thefunfeds

[thefunfeds]

Get (A Better Management Team) It Sexyy …. Get It Sexyy!!

As I'm sure we can tell throughout all of these posts. I take hating very seriously. Specifically hating what the majority likes.

This time I'm agreeing.

There are about 3 valid reasons to dislike Sexyy Red, but seldom can anyone get to ANY of them without first revealing their internalized racism or misogynoir.

Her effect on how the black community is perceived.

Where Everyone Gets It Wrong:

Sexyy Red is unapologetically ghetto. There's nothing wrong with this. In fact, I think it's a good thing. To celebrate black culture and not recognize its ghetto roots is a blatant case of sanitizing. The oppressors do that enough. There are very many things that happen in the hood that deserve to be critiqued, but that's just a universal part of any culture, and it continues to be an undeniable pillar of hip hop.

You can't chat to me about Sexyy Red's ghettoness when I know for a fact you can go bar for bar with King Von on "Took Her To The O"

My Certified Hater Opinion:

One of the most significant setbacks of any kind of activism, whether it be gender, race, or sexuality based, will always be the prioritization of proximity to whiteness rather than actual equality or equity.

And sure, the acceptance of Black Ghetto Culture for better and for worse means that non-black people will ultimately have to interact with it. I'm not arguing that.

That's a totally different thing than appearing on Twitch streams with notoriously racist people like Adin Ross.

Sexyy Red consciously places herself in spaces where the goal is not to celebrate her, her culture, or her art but to exploit and make fun of her. That's the problem. Not "how she makes black people look." If black people operated based on how white people wanted us to act, we'd still be slaves. Free Yourself. I beg.

And actually since we're on this subject, and the election quite literally did just happen. Yes. Sexyy Red endorsed Trump. Any endorsement of Trump needs to be hated. Lactching onto the picture people made of it to sell "Make America Sexy Again" hats (which makes the aconym MASA... need I say more?)

Her comments about the developing views of Donald Trump were not entirely wrong, and certainly not something unique to black people.

A big factor for many people in this election was, in fact, the economy, which is in the dumps. Stimulus Checks and PPP loans were a reprieve for many low-income homes and an overall net-positive decision from Congress.

The problem was that Donald Trump took credit for the entire thing, just like how he took credit for Obama's tax code in 2016 to run in 2024.

Mix this with the fact the midwestern and southern areas notoriously do not have the best education systems, including St Louis, where Sexyy Red is from, along with education levels bring directly associated with income rates, and that one of the ways capitalism and racism work to keep victims of oppression complacent is through chronic exhaustion ... it means that you're not gonna have people educated enough on the economy past the fact that things are more expensive and they're angrier about it. And when the government leader puts his name on a check that lets you feed your family for a couple weeks, well...

That's how you get the 2024 election result.

But black people's support of Trump was not the deciding factor in his presidency, nowhere near it actually, given what the exit polls are showing but that's an entirely separate conversation about the actual usefulness of Celebrity Endorsements, which is not what we're talking about right now.

Hate Sexyy Red for her endorsement of Trump, and eventually rescind of it in favor or Kamala Harris. Critique her for views on "Stimmys" and the economy. But … you cannot dismiss all of what she said as wrong. It is dangerous to ignore something just because you don’t want to believe it might be true.

2. Sexual behavior

Where Everyone Gets It Wrong:

I am actually not even wasting energy or significant word count on this one. I log onto TikTok every day where lyrics like "we gon fuck her in the back of the bus and fill her nose up fill of that dust" plays in the background of people dancing with the PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR.

But "My Coochie Pink, My Bootyhole Brown" is a danger to black women and girls? Get out of my face bro LMFAOOOOOOOOO.

My Certified Hater Opinion:

For me this one largely comes down to how Sexyy Red markets herself.

It has nothing to do with the way she dresses, or poses for pictures, or her lyrical content, which is largely meant to be funny and playful (although you will never catch me personally singing "I don't fight for my respect, bitch I fight for dick") but y'know, I also have the critical thinking to understand that

1. Feminism does not equal female solidarity

2. Despite the rise of feminism the world is increasingly male centered and If I'm prepared to critique Sexyy Red for her lyrics than I have to be prepared to critique Lana Del Rey's, which carries some of the same themes but encased in flowery metaphors and a misty indie instrumental.

