Today, 6 March, is the first ever BlackOut Day.
What's BlackOut Day? Glad you asked!
According to one of the creators of the event, Tumblr user expect-the-greatest, it's about "celebrating the beauty of Blackness", something he describes as being of "the UTMOST importance".
In his own words: "I got inspired to propose Blackout day after thinking "Damn, I'm not seeing enough Black people on my dash". Of course I see a constant amount of Black celebrities but what about the regular people? Where is their shine? When I proposed it, I thought people would think it was a good idea, but not actually go through with implementing it. Luckily people wanted to get behind the idea, and @recklessthottie created the #BlackOut tag.
So lots and lots of people have been uploading photos of themselves and posting them to social media sites – Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook key among them.
And the images have been diverse, in terms of sexual identity, religion, age, body shape and size, and geographical location. Many of them have incredibly moving words attached. And all of them have one thing in common: The subjects of the photos are black.
Like this massively retweeted one:
Why is black literally SOOO damn beautiful #BlackOutDay
And this one.
#blackoutday SO CUTE!!!
This one as well.
And this one.
Twitter exclusively shared with BuzzFeed this reverb that visualises the volume of the #BlackOutDay conversation. There have been 160,000 mentions of #BlackOutDay within the last 24 hours alone.
And the numbers are on the up.
The other creator of #BlackOutDay, nukirk.digi.tal, told BuzzFeed the event is about controlling the narrative.
"Originally I thought the idea was, like, just a fun thing," he told us over the phone. "But as I got into it, I sort of realised it also backs up the ideals I talk about: seeing more diversity in our media.
"Because even though our culture is curated, they are not our narratives. And this is our chance to use this media to take back the narrative and to diversify it."
So for the last several hours, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, and Facebook have been seeing a steady stream of beautiful black people.
All Melanin.
All Damn Day.
So how does Nukirk feel about this?
"I was in awe," he said. "It made me feel really, really good.
"And even though there's opposition to it, even though there's stuff I could have done better – to know that there's people who've been on Tumblr for years but never really connected, to know there are now connections and people who are so motivated that they're doing Tumblr meet-ups now, I mean..."
"I feel like I contributed to something a little bit bigger than myself. It's a lovely time."
Perhaps one of the loveliest stories is this widely shared Tumblr post.
Anything that inspires a tweet this wonderful is a great thing.
scrollin through the #BlackOutDay tags on here & tumblr like