What is Digital Blackface?
Digital Blackface is when white people use gifs and memes with Black people’s images. We’ve all done this without thinking about it. The picture/gif/meme is funny, and we just want to be part of the fun. We don’t mean anything by it.
In today’s use of social media, gifs/memes/pictures are used as part of the actual language. Think back to Egyptian hieroglyphs or pictographs. We actually replace part of our written language with those images. Because of that, we are implying that the images are ourselves at the moment, like an avatar. We are consuming the image and making it ourselves. This is disturbing and off-putting for many Black people, because we already have a long history of consuming Black lives for our own purposes, with no financial compensation. It’s just further exploitation.
It's time for us to think about this more and respect when we’re called out for it. We can do better. It doesn’t matter if some people don’t have a problem with it. Enough people do, and we should respect their feelings. This is one microaggression we really should stop.
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