3. In that same song, Glorilla's verse says the exact same thing subtextually, "Sneaky link, she say that's her n- I don't give a fuck/These bitches tryna scrap, but I'm knuckin' if you buckin', ho" but she has significantly more male supporters so y'know .... there's that.

The problem with Sexyy Red is that she is at risk of glorifying harmful sexual behavior, particularly around STIs and BV. We live in a society where self disparaging humor is increasingly common, for better or for worse, and in the certain cultural spaces, laughter as a coping mechanism for oppression is as easy as breathing, and the more normalized something is within your environment, the more likely you are to do it

This is why when launching a Lip Gloss brand, she saw nothing wrong with these names.

Sure, some of them are kinda normal funny gag jokes you'd find in a sex shop, I take issue with Gonorhera and Yellow Discharge in specific. Seuxal health, particularly for women and queer people remains to be an unnecessarily controversial topic, and the longer the negligence of it remains, the more discrimination surrounding them festers, and the slower it takes to actually mitigate these issues.

50 to 80% of the population experiences cold sores or fever blisters. If you told about half of those people that they have herpes, they'd think you gave them a death sentence.

If Sexyy Red, or her team had attached the announcement with a portion of the proceeds going to fund literally any kind of sexual health organization, or even something as simple as attaching a free condom or even a paper with sexual health resources, maybe i'd have a different outlook, because it'd be a case of talking the talk and walking the walk, but nope, it was just capitalistic desires. Sexyy Red cares about profiting off of shock value via parading it as humorous, while doing absolutely nothing to combat the stigma, and that's a problem regardless of identity.

Any person with a vagina can get BV, any person can get gonorrhea, all of them will experience equal stigma upon diagnosis. That’s the problem.

3. She Is A Bad Performer

Where people get it wrong:

They use this reason as a way to reinforce the above. But again, check your hypocrisy. If you're gonna fault her for not doing anything on stage and having absolutely no sense of stage presence or crowd control but get excited over a Future or The Weeknd tour ... why should I take you seriously? If you’re not gonna hate productively just exit the club man like we tryna run a respectable establishment here.

My Certified Hater Opinion:

She just sucks. She does the same thing as her male rapping counterparts and that's why both she and they suck.

Now i'm willing to call myself on bias, and admit that I'm a Beyonce fan so my standards was already high to begin with.

But my standards being high are the same reason I wouldn't buy a ticket to a Future Hendrix tour so ... *shrugs*

[thefunfeds]

One, Two, Three, Four, How Many Addictions Do Girlbosses Ignore?

If I told you to picture someone who has a porn addiction, you'd probably think of a man.

Suppose I asked you to explain the harmful effects of excessive porn watching. You'd probably tell me that it starts young, or something about how it creates an unrealistic expectation for real-life partners, or that it causes problems achieving arousal and orgasm, leading men to seek out often increasingly violent scenarios that depict the brutalization of women just so they have that precious hit of dopamine. Maybe you'd even mention something about the online spaces where these men find themselves in pursuit of the porn that will get them off.

We live in a society that places stereotypically masculine ideals, traits, and people on a higher pedestal than stereotypically feminine ones. This is dangerous because it implies that most research and technology are designed with a male-centered focus, often overlooking women and failing to recognize that certain issues may present differently in women.

Take alcoholic drinks, for example. The low-caliber, casual drinks by gender usually consist of men drinking beer and women drinking wine.

Beer ABV is usually between 4 to 8 percent. Wine ABV is anywhere between 18 to 22%

If I told you about a man who went to the bar every single day to knock back glasses of Corona and Heineken because it calms him down and helps him unwind, you'd probably be worried that he was a functioning alcoholic, and if he continued his behavior, he'd be at risk of developing a beer belly, and the effect of his drinking on his family would probably mean some type of aggression towards them.

If I told you about a woman who kicks off her heels and immediately heads to the kitchen to knock back glasses of wine after work every day to relax, the reaction might be slightly different. You might shrug and say she deserves to destress! Or pull up one of many articles that exist saying that a glass of wine is actually quite healthy! If she gets a little intoxicated, it's okay because it's just wine, after all! It'll probably just make her a little giggly or horny, and that's okay!

The two people in both scenarios are both people suffering from an alcohol use disorder, but despite the fact that wine has a higher ABV level, and thus means that the tolerance and withdrawal effects have the potential to be more harmful, society is not inclined to take it as seriously, because wine is more commonly marketed towards women.

What does this have to do with porn?

Well. Men watch porn. Women read smut.

