The Main Themes and Experiences Shared with the Hashtag #BlackintheIvory: A Qualitative Analysis

Abstract

BackgroundThe movement #BlackintheIvory gave Black academics an opportunity to connect through a social media platform allowing them to share common experiences in the pursuit of higher education. Through the analysis of Twitter posts, using the hashtag #BlackintheIvory, this study investigates the main themes identified among Black scholars in academia and their shared experiences with teaching, mentoring, collegiality, identity, service, and racism. MethodsUsing the Twitter API, we isolated all publicly available tweets, which can include text, images, and links to websites, posted with the hashtag #BlackintheIvory on the Twitter website (www.twitter.com) from the inception of the hashtag in June 2020 to the end of December 2020. To evaluate the tweets, we categorized the tweets inductively. Based on the content of the posts, we identified 6 themes: Teaching, Mentoring, Collegiality, Identity, Service, and Racism. ResultsOur search yielded a total of 12,538 original posts, including tweets between inception in June 2020 to December 2020 from profiles made public (excluding modified tweets and duplicate tweets). We selected and analyzed the top retweeted 2500 tweets, which is 20% (2500/12538) of the total number of downloaded tweets. The greatest percentage of posts were about Teaching (881; 35%), followed by Service (441; 18%) and Racism (414; 17%). The remaining tweets were categorized as Collegiality (388; 15%), Identity (210; 8%), and Mentoring (166; 7%) of the total number of tweets from June-December 2020. ConclusionThe experiences, perspectives, and narratives among the Black diaspora within #BlackintheIvory are not uniform. The commonality exists within the structural systemic racism which impacts Black academics within the ivory tower, this study is a resounding wake-up call for action. FundingThis study was not subject to any funding