

He wrote this famous essay, "Ornament and Crime."

This essay was central to architecture education and often still is today.

But not only was incredibly influential to design, it's literally just a white supremacist rant.

He specifically attacks the traditional tattoos of the people who are native to Papua New Guinea.

He calls them not only uncivilized, but amoral and childlike.

He championed minimalism as a way of showing that Europeans were literally more advanced and more human.

As an architect and decorator, he famously designed this tailor shop in Austria.

He was also obsessed with suits and professional attire.

He specifically praised the English for how they spread colonialism around the world through the suit.

This horrific cultural erasure was, of course, one of the prime objectives of the residential schools, forcing people to wear suits, not allowing tattoos, cutting people's hair.

That was the colonizers way of showing themselves that they had, "spread civilization."

I would still be doing the research if social media didn't exist because, but probably not in the same way.

I'm going to show you a little bit of my to-read list.

I am very close to being done with "Orientalism."

I'm going to be talking a little bit also about how it relates to this book, "Chromaphobia."

I am so excited to read this book, "Race and Modern Architecture."

This is supposed to give a really good overview of how race has factored into modern architecture.

Mostly, the race-ism part.

At the beginning of the, the of the pandemic, like, actually no, actually a year into the pandemic that I was on TikTok, I really liked TikTok, and I was, I was like, alright, I want to make a couple of videos of me like, a couple of, like, weird little, like, painting videos, and no one really seems to respond to them.

And then I did a video about about these skeletons that are covered in, that are covered in jewels and gold.

And I had -- and that people -- that we really got a huge reaction out of it.

And so I realized that I have this topic, which is essentially which is ornament and minimalism versus maximalism and cultural erasure, which is something that I've always been thinking about and always tried to find ways of connecting together, but I never really thought that other people would be interested in it.

Did you know that from the 16th and 19th century, the Catholic Church would take skeletons from the Roman catacombs, claim that they were saints and then decorate them lavishly with gold and jewels?

You might think there just be a few dozen or so, but there are actually thousands of these skeletons.

Found throughout Austria, Germany and Switzerland, these are also known as "Katakomben heiligen" or holy bodies from the catacombs.

Once in a while on TikTok, we'll all remind each other like we're not having these conversations outside in our everyday lives.

And even like other parts, of very close -- of other parts of TikToks, we're not people aren't very aren't interested in this.

I'm in a situation where I've had amazing professors and I have, I'm very deep in in these conversations and I have all these people in my community teaching me about this stuff all the time.

But the funny thing about social media is that we all create our, we all create our bubbles where we don't necessarily have to be talking about these things.

I'm not really sure what what it is.

But I can't quite sum up what leads us down the path that leads that we get let down on social media.

Conversations that are about race and gender and ingenuity and queerness.

But they could also just be about buttons and frog.

That's the part of TikTok that I'm on.

-♪ On the last day of Black History Month ♪ ♪ Some white folks said to me ♪ ♪ "We stand for the anthem," ♪ ♪ "Black people owned slaves too," ♪ ♪ "I have racist parents" ♪ ♪ "I came from hood," "We voted for Obama," ♪ ♪ "I'm a quarter Black and native," ♪ ♪ "I should be allowed to say the n-word," ♪ ♪ "You can't gatekeep hair," "My people ended slavery," ♪ ♪ "Irish, were slaves too," ♪ ♪ "I've been called a cracker," ♪ ♪ "Why can't all lives matter?"

♪ ♪ "There's Black in my family," ♪ ♪ "Is this reparations?"

"Is this affirmative action?"

♪ ♪ "Keep your protests peaceful," ♪ ♪ "I'm friends with Black people," ♪ ♪ "Please solve Black-on-Black crime," ♪ ♪ "Where are the Black leaders?"

♪ ♪ "Just stop talking about it," ♪ ♪ "Anyone can be racist," "I'm white and I struggle," ♪ ♪ "It's reverse racism," "No critical race theory," ♪ ♪ "What about white history?"

"Wasn't alive for slavery," ♪ ♪ "We don't even see color," ♪ ♪ "Do you need a month?

Y'all got B.E.T."

♪ I'm the person that will never shut up when it comes to holidays, when it talks about politics and stuff.

I'm the person that that people give a warning about that, that like, yeah they're going to they'll never stop talking if you bring up such and such.

So I think that once I hit social media because like in my life, like when I express those things, people are just like, "Yeah, I don't care."

I don't want to know about it.

I'm working blah blah blah.

But when I hit social media, I really didn't expect anybody to actually follow me or care about what I had to say, because in my personal life, nobody listens to me.

So I was just like, "Oh, this won't be anything."

I'll just post the things that I love to do.

I'll do the music I love and I won't get anything.

And then it just blew up, and I'm surprised myself honestly, three or four thousand followers in like a day.

And then I found out somebody I've been following since a child like Questlove reposted my video.

The Questlove, like the Questlove.

Like, no, like, I have something that I didn't mean to like be something.

And then people will, like, talk about how like, "This brought me to tears."

I'm like, "It brought you to tears?"

Like, like, I didn't know that I could make somebody feel something, you know, with just words.

