By Corn Cook, Maren Frye, Abby Schneider, and Hannah Klein
Appropriation of Black culture has long been established, and as time goes on, it’s gotten easier and less discernible to do it. With the rise of TikTok and its 80 million US monthly users, it has become rather simple to co-opt decades-old AAVE terms and market them toward young white users as Gen Z and Internet slang. Brittany Broski, a popular TikToker with 6+ million followers, got some backlash in 2020 over comparing her and others’ use of AAVE with “stan culture” according to a Business Insider article published in the summer of 2020. Business Insider also posted an article named “24 slang words teens and Gen Zers are using in 2020, and what they really mean.” What is not in the article is the fact that many of these terms are not recent and have instead been used by Black people in the US for decades such as chile, salty, sis, etc.
With the mass normalization of whites using AAVE, many young teens and adults have been able to profit off of Black creativity and speech. TikTokers can make cash through the creator fund and private brand deals. The biggest example is Charli D’Amelio who became famous for using and not originally crediting a Black creator for a TikTok dance. D’Amelio is one of the most popular and successful TikTokers with a net worth of 8 million dollars at only 16 years old (“Money On TikTok”).
Several subsets of white people are especially guilty of appropriating AAVE, most prominently the queer community. Though this “trend” began around 2014, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the rate of appropriation, as more people spend time on TikTok and interact virtually. Yet as AAVE terms and phrases, such as “finna” and “I’m weak,” continue to pop up across the platform, very few understand the etymology, or the history of the words. White appropriators purposefully mask the origin of the vernacular, as doing so gives them implicit permission to carry on unchecked.
Generally more accepting than traditional white cis-heteronormative social spaces, queer spaces have been historically kinder to Black people, so AAVE was commonly spoken in and around those spaces by queer Black people and other Black individuals who engage with the queer community. As these spaces grew, Black culture became more pervasive as well, which effectively desensitized white queer people to such an extent that they began co-opting certain AAVE words and phrases outside of queer spaces, without bothering to credit the Black queer people whose language they “borrowed.” The growth of TikTok sheds light on this issue, as more white queers take to the platform to share content that appropriates Black culture as their own, whether or not they recognize the racialized history of their words.
Moreover, when you sign onto TikTok, it’s only a matter of time before you encounter the appropriation of Black voices by white content creators. No matter what subsection of the social media platform you occupy, the trend abides.
Too often, these white TikTokers frame Black voices as the punchline of otherwise fatuous videos. In December 2019, 18-year-old Chris Guarino, white, uploaded a video of himself walking past the check-in counter of the budget airline Spirit. But, when Guarino speaks, the voice we hear does not belong to him. It instead belongs to Nene Leakes, an American TV personality. “Whew chile, the ghetto,” the teenager lip syncs (Parham).
That video, according to Wired, amassed over half a million views (Parham). The 8-second clip might appear innocuous enough to the casual scroller. Still, in appropriating Leakes’ voice for profit, Guarino fortified fraught racial stereotypes.
Ralinda Watts, a writer for Popsugar, elaborated on the societal implications of such videos in her piece, “Digital Blackface is a Huge Problem on TikTok and It Needs to Be Talked About.” “These expressions can seem harmless in nature,” she writes, “but the co-opting of Blackness for profit is an example of modern-day minstrel shows, which were a form of American entertainment in which white performers donned literal Blackface to perform dance and musical skits for all-white audiences” (Watts).
That said, the next time you happen upon a video of a non-Black TikToker lip-syncing to the soundbite of a Black individual, consider how it functions as an extension of Blackface and minstrelsy. If the video makes you laugh, reflect on what precisely it is that you’re laughing at.
The exploitation of Black creators’ vernacular and voice by white TikTok users is only compounded by the fact that TikTok’s algorithm and content rules systematically favor white producers over Black producers. The TikTok algorithm that recommends videos for viewers elevates white creators, according to a Forbes article, through a bias feedback loop: if a viewer likes a white artist, more creators who are white will be recommended to them (Asare). In this way, TikTok’s most popular white creators are continuously amplified while Black creators struggle to promote their videos to people whose personal algorithms are calibrated towards white artists.
Additionally, TikTok’s content rules are often leveraged against Black artists when they try to speak out against racism on the app. A Wired article reports stories from 29 Black TikTok creators who describe instances when their videos were flagged for content violation then muted or deleted altogether (Parham). These videos, which covered topics like Black empowerment and concerns over white TikTok users saying the N-word, apparently violated TikTok’s rules, but videos of white users saying racist slurs were allowed to stay on the app.
The harsh treatment Black creators face on the app has led to the creation of a hashtag, #BlackCreatorsFedUp, which boasts over 27.8 million views and where creators can share their stories, concerns, and demands for a better app. Although in June 2020 TikTok released a statement acknowledging the problematic treatment of the app’s Black community, it did not address the specific harms Black creators had been detailing, and issues in the app remain (Parham).
As TikTok’s influence over social trends and norms grows, it is paramount that we reflect on how those trends disenfranchise already marginalized communities. As it stands, the unaccredited appropriation of AAVE and the de-platforming of Black creators who speak up against it cannot continue. By uplifting Black creators and engaging with their concerns, TikTok can move toward representing the best popular art and entertainment of our society rather than the conventions that hold back and even degrade creativity.
Image by Solen Feyissa, “TikTok,” https://bit.ly/38Ck7hO