We see the nice white heist that’s persevering with to occur within the White Home, however we missed one other hijacking proper at our fingertips.
Black tradition hasn’t simply set the tone; it’s the creator of it. From vogue to meals, music to memes, the soul of what we now broadly name “American tradition” is definitely a siphoning system. A system that has modernized its extraction of Black creativity, voices, and taste, solely to repackage it, sterilize it, and serve it again to the world, sans credit score or context.
This contemporary-day cultural hijacking didn’t begin with TikTok or X, previously Twitter. It started in earnest when the web first supplied Black millennials and Xennials the chance to be heard on their very own phrases. For the primary time in historical past, younger Black individuals had been capable of bypass conventional gatekeepers and broadcast their lives, their humor, and their hearts.
Message boards, early YouTube, and social platforms like Blackplanet, MySpace, Tumblr, Fb, and finally Instagram grew to become digital cookouts—public but intimate gatherings the place our inside jokes, slang, household dynamics, and generational quirks had been placed on show, not for mass consumption, however for communal oneness.
Sadly, the cookout didn’t keep personal.
With out the gatekeeping knowledge of our elders—you realize, who taught us what goes on on this home, stays on this home—we threw open the doorways of the tradition, posting every part from grandma’s peach cobbler recipe to the precise tone of our moms’ “don’t contact nothing on this retailer” warning. We uploaded our sacred, nuanced, and deeply particular experiences for laughs, likes, and validation, not realizing the web has no context, care, or conscience—solely customers.
And eat, they did.
The vitality of the content material and the affect of our voices fed the machine that doesn’t care that “Black individuals be like…” was an inside joke for overcoming code switching, whereas passing down cultural survival and the power to face with pleasure within the face of oppression; it simply cared that it was humorous and hundreds of thousands of others thought so too. So the shared experiences of a bunch of people that have at all times needed to push via shortly grew to become memes and stereotypes for the plenty, turning what we used to affirm us into tendencies that began to erase us.
As a result of right here’s the gag: when Black individuals say “Black individuals be like,” it’s a nod to our shared rhythm, our inherited wit, our ancestors, and our group codes. When white creators mimic it, it turns into Blackface, a dressing up or cosplay rooted in caricature, not kinship, and that’s the actual hazard of giving them a peek into intimate Black tradition.
Cultural expression void of cultural understanding turns into cultural theft, and whereas the previous adage goes, “imitation is the sincerest type of flattery,” what we’ve witnessed shouldn’t be flattery; it’s flattening. It’s a long-standing observe in white America’s historical past of not assimilating or integrating, however absorbing and erasing. Extracting what’s useful, worthwhile, and funky, whereas discarding the individuals who produced it.
However this isn’t new. From Jazz, Blues, Rock and Roll, Hip-Hop, we’ve seen this play of tradition jacking earlier than; however the web has accelerated, gentrified and commercialized the method in such a fast means that it’s turning into arduous to maintain up.
In as we speak’s social media economic system, white influencers lip-sync Black vernacular and at occasions even cosplay as being Black or bi-racial, all whereas amassing hundreds of thousands of followers and model offers. In the meantime, the Black originators are flagged, shadowbanned, or worse, copied with out acknowledgment.
Even our most sacred colloquialisms—phrases like “woke,” “interval,” or “it’s giving”—have been repurposed in white mouths and have now been rendered meaningless or mockable, with AAVE now being labeled as Gen Z slang. Our ache changed into punchlines as our cultural foreign money is laundered and redistributed, with out us seeing a dime.
However per ordinary, it’s strategic.
Hijacking Blackness turns into a strategy to get rid of the very markers that make us distinct, highly effective, and proud. When whiteness wears Blackness like a dressing up, it’s not attempting to know us; it’s inherently attempting to interchange us.
It’s digital gentrification. Simply as they take the neighborhoods our ancestors constructed and rename them whereas making an attempt to hush the very soul that introduced them to the realm, they’ve taken the web blocks we made vibrant and claimed them as their very own. What we’re witnessing is the gradual bleaching of the Black Web, and it’s time we admit our half in it, too.
In our quest for visibility, we mistook publicity for fairness, confused virality with validation, and uploaded every part below the guise of lastly being heard, but it surely got here at the price of context and management.
For these sufficiently old to know, we now have entered an age in society the place “tradition” is now not tethered to the individuals who created it, and if we’re not cautious, our tales can be remixed, redacted, and retold by those that had been by no means meant to inform them within the first place.
So, the place can we go from right here?
As a group, we now have to turn out to be higher stewards of our cultural inheritance. Meaning reinvesting in Black platforms, defending our digital areas, and never being so fast to make our tradition content material on their platforms so particular. Meaning educating the youthful generations that not every part is for everyone whereas reinforcing that some issues nonetheless belong in the home.
As a result of if we don’t gatekeep, they are going to.
So the subsequent time you see a viral “Black individuals be like…” meme or viral Black sound bites utilized by somebody who doesn’t appear to be us, keep in mind this isn’t nearly jokes. It’s about safety, as a result of tradition is not only what we create, it’s what we protect.
And Black tradition deserves to stay ours.
SEE ALSO:
New African American Dictionary: Homage Or Appropriation?
When Outsiders Communicate Freely About The Black Group
Black Tradition, White Face: How the Web Helped Hijack Our Tradition
was initially printed on
newsone.com