Shafiqah Hudson, a Philadelphia-based writer and academic, first noticed the phenomenon back in the mid-00s in a comment thread on an article about police brutality. Photograph: YouTube/Killa Kev ProductionsĪctually, black women have been calling out certain online behaviours as digital-age blackface for some time now. Are gifs being used to disseminate racist stereotypes in cyberspace? Was the “black marching band dances to Fleetwood Mac” meme an example of “digital blackface”, as suggested in a recent high-traffic Twitter thread? Is there something problematic about white people using brown-skinned emojis? And what about the Black Lives Matter Facebook fundraising page that was revealed to be run by two unaffiliated white men in Australia? Was this the latest iteration of digital blackface in action? Or just a run-of-the-mill money-making scam?Īlcorn State University Marching Band. Racist caricature and impersonation are widely accepted tools of white supremacy, but it’s when minstrelsy’s 19th-century traditional tools of boot polish and a wig are replaced with 21st-century equivalents that the confusion begins. The online popularity of images of black people – particularly women and femme gay men – is a fact of internet life and, in recent months, an increasingly controversial one. Because, as Beyoncé’s “Beychella” performance proved, you can never have too many gifs of a sassy, confident Beyoncé, right? A mid the fanfare surrounding the release of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s surprise joint album and their video for APES**T, one group were paying particularly close attention: the professional gif creators employed by companies such as GIPHY, Tenor and Imgur.

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