If we're going by our criteria above, differences could be argued that porn is worse because it's the brutalization of real women, and creating unrealistic expectations of real-life parents might actually be a good thing for heterosexual women because real-life men are trash.

I'm not totally disagreeing with anything, but I do have counterpoints.

Hentai, Mangas and Manhwas exist. And often depict children or childlike mannerisms along with casual rape, beastality and incest. Which are often written off by avid consumers as just “apart of the culture” when you and I know both know there’s an obvious problem here. Just because it’s not real, doesn’t mean it has less of an impact. Words have power. If they didn’t then there wouldn’t be a very long list of banned books on Wikipedia.

Unrealistic expectations of male partners in cis women comes from an established romantic component that accompanies smut in books. There's a difference between a book that has an attempt at fleshed-out characters, plot, settings, and general narratives, themes and lessons that are being conveyed to the reader that just happens to include smut to achieve its goals, and a book that uses characters, settings and certain narratives as gateways to plot of gratuitous smut.

A booktook example of the former would be It Ends With Us (don’t mistake this as me liking Colleen Hoover, I read Verity and that was 20 hours of my life I’m never getting back), it’s a book that has lots of smut, but it’s also a story about a women’s experience with domestic violence.

An example of the latter, would be like ….. anything Penelope Douglas writes, but because if I have to see it so do you, we’re gonna talk about the more egregious example, which is Credence, where the entire plot is a girl going on vacation with her “step” uncles and cousins where she has sex with all of them.

You know what else commonly has videos of step family in sexual situations? Pornhub.

Similar to porn addiction in boys, it also starts very young. Most grown 18-25 year old cis women who read dark romance now, were people who had unsupervised and uncontrolled access to the internet as children, where fandom spaces are prevalent, and a large part of them involve written smut (of both real and fake people) under names called “imagines”. And if you didn’t have to ask your parents to visit Disney Channel dot com, what was stopping you from accessing Harry Styles imagines on Tumblr? Tumblr would lead to fan-fiction dot net and then to Wattpad and then to AO3 and then to TikTok where the carefully curated algorithm would drop dark romance recommendations into your lap, some of which were written by those same big authors who were on fanfiction dot net and Wattpad.

Fandom hasn’t went anywhere. The presence of children on social media also hasn’t went anywhere. Children as young as 10 were getting into anti-aging products and wearing makeup to school, because that’s what they saw all the adults do. The books that they’re exposed to, aren’t any different.

When Fifty Shades of Grey was everywhere around 2012-2013 ish. it was one of the rare times that my mother, unprompted, put her foot down and told me not to even think about asking for it.

I didn’t wanna read it, nor had I gave her any indication that I did. But it wasn’t because of what she told me.

First of all she was too late. By that point, I had already learned what the clit was from reading twilight fan-fiction and confused Google searches.

Fifty Shades of Grey was originally a twilight fanfiction.

By the time she got to me, I had already saved and read a PDF of Masters Of The Universe.

And it’s not like I hid it very well. But she didn’t pay attention, so I got away with it.

I know adult and child literacy rates are kinda in the dumps right now, and it might be a blessing to see your daughter, niece, little sister or cousin with a book in her hand, but it doesn’t mean you let them stick their heads in every book.

Cuz not every dark romance book looks obvious like this

Some of them look like this

Or this

Or worse, like this:

I also wanna make another thing clear, liking sex and sex scenes is not the problem here. Repression of normal and healthy sexual activity, including masturbation is bad. Sure it gets a little shocking when I’m watching a Netflix show and it goes from characters staring at each other to bare balls in my face, but I get why it’s there. Sex has come to be an important part of romantic bonds in modern society for better or worse, and what is fiction if not a reflection of the times?

As a writer myself, I’ll be the first to say that sex can actually be a great device to showcase a character’s personality, motives, and development/progression, but the dark romance books that commonly blow up on TikTok aren’t interested in that, because the plot would take away from the sex. And that’s the problem, the intense tunnel vision fixation on dominant men having sex with submissive women. What happens in the plot doesn’t matter if it’s not acting as kind of foreplay to the actual event.

Dark romance as a whole isn’t even the problem here. Don’t get wrong, most of these books are bad, but 1. That’s a subjective opinion and not what we’re talking about here. 2. As a twilight kid, you can take it from me when I say one bad book a day keeps the pretentiousness away. A lot of the targeted hatred for these books is indeed fueled by misogyny however, this doesn’t change the fact that there is still microagressive to blatant abuse, racism, etc etc perpetuated in these books and YES it can distort your reality, if you consume them frequently enough.

