What’s so bad about digital blackface?

Think of a Black woman saying "oh no she didn't, gurl" followed by a Z finger snap. It's likely you see a very vivid image in your head right now because you've seen it countless times already.

(I'm pull-quoting from my own little mini essay comment.)

I find the issue of digital blackface to be quite legitimate — and I myself am normally not very fond of some recent political correctness trends. Last month if you heard some faintly audible groan from some far distance beyond the earth's horizon, it was probably mine when I saw that a trans activist acquaintance from my early queer university days advocates the term "pregnant people" over "pregnant women" because trans men can get pregnant. It's like, oh come on, don't bust people's linguistic balls over something that is one in a million (and also would be maximally dysphoric anyway?).

Anyway, coincidentally, a skeptical liberal friend of mine forwarded me a similar piece on digital blackface to ask what I thought about it — because he couldn't see the point of it. The issue of blackface has been around for a long time; the issue of digital blackface seems to be relatively new. The authors use loaded terms like "appropriation" which have been misused and are now tainted. After Tumblr and Twitter SJWs went about crusading against instances of legitimate cultural assimilation and exchange as "cultural appropriation", everyone now rolls their eyes at the mention of "appropriation". But I think these new arguments against digital blackface have strong merit.

I think that the problem isn't people using GIFs of Black faces per se, but the leveraging of Black archetypes that are the salient features in the GIFs, thereby spreading, reinforcing, and (collectively) perpetuating certain contemporary stereotypes.

The Black archetype in the Western imagination is one of exaggerated, entertaining emotionality. Think of a Black woman saying "oh no she didn't, gurl" followed by a Z finger snap. It's likely you see a very vivid image in your head right now because you've seen it countless times already. These images, when produced and re-produced virally in large numbers and in the absence of other counterbalancing images, subtly shape and form our imagination of how Black people can be. I think that one aggregate effect is that Black women are perceived to be comparatively masculine.

Where I'm coming from as another minority person
I'm hesitant to use the term "dehumanizing" because it's a very strong word and it also literally means "to deprive a person or group of positive human qualities". There are plenty of benign and ostensibly positive stereotypes. I'm Asian. Asians are perceived to be polite, industrious, intelligent, and academically-inclined. There is a lot of media that spread, reinforce, and perpetuate these images and this archetype of the polite, industrious, intelligent, and academic Asian. I'd like to say that they—in such concentration and in absence of images that depict Asians as romantic, foolhardy, brash, loud, extroverted—limit the range of archetypes that Asians can inhabit in the imaginations of others.

Concentration of images, lack of counterbalancing images
White people are represented abundantly in a wide range of archetypes: emotional, stoic, brilliant, stupid, rich, poor, and so on. These form people's priors about white people. Whether you use the blinking white guy GIF or not, there will be plenty of counter-images out there to balance it. The piece my skeptical liberal friend with me specifically advocates not against using GIFs of Black faces, but for being mindful and intentional about which salient features we choose those GIFs for — which I think is easy enough for us to all do.

Thank you for sharing this very interesting article. Whittaker makes a very reasonable, nuanced analysis of a phenomenon I was familiar with at a high level but had never seen described as "digital blackface." Spillers and Hartman, as always, introduce some very important concepts in our understanding of contemporary racial discourse.

Spillers and, especially forcefully, Saidiya Hartman have argued that this fungibility did not disappear when slavery did. We live in what Hartman calls “the afterlives of slavery,” and much of what was true then is true now. A prime example often pointed to is that of images of black death and the black dead. These images – of George Floyd, of Breonna Taylor, of Tony McDade – and, worse, the videos of the their murder, the brutal beating of black children, etc., are heavily circulated through social media and news reports. This repetition, these theorists argue, is an aestheticization of the spectacular violence that defines antiblackness. There’s much to say here; the point for the present is that this circulation reduces the human character of what’s portrayed into fodder for clicks, likes, and views. These images are not employed for the sake of a radical politics or emotional affiliation, but as products in service of the pursuit of profit.