You know, that, that's like one of the most, honestly, most powerful things on the planet is just like you can, make somebody feel something if you put the words in the right way, put the emotions in the right way, and it's just like, I want to be a master of that.

I want to be a master of cultivating like experiences and emotion.

Our generation is, and the generation below me is way more socially inclined.

It's like social media is the way that you speak to the generation, to the younger generations.

It's just like especially through memes and pop culture.

I really like the idea of like having really upbeat songs, but just making them about like horrific things like capitalism and misogyny and stuff.

It's just like, Oh my gosh, this is such a catchy song, but oh, these lyrics are horrible.

It's just like, well, welcome to America, because that's exactly what America is.

It's a... it's a beautiful place with a whole bunch of darkness.

It's just like it's it's just painted on.

♪ My country tis of thee ♪ ♪ Manifest misery ♪ ♪ Just for dream ♪ ♪ Land of mass gen'cide ♪ ♪ Fracking what's been redlined ♪ ♪ Slavery transformed to prison time ♪ ♪ Let freedom sting ♪ ♪ Earth is ghetto, I wanna leave ♪ ♪ Can you beam me up?

I'm out on the street ♪ ♪ By the corner store, you know, the one on 15th ♪ ♪ Got a bright shirt on, so easy I'm easy to see ♪ I was just, you know, really fed up with everything.

I had even left America and went to Mexico to stay, thinking things would be better.

But yet, the chaos of the planet followed me.

So that's where it would.

Instead of it being America is ghetto or U.S.A. is ghetto, it ended up being on Earth because... ♪ I can't reach my planet ♪ ♪ But I need to leave ♪ ♪ You should see these people, it's hard to believe ♪ ♪ how they treat each other ♪ ♪ It's hard to conceive ♪ ♪ Oh, Earth is ghetto, I wanna leave ♪ I was actually staying on 15th Street in Mexico and I was at the store and I was looking at the fact that the store had bars on the window.

And they don't normally have it, but they had it there as a measure to keep people from going in the store.

You had to try to explain what was going on.

You had to try to explain what you wanted because they didn't have people going in the store for COVID protection.

And I was, "Man, this is just ghetto.

Ghetto just following me everywhere."

So it didn't take me that long.

It took me between maybe 15, 30 minutes because of that, just waiting at the store and trying to explain it.

And just being at the store writing it and then getting home and sitting at the piano and writing it.

And a lot of people reach out to me and say, "Oh, the song got me through this" or "this song really meant a lot to me and I feel like this to."

I have a song out now called "Never Drinking Again," and I have a lot of people reaching out to me saying that they stopped drinking.

And this song helped a little bit with that where they love this song because they're currently trying to stop drinking and which I've, which I've stopped in nine months now.

♪ I'd like to get my life right ♪ ♪ Soon as I get through the night ♪ ♪ Some things look better in light ♪ ♪ Maybe tomorrow I'll try ♪ ♪ To wash all my troubles away ♪ I do feel like I definitely have found an online community, of support of people and people that, you know, just want to see me succeed.

So I definitely feel like I found that.

Which is crazy because I haven't met these people, a lot of these people in person.

I've met some of them in person, but I haven't met so many of those people in person, in person.

It's overwhelming sometimes to think about how many people know I exist, so.

[ Laughs ] It's not like I'm a constant thought, but it's just it's just like just wrapping your mind around the fact that that many people know of your songs or a song because it may not even be I've had people not even hear that song and follow me.

♪ Got a bright shirt on, so I'm easy to see ♪ ♪ I've been down here stranded indefinitely ♪ ♪ I can't reach my planet but I need to leave ♪ ♪ You should see these people, it's hard to belive ♪ ♪ How they treat each other, it's hard to conceive ♪ ♪ Oh, Earth is ghetto, I wanna leave ♪ ♪ Earth is ghetto, I wanna lea-ea-ea-ea-ve ♪ ♪ I wanna leave ♪ I did not expect the remixes at all.

I just kind of went with it and people are like, Well, what did you do to get people to remix that?

I did nothing.

[ Singing in Spanish ] ♪♪ Okay, the music, the rhythm is great I'm gonna share it because it sounds great and I really appreciate it.

So I just, I was just sharing it because I really appreciate it.

People relating to that.

♪ Earth is ghetto, I wanna to leave ♪ ♪ Can you beam me up?

I'm out on the street ♪ ♪ By the corner store, You know, the one 15th ♪ ♪ Got a bright shirt on, so I'm easy to see ♪ ♪ I've been down here stranded, indefinitely ♪ ♪ I can't reach my planet.

♪ ♪ But I need to leave.

♪ ♪ You should see these people, it's hard to believe ♪ ♪ How they treat each other, it's hard to conceive ♪ ♪ Oh, Earth is ghetto, I wanna leave ♪ ♪ Oh, Earth is ghetto, I wanna lea-ea-ea-ea-ve ♪ ♪ I wanna leave ♪ Narrator: It could be the end of the day or the start of the day.

And as you navigate content, leading you to the good and the bad, it's all worth it when you find your community, artists, and content creators and when you're able to find the "social" in social media.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