Aizo
Banned
Here's the article, We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs.
Be a defensive white man if this is old news.
If there's one thing the Internet thrives on, it's hyperbole and the overrepresentation of black people in GIFing everyone's daily crises plays up enduring perceptions and stereotypes about black expression. And when nonblack users flock to these images, they are playacting within those stereotypes in a manner reminiscent of an unsavory American tradition. Reaction GIFs are mostly frivolous and fun. But when black people are the go-to choice for nonblack users to act out their most hyperbolic emotions, do reaction GIFs become ”digital blackface"?
Now, I'm not suggesting that white and nonblack people refrain from ever circulating a black person's image for amusement or otherwise. There's no prescriptive or proscriptive step-by-step rulebook to follow, nobody's coming to take GIFs away. But no digital behavior exists in a deracialized vacuum. We all need to be cognizant of what we share, how we share, and to what extent that sharing dramatizes preexisting racial formulas inherited from ”real life." The Internet isn't a fantasy — it's real life.
As a community that uses a lot of reaction GIFs, I think it's something that's worth giving some thought to. If you find yourself specifically choosing Black people to express your strong emotions consistently, think about why that is and what that says.Then comes the more sinister side of this. Similar cases happen all over the comments section virtually anywhere, with or without a photo, often prefaced with statements like ”as a black man..." before proceeding to sound like anything but. In other instances, digital blackface is an orchestrated attempt by white supremacists to disrupt black organizing. Writer Shafiqah Hudson started the hashtag #yourslipisshowing to document instances of digital blackface in real time, joined by other black women writers and theorists such as I'Nasah Crockett, Sydette Harry, Mikki Kendall, Trudy, and Feminista Jones. As the name of the tag suggests, online minstrels are no more believable than their in-person counterparts to anyone who knows black culture and black people, rather than a series of types. Unfortunately, digital blackface often goes unchecked unless a black person does the work to point out the discrepancies in someone's profile.
But while these examples are particularly noteworthy for their malicious intent, digital blackface has softer counterparts, just like offline blackface. Digital blackface does not describe intent, but an act — the act of inhabiting a black persona. Employing digital technology to co-opt a perceived cache or black cool, too, involves playacting blackness in a minstrel-like tradition. This can be as elaborate as anon accounts like @ItsLaQueefa or as inadvertent as recruiting images of black queer men to throw shade at one's enemies. No matter how brief the performance or playful the intent, summoning black images to play types means pirouetting on over 150 years of American blackface tradition.
Be a defensive white man if this is old news.