Act Black, Be White - The Secret to Tik Tok Fame

That was one of the most depressing moments of my life are black people just tokens for you to use .

I also receive a good amount of like trans comment .

It's probably the worst place for critical .

It's a reflection of the way that I'm suppressed in my everyday life .

They should hype up black creators doing black things just as much as they hype up white people doing black things again , be them woman and man them for less than $15 a year .

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What's up .

So you know the story that I do in the beginning of each video .

Um Yeah , full disclosure .

I've never , I've never really watched one of your videos until like five minutes ago .

I want you to play the protagonist .

Oh um Can I decline or is this like um you should be getting it right now ?

OK .

Let me take it .

Jeez .

This is , I don't know if this is um this is one of the more offensive ones .

Hey , hey , girlfriend .

Hi .

Wait , why do you sound like Jar Jar Binks trying to sound like Darth Vader .

Is that racist ?

Am I going to sound racist in the sketch ?

It'll sound better in post , don't worry .

Uh OK .

Uh Cool beans .

Why are you calling from ?

My girlfriend's phone ?

You , me and our girlfriend come again .

You need to come right now cause I freaking myself out .

Me and your gal been slewing since January .

I was thinking we had something real , right ?

Well , tell me why I just shot you in bed biting the pillow with one gal behind her so she could choose plastic over me .

I mean me .

Ok .

You know Liam Neeson's monologue and taken dad loves me to sleep every night .

I want you to perform that verbatim action .

OK ?

With the phone to your , I don't know who you .

Ok .

Yeah , I don't how to , I don't know who you are .

I don't know what you want but if you're looking for a ransom , I tell you I don't have money but I do have , it's a very particular set of skills skills that I've acquired over a very long career schools to make me a nightmare for people like you people like you .

Is that what am I am ?

I , this is gonna sound crazy but I want you to act like you're driving and I'm gonna turn that into an epic driving .

Ok .

Uh I'm just , but I'm not , I'm , I'm not in the car right now .

Is that important ?

Yes , you are .

Yeah .

Oh yeah , this is this is the best thing because the good stuff .

Yes , this is amazing .

Now , I want you to act like you're bursting open the door almost like the Kool Aid man .

But instead of saying , oh yeah , I want you to say , oh no .

Ok .

Yeah .

Ok .

So .

Ok .

Mhm .

So I , I burst , just burst them .

Is that ok ?

Really ?

Oh , no .

Yeah .

I'm surprised I'm very surprised that you do something like this .

Well , what's worse you forgetting our five year anniversary or me pranking you to remember ?

Great boys .

I just have one question for uh Yeah .

What does this have to do with tiktok ?

Like at all ?

I'm glad you ask Rose and her girlfriend are both incensed by each other's actions in the story .

This is rightfully mad because her girlfriend created a scenario that caused us stress and tested herself in the relationship and her girlfriend is rightfully ma because she missed a milestone event .

Who would remedy this would be both parties being empathetic towards their respective perspectives , but that's often not how it goes .

And that definitely wasn't the case with elitist tiktok drama with you .

Are you familiar with M M I W murdered missing indigenous women ?

They have this symbol of the hand over the mouth just like black lives matter .

Of course , all lives matter .

But it sucks for us .

Can we focus on us right now ?

Anyone that's queer , their voices are also suppressed too and they decided to do pride out and create this video trend where they put their hands over their mouths to represent being silenced .

You can imagine how upset that has made the indigenous community .

So indigenous tiktok , black tiktok , other people of queer social justice tiktok , all of us are jumping in to like explain why what they're doing is , is icky and gross .

We're not saying you're bad people .

We're not saying you should be half .

So we're not saying that your movement is trash .

Just you picked that one symbol .

Did you have to do that ?

Here's why that's problematic .

Some people took that real well .

Ja gazes doubled down super super hard and his following then went out and started mass reporting .

Anyone who was making videos like that now , no way are the plights of pride on my indigenous folk them equitable to relationship drama .

But it's a similar situation to tunneling one's vision to the point where you can only see how one has hurt you rather than how you may have hurt them .

