Why Black Washingtonians are seeking friendship on social media

Myah Paden, 25, of Uptown, was scrolling on TikTok last year when they saw a video inviting people of color to join See(attle) Friends, an all-ages queer social group in Seattle.

Shortly after, Paden attended a gathering at group founder Loki Dyvine Blaque-Peak’s First Hill home to watch the 1999 film “Jawbreaker” while eating Oreos and sipping oat milk boba tea.

“It was really fun. It’s just a super wholesome type of group,” said Paden. “Everybody came because they want to make friends. They want to make connections.”

Paden is among the many Black Seattleites who use social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to find community and form real-life friendships. These online social spaces build on years of Black Washingtonians forging their own connections in the Pacific Northwest.

Blaque-Peak said they created the See(attle) Friends group last year to help queer people of color find one another.

“I needed a space with people who looked more like me,” Blaque-Peak said. “For Black people, there isn’t a space that feels comfortable for us.”

Black social clubs in Washington have long served as hubs for bonding, organizing for racial justice, and havens away from racial discrimination in a predominantly white state. The movement to increase Black social circles’ visibility follows slight growth in Washington’s Black population. In 2020, 5.8% of Washingtonians — about 446,200 people — identified as Black, compared to 4.8% in 2010, according to U.S. census data. Today, the resurgence of these virtual spaces comes as many communities of color reestablish connections lost during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Black people always find each other,” said Timeka Tounsel, assistant professor of Black studies in communication at the University of Washington. “In particular, when we are in environments that are hostile … or environments where we simply don’t see a lot of other people like us.”

Paden, who moved from Michigan to Seattle eight months ago, said they struggled to meet other Black people in the Emerald City. However, joining See(attle) Friends, which operates groups on Facebook and Instagram, helped fill that gap.

“I had a hard time figuring out where people of color, let alone Black people, were hiding in the city,” Paden said. “It was something I had to go out and search for.”

Similarly, Katerina Canyon, 54, said she turned to social-circle-building smartphone apps like Bumble BFF to make new friendships. Last year, Canyon befriended Julia Armenta after they both swiped right on the app.

“There are so many people who are feeling the same way I do,” said Canyon, who lives in northeast Seattle and enjoys finding fellow tea drinkers. “Because they either lost their friend connection because of the pandemic or they’ve had friends who used to live in Seattle that moved away.”

Social networks provide more opportunities for Black people to connect around shared experiences and interests, Tounsel said.

“It has closed the gap that might have otherwise existed because of physical distance.”

Ashley McGirt-Adair, a Black therapist and founder of the WA/CA Therapy Fund Foundation, said the Seattle Freeze, a Northwest social phenomenon that some argue makes it difficult to form friendships here, could negatively impact a person’s mental health. Many of her clients have faced similar challenges cultivating their relationships, particularly “expats who may have come from communities that were more diverse than Seattle,” McGirt-Adair said.

Forming Black community before the internet

Before these spaces appeared online, churches were the original hubs to gather with other Black people, said Stephanie Johnson-Toliver, president of the Black Heritage Society of Washington State. After more than 130 years of service, First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Seattle and Calvary Baptist Church in Spokane are some of the state’s oldest Black institutions for gathering and worship.

“As Black people were coming to Seattle, they were looking for places to feel comfortable and be invited,” Johnson-Toliver said. “They started forming their own clubs, usually out of the churches, because that’s where people first gravitated toward for comfort and community.”

In 1912, the Dumas Club was created in Seattle’s Chinatown International District as a venue for dancing, gambling and drinking. Club owners Russell “Noodles” Smith and Burr “Blackie” Williams went on to own the Black and Tan Club, a popular jazz nightclub at the boundary of the Chinatown ID and the Central District at 12th Avenue and South Jackson Street. Smith and Williams bought the venue, formerly known as Alhambra, in 1922 and renamed it in 1932.

During the early to mid-20th century, other Black social clubs and organizations formed across Seattle, including the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA in 1919 and the Washington Rhinestone Club, a nonprofit focused on uplifting young Black women through educational support, in 1952.

