- Mar 2021
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www.wired.com www.wired.com
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When this happens, Blackness—or what is perceived as Black identity—thrives outside of context. It's diluted and remixed to a dizzying degree. Black people lose control over how their humanity is presented.
Is this not an ever present factor of life though? In the US, the media has controlled how the humanity of white people, black people, Arab people, and everyone else in the world is presented. In North Korea, Russia, and China, they've controlled how the humanity of Americans is presented. Africans certainly have zero control over how our humanity is presented to the rest of the world.
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- Aug 2020
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www.wired.com www.wired.com
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“There were little white girls slicking their edges and drawing their eyebrows all weird,” Roberts says. “They would wrap tape around their fingers to be their fake nails. They'd put hoops on. When you call them out, it's, ‘Anyone of any race can be a Hot Cheeto Girl.’ No sweetheart, we know what you're doing. We know that the Hot Cheeto Girl is just a derivative of the ghetto girl, the hood rat, the Shanaynay that people used to call Black and Latinx women.”
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The most effective videos come down to one factor: how well a creator grabs hold of our attention. That is to say, how deftly they make what we watch theirs. Blackness is a proven attention getter. Its adoption is racism, custom-fit.
This last line needs more explanation. Why is its adoption racism?
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the tenets of minstrel performance remain alive today in television, movies, music, and, in its most advanced iteration, on the internet.
I wonder if it's the history of minstrelsy that makes this a problem. When I think of people laughing at minstrel shows, I think they were laughing at the racist caricatures of black people on show, so it was hateful entertainment and their joy was derived from it. When I think of what people are doing today on TikTok, it doesn't immediately seem to be for the same reasons. And the laughter doesn't seem to come from a place of hatred of black people. A person painting themselves black and making a "joke" about black people being stupid feels very different from someone imitating Nene Leakes to call an airline ghetto. Is it possible to imitate black culture innocently?
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In a video uploaded to TikTok last December, a white teen saunters through an airport terminal, roller suitcase in hand. As he passes the check-in counter for Spirit—the notoriously awful low-cost airline—a look of mild irritation crosses his face. He glances left, then right. “Whew chile, the ghetto,” he says, elongating the o in ghetto. Only it's not the young man's voice we hear. It's that of reality diva NeNe Leakes, whose audio was pulled, edited, and resynchronized for the eight-second clip.
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As Blackmon puts it, “Be clear: Without Black culture, TikTok wouldn't even be a thing.”
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TikTok, it turned out, was reminiscent of Vine in more ways than one. The common denominator of many of its viral moments is an unspoken partiality to Black cultural expression
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