Everybody thought 2000s fashion was ugly for the longest time. And now look. Chunky platforms, juicy couture sweatsuits, Low-Rise pants and heroin chic are all back like they never left.

Also, everyone has guilty pleasures. After Fifty Shades of Grey hit the market, most cis women readers will admit to indulging in a crappy little mafia or billionaire romance book. Those books with Fabio and a majestic looking stallion on the cover that older women were reading also contained graphic sexual content. Erotica and smut are definitely not new things. Most people turn to porn when they’re horny enough to do something about it. It doesn’t make them addicts.

However, comma, semicolon:

When this fixation begins to spiral to the point of asking in every book recommendation “does this have spice?” Or the inclusion of a “🌶️ level” on certain book recommendation that aren’t even dark romance means there’s a problem.

If the chase of your next dark romance book leads you to begin chasing stories that involve graphic torture, rape, and increasingly unrealistic depictions of what healthy, safe, sane and consensual sex looks like… what makes it any different from a boy who started off watching “girls kissing” on pornhub but ultimately found his way into types of porn that depict torture more than pleasure?

[thefunfeds]

Who Is "Gang" and Why Can't They Know You Mess With Old Man Yaoi?

I try my hardest to be self aware. And I recognize that I’ve solely been talking about things that the internet and digital culture bastardize; this time, we're gonna switch it up and talk about the bastardization the internet and digital culture are working to undo. After all, the key to being a sustainable D-1 hater is recognizing the importance of offsetting an abundance of hatred with an abundance of love.

So, let's talk about Queer people.

One of the most prominent feelings that occur in queer kids is isolation. One thing a lot of older queer folk especially talk about is struggling to find a sense of community when they were young and the effect this had on their identity formation. If you were growing up in the 80s and 90s especially, the only way to find your community was by luck, careful consideration, bravery, abandonment of familiar surroundings, or a combination of some or all of these elements. Sure, there may have always been bustling communities of queer folk living proud and working honestly for equality in major cities like NYC, San Fran, and Chicago, but if you lived in the deep south or the Midwest where knowledge acquisition is heavily guarded by a bias that seeks to actively cleanse you of certain parts of your identity, those safe havens seem out of reach.

If there's one positive thing I can say about the digital culture, it has been integral to closing that gap by undoing and actively preventing Queer erasure.

The internet has had an immeasurable impact on the normalization of same-sex relationships, and not just as a thing of current times, but as something that's existed for as long as humans have but was gatekept within academia and prevented from becoming public knowledge. One of my favorite ways of recognizing this has been witnessing how the internet's prioritization of representation for marginalized identities has meant that there are now lots of queer media and characters created by and for queer people.

So in that spirit, I specifically want to talk about Queer Period Pieces.

Queer folk deserve to know that they have a rich history past the AIDS epidemic. Because of digital media’s contributions to media accessibility, we can uncover the history that centuries of colonialism have attempted to hide as the information becomes more accessible. I’d even go as far as to argue that the tiny surge of Period Pieces featuring gay people at the forefront is a prime example of how much the internet and digital media have contributed to this.

Sometimes this happens by telling true, albeit dramatized (as all media is) stories of Queer folks that have contributed to history. For example:

Mary & George - which tells the story of Mary Villers and how she and her son Geroge gain power in the British empire by encouraging through George's developing a relationship with the King, which is pretty well known by historians to have been sexual.

Rustin is a Netlix original that tells the story of Bayard Rustin, an openly gay black man who served as an advisor to MLK Jr and helped plan the March on Washington in the 60s.

Other times, this manifests of fictional stories, being told amongst the backdrop of historical events, ala titanic 1997 style.

The last 2 examples include some of my favorites:

Fellow Travelers follows the romantic relationship between Hawkins Fuller and Tim Laughlin from the 50s to the 80s. Starting when they meet in Washington DC during the height of McCarthyism, where the government did mass purges of its staff for fear that they were communist spies, and this ended up disproportionately affecting closeted queer folk who worked in the government, as their sexualities were cited as something that made them susceptible to communist influence.

Interview with A Vampire follows Louis De Pointe Du Lac, a gay, creole, black man living in 1910s Louisiana, as he develops a relationship with Frenchman Lestat De Lioncourt, the mysterious new guy in town who takes a sudden fascination with him.

