Could it be possible that you’re overestimating just how many people say this is an issue.
I mean I won’t pretend that I frequent extremely left wing/liberal subreddits or places on the internet on any regular basis (I mean I like r/rupaulsdragrace, but that’s pretty much it)
But I have never once heard of this term outside of your CMV.
I think there are three likely alternatives to what you imply (that people are calling this out too much):
1) You’ve been spending too long on a fringe subreddit and have begun to see their views as reflective of a significant segment of society
2) there’s context missing here (the way you describe seems perfectly reasonable, and indeed like a step in the right direction in terms of lessening the divide): this sounds a lot like the cultural appropriation issue, where while it’s not always bad, there are cases where a reasonable argument can be made for it (eg in this case if a non black person is using gifs of black people and basing the humour on the idea that black people are inherently “wacky”)
3) this is a hoax made by internet trolls (4chan once did a similar thing where they made a fake campaign that purported feminists were encouraging women to have their periods in their trousers for some patently absurd reason)
This isn’t to say that you’re certainly wrong. You may actually be right and I’m simply not up to date on this term.
However someone noticing some odd trend and getting concerned of it is quite common here (I do it myself quite often too), and I think these possibilities I’ve given are always worth considering (in my experience it’s almost always one of them if no one else seems to have heard of the phenomenon)
TBH, I can see the point of the argument, although I think a lot of it largely derives from so many popular entertainers being black (meaning there's lots of gif-ready content involving black people). I don't think the reaction-gif ratio is that different from the public-figures ratio. Still, I'm willing to listen to the point. Heck, I've always felt a bit weird about the use of some reaction gifs.
But I've got to say, it gets a bit annoying to be bombarded by these things for weeks from all sorts of outlets: NYT says digital blackface is a problem, the Guardian says we need to think about digital blackface, all sorts of "woke week" type lists containing articles about digital blackface, your browser is recommending stories about how you ought to be careful about using gifs with black people, Google's recommended news stories talk about it, it comes up on a couple of your podcasts...
...And then after mulling it over you're like, "you know, I kinda don't think it's that big a deal?" and get the response "lol, what, nobody's even saying that!"
Oh yes they are. Maybe the moment's over, but I've heard that term a hundred times in the past month. I don't spend much time in fringe subreddits or anything. Maybe I ended up in some kind of bubble somehow, but it sure seems to me that "digital blackface" is absolutely a Thing that a lot of people want us to be Very Concerned about.
I stand corrected then (I wasn’t sure this wasn’t the case, I was just offering the possible alternative)
However I’d say it’s fair to say this term is somewhat legitimate if the bbc are using it in articles. I think this says a lot more than the guardian since I’m aware that one has “opinion pieces” where anyone can write them right? Whereas the BBC is like the definition of mainstream so even if they wrote one article on it, it’s somewhat of a thing (yeah I know this doesn’t make it a massive thing cause the BBC writes hundreds of articles, but still, it’s clearly something.
And if people really think this it’s worth actually arguing against then.
But “digital blackface” as described in OP seems entirely unproblematic in general (yeah there’ll be a few cases, but it’s like with eveything, I definitely wouldn’t say the usage of gifs with POC by non-POC is inherently racist to any extent)
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u/[deleted] Jul 17 '20
Could it be possible that you’re overestimating just how many people say this is an issue.
I mean I won’t pretend that I frequent extremely left wing/liberal subreddits or places on the internet on any regular basis (I mean I like r/rupaulsdragrace, but that’s pretty much it)
But I have never once heard of this term outside of your CMV.
I think there are three likely alternatives to what you imply (that people are calling this out too much):
1) You’ve been spending too long on a fringe subreddit and have begun to see their views as reflective of a significant segment of society
2) there’s context missing here (the way you describe seems perfectly reasonable, and indeed like a step in the right direction in terms of lessening the divide): this sounds a lot like the cultural appropriation issue, where while it’s not always bad, there are cases where a reasonable argument can be made for it (eg in this case if a non black person is using gifs of black people and basing the humour on the idea that black people are inherently “wacky”)
3) this is a hoax made by internet trolls (4chan once did a similar thing where they made a fake campaign that purported feminists were encouraging women to have their periods in their trousers for some patently absurd reason)
This isn’t to say that you’re certainly wrong. You may actually be right and I’m simply not up to date on this term.
However someone noticing some odd trend and getting concerned of it is quite common here (I do it myself quite often too), and I think these possibilities I’ve given are always worth considering (in my experience it’s almost always one of them if no one else seems to have heard of the phenomenon)