Did the Black Panther Movie Make Blacks Blacker? Examining Black Racial Identity on Twitter Before and After the Black Panther Movie Release

摘要

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(l, 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.