Interview with a Vampire is undoubtedly my favorite on this list for so many literal and symbolic reasons it could be its own 5 blog posts.

And I wouldn’t be me if I i didn’t give a niche little history lesson so buckle in, we’re gonna speed round this one.

IWTV already had an adaptation in 1997 with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. My grandmother, a long-time gothic horror lover, swore by this movie, and I have very hazy memories of watching it as a child. Watching it now as an adult capable of critical thinking was ... interesting.

Although critically acclaimed, Queer fans were dissatisfied by the movie as it contains none of the romantic undertones of Louis and Lestat.

In the original, which took place in the 1800s, Louis De Pointe Du Lac was white and a slave owner.

(If you read that and didn’t audibly boo, you’re racist)

Just kidding!

Or am I?

IWTV is probably the biggest representative of digital culture’s impact on combating Queer erasure via Queer Media, and that’s because it was once a victim of it. With its reboot, it chooses to adapt to the times, and it does a beautiful job at managing the load of telling the story of a character who holds multiple intersecting identities without any of them feeling tokenized.

And also, because I can’t resist myself, how beautifully symbolic and poetic that while talking about systemic queer erasure, one of the most highly acclaimed pieces of Queer media right now features very unapologetically queer black and brown immortals, who live their eternal lives incapable of being anything other than themselves, no matter how hard the world tells them they should do otherwise?

[thefunfeds]

The Pookiebears Are Not In The Room With Us Right Now. In Fact, They Are In Paris.

One of the coolest things about the internet is that it serves as a widely accessible archive. What we don't talk about, is who gets to contribute to the archive.

Sure, you can say "everyone," and that'd be true on some level. But a widely accessible archive means there will be a lot of noise to shuffle through.

So, who gets to contribute to the archive in a significant way?

Whose voices do we prioritize when shaping some sort of internet canon? If all voices on the internet aren't treated equally, who becomes in charge of enforcing the truth? And if certain voices still aren’t prioritized, what happens when even the enforcers get the truth wrong?

We regard anecdotal evidence as a fallacy. If I’m writing a college paper about my culture, I still need a source to back it up, even if I have first-hand experience with what I’m talking about. And sure, maybe if I'm talking about a significant historical event, I can take my research at face value. But what if I'm talking about something more recent?

Who's responsible for tracing the origins of things seemingly coming out of nowhere?

Remember in 2013 when everyone discovered the term "Bae"?

I can practically hear everyone who had access to a Vine account in its prime days cringing.

I'm going to be very blunt when I say this.

The same thing is going to happen in a year when everyone gets tired of using "Pookie"

And I know what some of you are thinking; Well, Dana, that's how the internet works! Trends come in cycles, and why should slang be any different? We laugh in the face of people who still say "whack," and we'll laugh in the face of people who still say "pookiebear". It's not intentionally malicious; it's just how the internet works!

And to that, I'd say, yes, you're right. That is indeed how the internet works.

Let's talk about why that's not a good thing.

I am one of those people that still says bae. So is my mother, and my grandmother, and my uncles, and my aunties, and my cousins, and my aunties and uncles and cousins that aren't really my aunties and uncles and cousins.

Why? Because it's a cultural word.

But if I listened to the voices that the internet prioritizes with enforcing the truth. They'd tell me that no one was saying it past 2011.

My grandmother has been calling people, including strangers, bae her entire life. She is a Southern black woman born in 1947.

The word bae is short for "Baby," no more, no less. If the internet had properly prioritized black voices, the mystery behind the word would've been solved much quicker.

But instead, there's still a large chunk of the world that fully believes multiple misconceptions.

The first is that it's a word with only romantic connotations. Sure, it's a term of endearment, but it's closer to how you would use "Hun" as short for "Honey". You can call your partner bae, but you can also call the cashier at the supermarket bae when they ask if you want a bag.

There's also the longstanding belief (and most egregious form of bastardization, in my humble opinion) that it's an acronym for "before anyone else."

And worst of all, when the general non-African American public thinks of the term, they attribute it to this guy.

Or this guy.

See the problem here?

If I asked most non-African American internet users where they first heard of the term pookie, they'd probably tell me something about this guy on tiktok:

Prayag and his "Pookie Nation" have launched the term into the public vernacular. And here's the thing. At least back in 2013, people wanted to know where the term "Bae" originated from. People nowadays just think it started with Prayag.

