Digital blackface

I don't really have enough to write about this topic, but I can at least share some quotes from articles around the web.

It's been called digital blackface, and Blackmon started seeing examples of it almost immediately after she joined TikTok, mostly being posted by young white women and white gay men. “I have never seen so many teenagers who are this race-obsessed,” she says. “My Blackness is not a show, it's not something you just turn on.”
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Minstrelsy thrives on TikTok, but the phenomenon goes back a long way. The earliest American iterations emerged in the 1840s as a form of entertainment and endured for more than a century. White people would darken their skin with burnt cork, greasepaint, or shoe polish and perform in variety shows. The musical acts, comedy sketches, and dances relied on stock characters, like Sambo and Zip Coon, to parade Blackness as laughably uneducated or as a target of humiliation.

But the mask of Blackness cannot be worn without consequences. It can't be worn as a joke without reaching into some deep cultural and historical ugliness, without opening a wound of abuse and humiliation.

In 2013, the writer Aisha Harris suggested that blackface's mainstream allure was about “a persistent, if unconscious, desire to see Black people perform.”

“The Black man in America is the most copied man on this planet,” Mooney said. “Everybody wanna be a nigga but nobody wanna be a nigga.”

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-evolution-digital-blackface

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