Attention Townspeople: You Are Probably Guilty Of Digital Blackface

I don’t think this can be topped. Then again, liberals never cease to amaze me. They always come up with something.

I hate to break it to you fine folks, but you’re probably guilty of a terrible, unforgivable offense: Digital blackface. Oh yes– it’s A Thing. If you’ve ever used a gif featuring a black person and you’re NOT black, bam. You’ve done it. Teen Vogue is FED UP.

If you’ve never heard of the term before, “digital blackface” is used to describe various types of minstrel performance that become available in cyberspace. Blackface minstrelsy is a theatrical tradition dating back to the early 19th century, in which performers “blacken” themselves up with costume and behaviors to act as black caricatures. The performances put society’s most racist sensibilities on display and in turn fed them back to audiences to intensify these feelings and disperse them across culture. Many of our most beloved entertainment genres owe at least part of themselves to the minstrel stage, including vaudeville, film, and cartoons. While often associated with Jim Crow–era racism, the tenets of minstrel performance remain alive today in television, movies, music and, in its most advanced iteration, on the Internet.

I’m quite fond of this gif and use it frequently–

–so I’m in the same boat as you. Wanna know who else is? Meghan McCain.

Me… all day today. pic.twitter.com/OwpCahsMcG

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) July 11, 2017

Someone explain to me the point of fat shaming Sean Spicer? Is it just to humiliate him even more? What is this?! pic.twitter.com/70jMDM7SVQ

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) June 20, 2017

Me – watching the Comey hearing for the last hour… pic.twitter.com/OJ25SWHAKY

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) June 8, 2017

Shouldn’t they be flattered? We use those gifs because they’re the absolute best.

GIFs with transcripts become an opportunity for those not fluent in black vernacular to safely use the language, such as in the many “hell to the no,” “girl, bye,” and “bitch, please” memes passed around.

Teen Vogue’s Lauren Michele Jackson believes we use those memes because we’re too afraid to say those phrases on our own. We don’t know how to safely use “black vernacular.”

B*tch, please.

Ultimately, black people and black images are thus relied upon to perform a huge amount of emotional labor online on behalf of nonblack users. We are your sass, your nonchalance, your fury, your delight, your annoyance, your happy dance, your diva, your shade, your “yaas” moments. The weight of reaction GIFing, period, rests on our shoulders.

“The weight of reaction GIFing, period, rests on our shoulders.” She said that. In real life. We’re actually burdening the black community. We’re sucking their emotions dry and preserving our own. We’re exploiting them.

Now listen, I know it SOUNDS like Lauren is policing our super racist gif habits, but it’s not like that. She simply wants us to “be cognizant of what we share, how we share, and to what extent that sharing dramatizes preexisting racial formulas inherited from ‘real life.'”

Just remember that sharing dramatizes preexisting racial formulas, all while keeping in mind that our giphing habits are taking a huge toll on the black community. After all, we’re exploiting their emotions and using them as our own. This is unacceptable and incredibly racist. If nothing else, stop for Michael Brown’s sake. Think of him.

Not kidding. She actually mentioned him to help her argument along.

After all, our culture frequently associates black people with excessive behaviors, regardless of the behavior at hand. Black women will often be accused of yelling when we haven’t so much as raised our voice. Officer Darren Wilson perceived a teenage Michael Brown as a hulking “demon” and a young black girl who remained still was flipped and dragged across a classroom by deputy Ben Fields. It’s an implication that points toward a strange way of thinking: When we do nothing, we’re doing something, and when we do anything, our behavior is considered “extreme.” This includes displays of emotion stereotyped as excessive: so happy, so sassy, so ghetto, so loud. In television and film, our dial is on 10 all the time — rarely are black characters afforded subtle traits or feelings. Scholar Sianne Ngai uses the word “animatedness” to describe our cultural propensity see black people as walking hyperbole.

She added:

If there’s one thing the Internet thrives on, it’s hyperbole and the overrepresentation of black people in GIFing everyone’s daily crises plays up enduring perceptions and stereotypes about black expression. And when nonblack users flock to these images, they are playacting within those stereotypes in a manner reminiscent of an unsavory American tradition. Reaction GIFs are mostly frivolous and fun. But when black people are the go-to choice for nonblack users to act out their most hyperbolic emotions, do reaction GIFs become “digital blackface”?

She’s seriously telling us to gif responsibly. I can’t. I really, really can’t. Lauren has waaaaaay too much time on her hands.

This might come as a shock, but I don’t choose gifs based on skin color. Whatever’s funny is funny, period. I don’t consider race. I use whatever fits my situation and mood. I’m not going to freaking re-examine my giphing habits because some whiny social justice snowflake can’t deal. Get a life.