Digital Blackface written by Ifueko Osarogiagbon art by Emma Lehman For a movie made an entire decade ago, “Bring It On” really was ahead of its time. The 2000s cheerleading film starring Kristen Dunst and Gabrielle Union brought the issue of cultural appropriation to the big screen by telling the story of how a white upper-class cheerleading squad made their name by stealing the dance routines of a rivaling team of entirely Black inner-city students. But between the amount of white female influencers using deep tans, dark makeup, body surgery, and textured wigs to pose as racially-ambiguous women on Instagram (blackfishing as coined by Black culture writer Wanna Thompson and Twitter user known as Deja) and the number of non-Black teens on stan Twitter speaking in butchered African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), non-Black people have moved to an even deeper level of theft than the teen comedy could ever imagine.
It doesn’t help that social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram operate with a level of anonymity that allows people to build an entire identity others have no choice but to presume is true as long as your performance is consistent enough. This is part of why Emma Hallberg’s performance fell apart so fast. The Swedish influencer was one of the many white women caught cosplaying as Black by Thompson and Deja’s Twitter threads. People were able to dig through her Instagram history to find photos exposing what she actually looked like, not to mention Hallberg herself had made videos on YouTube showcasing step by step how she’d use makeup to drastically alter her appearance. They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But when you look at the way these modern forms of Blackface all come at the expense of actual Black people, imitation proves to be much more sinister than what the quippy proverb could ever capture.
It’s hard to see how blackface has advanced digitally without understanding how it was first derived. The form of blackface most people are familiar with dates back to the 1820s, when white people would put literal brown and black paint makeup on their faces in order to perform crudely exaggerated performances of Black people in minstrel shows, a popular form of white entertainment made up of comedy skits, dancing, and music. These performances cut deep into American culture as they not only paved the way for many of the racist stereotypes Black people currently struggle with today, but also shaped post-Reconstruction legislation. The Jim Crow laws of the deep South were named after one of the earliest blackface characters created, Jim Crow.
Just by putting on these digital performances of Blackness, non-Black people are able to leverage their fabricated likness in order to gain access to spaces actual Black people–Black women in particular–are blocked from ever entering. Danielle Bregoli’s— otherwise known as Bhad Bhabie—claim to fame was threatening her mother with a blaccent in an episode of “Dr. Phil.” Her belligerent attitude and botched attempt at AAVE created the viral “Cash Me Ousside” moment that quickly reached meme status on Twitter. Her newfound fame later earned her a million dollar music deal with Kevin Abstract and Ty Dolla $ign’s record company, her own reality tv series “Bringing Up Bhabie’’ on Snapchat, and a $900,000 beauty deal. Now Bregoli has decided to dip her toes a bit deeper in her performance through the Kardashian cheat code of body spray, lip fillers, and textured hair. And before being exposed, Emma Hallberg had already been featured as a beauty figure in publications like “Teen Vogue” on top of being an Instagram influencer with a sizable following. She now models for PrettyLittleThing.
The internet and social media subsequently have created a digital dystopia where it is now easier than ever before for non-Black people to be Black without the baggage of anti-Blackness. Meanwhile, actual Black people are left to be the bellhops of our own culture. Apps like Twitter where interactions are generally all done through text gives non-Black people unfettered access to actual Black people’s different dialects and speaking patterns as written out in AAVE. The Internet and social media’s interconnectivity has made it to where non-Black people now have an all-access pass to phrases and terms you’d normally have to be physically be a part of Black queer communities and the Black community in general to even know about. Meanwhile, our styles and aesthetics are laid out for everyone to see through photo-based apps like Instagram.
Meanwhile Black girls and women are disproportionately disciplined within education and the workforce for having a hint of an attitude as well as barred out of these same spaces for simply existing as ourselves. Actual Black influencers struggle to be reposted by beauty and fashion brands’ Instagram pages and be paid equally to their non-Black peers.
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