Carol Bell, former president of the Rhinestones, said a longtime member invited her to lunch to join the group after meeting her at church.

“It is a sisterhood,” said Bell, who now mentors other young women in the club. “This gave me a group of Black women who were established to … support me in everything that I was doing.”

COVID-19 posed a major disruption to social gatherings and worship communities, which forced some to seek out friendships virtually. While plenty of Black people continue to form bonds in person, others are still moving online to find connection. The popularity of online groups builds on a long history of Black tech founders creating virtual communities for Black people on the internet.

Founded in 1999, BlackPlanet became one of the earliest and largest online Black communities for people to socialize and discuss politics. In the late 2000s, Black Twitter emerged as a space where Black users could connect across shared interests, news, culture and commentary. Popular hashtags such as #BlackGirlMagic and #BlackLivesMatter became important avenues to celebrate and grieve or rally for support for victims of police violence.

“Black communities, especially online, seem to be always engaged in intervening in larger political discourses at the same time that they’re experiencing the pleasure of sharing space with one another,” Tounsel said.

Hashtagged messages can have a unifying effect on social media users, too, “[w]here boundaries of class, education, gender and geography might otherwise stratify Twitter’s Black users,” wrote social media researcher and scholar Meredith Clark in “Black Twitter: Building Connection Through Cultural Conversation.”

“The use of culturally resonant hashtags affords them the opportunity to form multilevel networks online, developing a sense of online community,” Clark wrote.

“Black in Edmonds”

When Alicia Crank, 48, created the Facebook series Black in Edmonds in 2020, she wanted to call out racial injustice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. The group later became a lifeline for Crank and others to form connections during the pandemic.

“I was so afraid of feeling so isolated,” she said. “It probably saved my sanity.”

Crank, who moved to the majority-white suburb north of Seattle in 2014 after being priced out of California’s Bay Area, said she now has friends who check in on her outside of the group.

“‘Hey, we’ll make sure you’re doing OK,’” Crank recalled her friends saying. “I wouldn’t have had that if the Black in Edmonds group hadn’t started.”

Social media expert Tounsel said online groups also fill a void in Black cultural spaces, including barbershops, hair salons and other community centers that have been lost due to gentrification.

“Those spaces are disappearing,” Tounsel said. “A lot of Black businesses double as community organizations. As those disappear, that also feeds the isolation and the need for connection online.”

Beating the Seattle Freeze

Derrick Love, 40, and Tanise Love, 35, were inspired to create Sync Seattle, a networking and social group for Black people, after moving to Seattle from North Carolina and confronting the Seattle Freeze.

“People were definitely more introverted, or less likely to open up a conversation or respond to a head nod, and we hadn’t really experienced that,” Tanise said. “It felt a little cold. It literally felt a little frozen for a minute.”

Derrick said the abrupt change was unsettling.

“There were days where we didn’t see a Black person,” Derrick said. “Of course, COVID and the pandemic lock down was part of that, but we were used to us everywhere, and then coming here, it’s like, ‘Oh, where are we?’”

The married couple said they had to reset their expectations. Last year, they began organizing mixers for Black Washingtonians at local Black-owned businesses like Poco Bar and Lounge on Capitol Hill and on the rooftop of Noir Lux Candle Bar in Belltown, among other venues.

“If we meet people, we’re going to have to be intentional about putting ourselves in places that we want to be,” Derrick said.

Bumble BFF user Canyon, however, said she felt embraced by born-and-bred Seattleites.

“People talk about the Seattle Freeze, but I have not seen that,” Canyon said, adding that most residents are conscious of the racial disparities. “I think a lot of people in Seattle are sensitive to that and they try … to be as welcoming as possible.”

Outside of combating loneliness by forming social circles in predominantly white spaces, virtual Black communities are also part of a larger resistance to the history of racism in this country.

“We’ve always had to invent ways because we weren’t supposed to be forming friendships, we weren’t supposed to be having fun,” said McGirt-Adair, the therapist. “But that isn’t typical to how we were created. We were created to constantly be in connection with other human beings.”