TikTok is Generation Z, and it may be the most exciting cultural product of this time. It’s also exploitation at its most refined and disturbing. (From 2020)
” Blackmon says, raising the glass into the video frame. “Well call me Karen, OK,” she jokes, invoking the meme for privileged white womanhood. With more than half a million views, it was her first viral hit; she'd been on the app less than a month. A week later, she struck gold again. A video of Blackmon dancing with a stranger in the restroom mirrorTikTok, it turned out, was reminiscent of Vine in more ways than one.
Videos like Guarino's are among a disturbing and ongoing form of content production that suggests a twisted love of Black culture through caricature. 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.
Sometime on April 14, Carter Ricket uploaded the first iteration of what would become known as the #HowsMyForm challenge. In the opening frame, 17-year-old Ricket sets the bait with a raunchy caption: “Best S3X positions for guys with 9–12-inchers.” The challenge is meant to capitalize on a racial stereotype, which is soon made explicit.
“It's 2020 and Black bitches still get mad when a white bitch tries to act like them or look like them. Can't y'all just embrace that shit?” On TikTok, creators embody Blackness with an auteur-driven virtuosity, taking on Black rhythms, gestures, affect, slang. In 2013, the writer Aisha Harris suggested that blackface's mainstream allure was about “a persistent, if unconscious, desire to see Black people perform.” Toni Morrison took it a step further, likening the centuries-old practice to a “kind of public pornography.” The comedian Paul Mooney drove the point home: “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.
Bissah, like many Black users, had a so-called backup account at the ready, for just this eventuality. Inposted to this new account, Bissah talked about what drove her to join the app in the first place. “I wanted to uplift people who look like me,” she said. “Growing up I was never comfortable in my skin. I wanted to bleach my skin. I was not comfortable with being who I am.
Aiyana Katori : “I see people duetting other Black creators' stuff only to tell them to go back where they came from or comment on their ‘nigger appearance.’”
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