I have a cousin named Pookie, who was born in the late 90s. I was 16 when I found out Pookie was never his real name. I thought when we called him "Pookiebear," that was the nickname, but nope.

Like many African American households, I watched a lot of 80s and 90s cultural black comedies and dramas like Friday, Belly, Juice, Baby Boy, Paid in Full, Boyz-In-The-Hood, and most importantly to this topic, New Jack City.

For most Black American folk, this is Pookie:

Pookie Robinson aka Pookie The Crackhead.

And some y'all might be like, "Oh wow, dana, that's kind of a sad and messed up thing to call a kid."

No, actually, not really. Pookie was funny and endearing because he spends most of the movie wanting to help the good guys and dies for it; he just, y'know, happened to be a crackhead because this was the 80s, and the crack epidemic was like ... a real thing that disproportionately affected black people.

(Ronald Reagan and The CIA my detested.)

Just like my cousin, Pookie also wasn't his real name either. He was actually a guy named Benny.

You'll notice that as I mention these terms, I never give you a concrete origin for where they come from. Just noticeable instances where they appear.

That's because I don't actually know it.

But I do know that the internet's claim of slang origins is almost always wrong. Most of the time, it's something I've been saying since childhood. And it's not just Bae, and Pookie.

Period, stink, slay, boo, sis, unc, tea, finna, gang, gag, ghetto, rachet, bougie, homie, deadass, we been knew, tweaking, etc. are all words that I can think of in the last 5 or so years that have been called "internet slang," when I've been surrounded by people saying it my entire life.

(Some of those shouldn't even be in the general public vernacular at all, but if I start on that tangent, we'll be here forever. The drive-by version is simply; if you are non-black and say something is "ghetto" or "ratchet," you are anti-black. Have a nice day.)

What I'm trying to prove here is that you shouldn't let academia brainwash you into believing that anecdotal evidence is completely useless. Black American folk have been saying for ages that certain terms existed before the general public got their hands on them. Yet, the people we trust on the internet to provide truth and facts for historical origins continue to not listen because the internet does not care about prioritizing black voices.

Unless y'know, we're rapping or dancing or doing something otherwise entertaining for people to laugh at or gain enjoyment at our expense.

*stares intensely into the camera like an episode of The Office*

I've been talking a lot about origins. Usually, when I talk about Black Language, I typically go on a schpeel about AAVE (African American Vernacular English) and its unrecognized validity as a language, despite the bastardization of it (it's why black people can so easily hear a blaccent). But this post is already way over 700 words, so I'll leave you with an origin that I do concretely know of.

African American Vernacular English comes from how slaves learned to speak English without knowing how to read or write to fully understand traditional English grammar rules.

The vast majority of "internet slang" is just repackaged AAVE.

Think about that next time you find an "internet slang" word everyone seemingly "discovers" on TikTok.

[thefunfeds]

Well If You Can't Go To Tiffany Pollard Gifs to Express Your "Inner Black Woman" ... Where Can You Go?

If you've been on the internet for more than 2 days, you've probably seen this gif before.

If I were to ask you to describe this meme, you'd probably say something along the lines of "Black/African kid crying and holding a knife," and to be transparent, I would have done the same a few years ago.

What if I told you the man in this GIF isn't a kid. He was born in 1977, making him 47 years old, and the movie this GIF is from, "Intelligent Student," came out in 2008, where he would've been between 29 and 31 years old at the time of filming? Not only that, but the actor, Chinedu Ikedieze, is a household name in Nigeria who has starred in countless classic films.

I say this recognize that what's so fascinating about meme culture is that we don't think much about what we use to express our emotions. And this isn't always a good thing when we think about who's driving the canon of what enters mainstream consciousness.

Let's talk about Digital Blackface.

Ironically, when doing bits of research for this post, I found out 2 things:

Digital Blackface is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as "the use by white people of digital depictions of Black or brown people or skin tones especially for the purpose of self-representation or self-expression." and places the first known use of it in 2013 (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2024).

Merriam-Webster is wrong.

It was tucked away in a WIRED article celebrating black culture's influence on Vine, where it mentions a 2006 dissertation by Joshua Lumpkin Green titled "Digital Blackface: The Repackaging of the Black Masculine Image." In the dissertation, Green discusses how the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas influences the perception of Black Masculinity, saying that because the game requires that people step into the personhood of a black man in a game where the story involves committing countless crimes, the result is that it ends up reinforcing harmful stereotypes about black people and culture, contributing to its appropriation and commodification (Jackson, 2019; Green 2006)

Slight ironic sidenote: Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is also the source of this meme:

The same principle in Green's dissertation applies to meme culture. Every time any of us captions a funny video or picture with "they're so real," "me fr," "that's so me," or "me when I-" In a way, we are taking on an element of their personhood through proclaiming their emotions, but what does this mean for black people when we think about how society treats black emotion?