In this vein we are working somewhat within the postmodern, at least to the extent that in the context of the internet we are led to a system of traumatic recurrence that characterizes Black trauma as an "aesthetic," a self-fulfilling cycle in our age of capitalism and very much a harmful one to the collective identity-actualization of the Black community targeted indirectly by this material. But I agree with Whittaker that this line of reasoning breaks down somewhat when the content being shared is a meme disconnected from trauma, not only because memes are inherently a "reduction or annihilation" of the "real" (assuming, for the sake of argument, the intelligibility of such a thing within the hyperreal context of the internet), i.e. it is their nature to be "fungible," but additionally because the online medium to some measure creates a magnified variant of the already non-computable problem of discerning the "trueness" of a person's stated racial identity—that is to say, the "prescriptive" notion of verifying who is Black and who is White through an "objective" lens (disregarding subjective identities) can for obvious reasons already be an unintelligible one in the real world, and becomes infinitely more unintelligible when obscured through pseudonyms and avatars: the hyperreal at play. Within the realm of theory we may analyze the semantics of meme distribution on a basis of a determinable morality if we are assume a system of defined acceptability and unbounded time and resources to distinguish Black from White (on behalf of the subject(s) of the meme and the persons involved in its sharing); but again this is merely an exercise and cannot for all intents and purposes be taken as a realistic course of action in the "real" world, where there is more content to be analyzed than we are fundamentally capable of analyzing, both in regard to memes and personal beliefs about one's identity.

So not only is it somewhat pointless to suppose in practice that we ought to universally assign truth values to the morality of a specific person's supposed inhabitation of a Black body via the digital medium, but, to return from my logical extreme to Whittaker's actual argument, memes as we know them today are something of a construct of the internet and not the "real" world, and, unlike the explicit and determined fungibility associated with the Atlantic Slave Trade, "underdetermined, by which I mean they open themselves up to a vast multiplicity of meanings." I feel that this term can be very useful in our understanding of semantic and semiotic subjectivism. What I think is important to bear in mind here is that memes, as Whittaker implies, are less of a specific, unified construct and more of a medium or modality of discourse. Language, for example, has the capacity to introduce a specific emotionally and culturally harmful social recognition of the manner of being of a given racial group by means of stereotypical or degrading terminology, structures, and assumptions (among other things), perhaps unbeknownst to the audience and/or author—and can therefore serve as an incredibly useful framework through which to analyze case studies—but has no inherent quality prescribing racist or otherwise discriminatory meaning; that is, unless we are to subscribe to a strong form of linguistic determinism. Similarly, memes can be used effectively to make a point about societal attitudes, behaviors, and even individual subconscious mental processes related to the interplay of race with the lived experiences necessarily accompanying one's inhabitation of the human condition, but are not in and of themselves (or in context) necessarily instances of racial signification. Taylor's example of the meme of the boy moving his eyes away from the camera being used in an implicitly racial context is a remarkable instance of emergent racial semantics in the use of a meme that is otherwise not specifically racialized. Thus, per Whittaker, the meme has become "overdetermined." It would be important to note that the author of said meme in the stated context would not necessarily have to have assigned it a juxtaposition to "that white people shit" on purpose, but focusing on that detail somewhat misses the point of an overdetermination occurring at all (whether conscious or subconscious), and why that can be problematic in the context of racial stereotypes.

This is digital blackface. The problem isn’t that nonblack people are “pretending to be us,” or that black people are being reduced to fungible. Digital blackface is actively skewing our perception of what blackness contains, and thus what possibilities are open to all of us, regardless of phenotype (if, that is, I and hooks are right). Importantly, though, this is possible because memes are underdetermined and fungible; it is because memes in general are open to this kind of manipulation and projection that a distinctly antiblack manipulation and projection can happen.

I'll admit I've never actually gotten around to reading anything by bell hooks (I own a copy of All About Love: New Visions, but have not touched it yet), but the observation she makes earlier in Whittaker's essay is certainly interesting and inclines me toward putting her work higher on the list. The conclusion that Whittaker makes based on the analysis presented by hooks and the other authors cited in the essay is one that I wish I had the eloquence to articulate: "what would – as silly as it may sound – a generative, radical, socially connective, powerfully black memeing practice look like?" I'm not sure either: I'd also like to find out.

Something else I found extremely interesting in Whittaker's essay:

Editorial note: The author prefers to leave “black” uncapitalized, in order to resist the notion that ‘blackness’ is a coherent, discrete, and sovereign Identity.

I've just recently gotten into the habit of capitalizing the term in my writing, so this is an interesting take. My impression is that there has been a growing sense of a "Black" identity in the wake (à la Christina Sharpe) of rising recognition of and opposition toward Black violence, although this may ultimately be an American phenomenon. Whittaker, like the people who have asked me in the past to make this stylistic decision, is himself Black (as far as I can tell), so I am somewhat at a loss as to what precisely should be done in this regard.