If the racial discrimination lawsuit against Tesla is any indication, then it makes sense that the news about Elon Musk's possible takeover of Twitter has unsettled many of the social media platform's Black users. Photo: CNN

While the site has become increasingly venomous over the years, it has also allowed Black users to deepen kinship bonds and elevate movements. Now, that community-building might be in jeopardy.

"There's an innate sense of dread," Meredith Clark, an associate professor at the School of Journalism and the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, told CNN. "And I think that it comes not just from the announcement that Musk might buy Twitter."

Clark explained that, for many Black Americans, the past decade has been rife with social and political turbulence.

There was the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, the 2016 election that installed in the White House a man who struggled to condemn White supremacy and the 2020 contest during which plenty of Republican Party leaders suggested that Black votes shouldn't count, on top of so much else.

"The only reason that (the Musk announcement) is sort of on the same wave as those other events is that this is a person who has made a number of statements that are concerning to Black people," Clark said.

"He's a son of apartheid. He's in the middle of a discrimination lawsuit brought by Black employees at his Tesla plants."

Clark minced no words, "You have to be concerned about what it means not only for another billionaire to be playing with money in a way that affects something that represents connection and that you enjoy but for this billionaire, with a specific history, to be the person behind that intended purchase."

Clark minced no words, "You have to be concerned about what it means not only for another billionaire to be playing with money in a way that affects something that represents connection and that you enjoy but for this billionaire, with a specific history, to be the person behind that intended purchase."