Social media allows for rapid sharing and remixing of content. These representations spread quickly, and the origins become lost or disregarded for humor in the chaos. This can be one thing if the meme's origin is from a movie, as exaggeration is the whole point, but what about when it's real people? Take, for example, this meme on Antoine Dodson that went popular probably more than 10 years ago when the internet was obsessed with news clips for some reasons:

Despite the fact that it came from a news segment, where the story is quite literally spelled out for you, many people would be shocked to find out that this meme came from a brother who was rightfully angry at an attempted assault on his sister the night before. This context was forgotten in favor of humor, and what remains of this story is a black man's anger and mannerisms meme-ified as a sassy way to call someone dumb in an internet argument.

When a meme that features a Black person is shared widely, the lived experiences behind those images become trivialized, which causes society to view further black emotion and culture as a vessel for humor. It pushes Black People back into the stereotypes we already struggle to combat and compromises black people's ability to find safe spaces on the internet outside of their racial identity.

The safe space part, in particular, happens very frequently to Black Women and sometimes from other marginalized identities. And here is where I begin to diverge from Meriam's definition of it a bit.

The most egregious modern example I can think of is the reveal of @/MADBLACKTHOT on Twitter. For all intents and purposes, MADBLACKTHOT was a safe haven for (often queer) black women to be uplifted and celebrated. They loved astrology and talked about having periods and afab conditions such as endometriosis. The account was instrumental in propelling Megan Thee Stallion onto black women's radar and later mainstream success as well as Cardi B, Normani, and even K-Pop group BTS. They even were close enough friends with RnB singer Kehlani to confide in her about the identity reveal, although she did not find out about his identity until later (Angus 2019).

As a person who was active on stan Twitter at that time, you could not be on Twitter without knowing who that account was; they were kind of like the Kai Cenat of stan Twitter accounts. From about 2016 to 2019, if you were talking broadly about someone named "Nicole" everyone knew who you were talking about. Seeing their face was equivalent to seeing Sia's face in 2013.

And then, during an op-ed in Paper Magazine, it was revealed that MADBLACKTHOT was actually a black man named Isaiah Hickland.

I mention this to point out that anonymity is a double-edged sword in the Internet age. A culture that allows for completely curating an individual persona from the ground up means that reality and performance become blurred. And sometimes, this can be intentional, like in the example above, or unintentional. Either way, it's exploiting parts of the a community for gain, regardless of someone's proximity to the culture as an outsider (aka nonblack, or even not a black woman in the case above), or whether or not you even harbor intentional feelings of misogynoir or racism. Even digital blackface isn't immune to intersectionality.

Many articles, including Merriam Webester's, will call Digital Blackface a modern-day minstrelsy show, where white people back in the 1800 and early 1900s would don blackface and perform exaggerated stereotypes of black people such as the Jezebel, the pickaninny, the uncle tom, the Mammy, etc (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2024). Sans the black paint ... it's not a very far off claim, especially considering TikTok. This time, anonymity is thrown out of the window, but through the use of meme-d audio and sections of hip-hop and RnB music, the mimicking of Black mannerisms, voices, and slang remains ongoing, often leading to a bastardization of black language and the expression intrinsic to it.

But that's a topic for my next post :)

For now, I leave with this piece of advice. Critical thinking is often exhausting but always rewarding. We've all seen a funny and ridiculous video or picture and wondered, "Why would they say/do that?" Don't let that thought be fleeting the next time it strikes you.

References

Angus, H. (2019, October 16). Why @EmoBlackThot’s identity reveal hurt Black women so much. PAPER Magazine. https://www.papermag.com/emoblackthot-twitter-response#rebelltitem17

Green, J. L. (2006). Digital blackface: The repackaging of the Black masculine image (Master's thesis, Miami University). OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1154371043

Jackson, L. M. (2019, November 12). The undeniable Blackness of Vine (RIP). Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/excerpt-white-negroes-lauren-michele-jackson/

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Digital blackface. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved October 4, 2024, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/digital%20blackface