
“I think I could have gotten money for it, promos for it, I could have gotten famous off it, get noticed,” Harmon told the Times. The dance’s real choreographer, 15-year-old Jalaiah Harmon, remained undiscovered until a New York Times profile ran, and she spent months asking for acknowledgment in TikTok’s comments section. D’Amelio’s identity is forever intertwined with the dance, its peak hitting when she performed it courtside at the 2020 NBA Dunk Contest, despite having nothing to do with its creation. of Renegade,’’ a 30-second dance combination set to the chorus of K Camp’s “Lottery” that made its rounds on the shortform video apps Funimate and Dubsmash before hitting Instagram and then TikTok in 2019.

And why wouldn’t it? It’s how two of TikTok’s biggest darlings found their stride.įor months, Charli D’Amelio let herself be described as the “ C.E.O.

“But what ends up happening is non-Black folk appropriate our content, and they end up being the faces of what Black folks created.”ĭigital blackface, or the co-opting of dances, memes, and slang popularized by Black creators by the non-Black side of the internet, is committed so casually and frequently that it feels like the default mode of shitposting. We make the trends, we give the looks, we are funniest - there’s no argument about it,” says Louis. “Black creators carry TikTok on our backs.
Black tik tok logo plus#
“We’re mobilizing in this way because it’s necessary and it’s something we’ve been saying among ourselves for quite a while now.”Įach week we’ll send you the very best from the Vox Culture team, plus a special internet culture edition by Rebecca Jennings on Wednesdays. Even in the spaces we’ve managed to create for ourselves - whether it be in music, fashion, language, or dance - non-Black folk continuously infiltrate and occupy these spaces with no respect for the architects who built them,” says Erick Louis, a dancer and TikToker from Florida whose content traverses the space between social commentary and off-the-cuff humor. “As Black folk, we’ve always been aware that we’ve been excluded and othered. One such recent controversy saw white female creators flooding TikTok with videos of lip-syncing along to Nicki Minaj’s “Black Barbies.” While the trend first emerged as a way to celebrate Black beauty, it’s now a site of heated discourse on the lengths to which non-Black creators will go to pantomime Black culture for views. The move comes on the heels of the now-national holiday Juneteenth, which signifies the day in 1865 when a group of enslaved people in Texas learned of their emancipation three years late, but also amid larger conversations about race and appropriation on the platform. vLWse61wD2- Naima Cochrane’s Burner Acct June 21, 2021