This is one of the common occurrences on tiktok when a white creator appropriates black culture and then it eclipses the black creator that created it .

There's a historical precedent to all of this Elvis , right ?

The fact that it's majority white audiences and that is what becomes so successful taking that and blowing it up for the majority white audiences and disconnecting it that's like been happening and now it's just happening online summer 2020 reminded us to our respective living room and rather than winding up your waist on someone grotch , many of us CDC abiding folk were winning on tiktok , Megan Nas Stallion .

The Mother Mary of thought , just drop the aptly named tune so much like Leming is off the cliff , everybody and they mine included , I am returning this man .

This is your baby .

I know it was like crying and like scurry to this the skies of the social media platform to probably the latest dance choreography and inject digital dopamine straight into our vein .

However , unlike savage or insert Twerk song here , there was no challenge this time to go viral like the RNA that ran rampant outside .

That's because the author of these dance challenges will block women .

Notably , in this case , K R Wilson , who of their choreography being co-opted by the likes of Charlie Emilio and Allison Ree and would aggregate an obscene amount of success of the very dances that when danced by Kiara herself wouldn't get even a whiff of the same amount of views .

Black women creating the songs , creating the dances , doing the dances , putting the songs on the platform and then white women coming in stealing it and just skyrocketing levels and levels and levels above them is a reoccurring trend on tiktok that I've seen since inception .

Charlie de Milio came in and like popularized it .

The thing is a black creator did it nevertheless , it was like a black little girl .

This girl never got the platform .

Charlie DeMillo did like Charlie DeMillo at this point is a multimillionaire just off that one dance just off that Renegade .

You know , she went on Jimmy Fallon and like Jimmy Fallon called the Renegade .

Her dance black creators were protesting because this was but another example of how the world loves black culture but not black people .

The Renegade Challenge of 2019 to 2020 .

What I sound like the 1000 days war .

The Renegade Challenge of 19 saw Emilio emerge from the napalm clouds of cultural appropriation and black exploitation as one of the largest creators on tiktok or artist and Ray who went on Jimmy Fowler to perform these dances created by Black creators .

So when thought came out rather than ranting on tiktok about the racist algorithm , these creators simply didn't create and they let their silence speak for itself which resulted in the what is this man ?

Money eating out the gun .

It's the fact that Megan made it easy for them .

She legit said hands on her knees , shake it on our thought , literally thought dumb for dummies at this point .

And the male Sapiens couldn't even conjure up a semblance of what these black creators did .

This wasn't a simple scandal that will be soon forgotten .

The thought strike was a microcosm of the discourse surrounding race in the States .

It didn't only expose the biases in these algorithms .

But it exposed the biases in ourselves .

The algorithm in and of itself is still just about of rules and numbers .

It's a reflection of the people who created it and their biases and it is a way to perpetuate the biases of the people who are using tiktok scholars such as Shafer , I've been at zing claim that tiktok's algorithm is akin to crack cocaine .

Nevers doom scrolling .

Been so enticing than a never ending feed of F Y P .

Approximately one billion users per month .

Open the clock up at least eight times a day on waste .

I mean watch 52 minutes worth of content .

It was once a gen Z safe space where more about millennials and boomers alike would wag their fingers and condescend to it is now the most downloaded app in 2020 and 2021 new media like I G N F B .

See Senile .

In comparison to tiktok , the app has transcended content and it's now culture .

Tiktok is a very insular space whose lessons cannot be applied holistically to any other platform on the internet .

These ephemeral entries into the entertainment landscape , I'll born on this app and live in our interaction to the point where every conversation that I have with my little cousins can be comprised of tiktok memes no longer are URL and I R L reality separate .

They are now informed and intertwined with one another .

But tiktok is interesting and it's paradoxical nature on one hand , it's rooted in youth culture which challenges the status quo .

And on the other hand , it perpetuates the status quo , all of these problems .

They obviously are multiplied by aspects like talking about race or like like a black creator making a , a video with a hashtag that talks about blackness .

The algorithm could just freak out at that for the reason of upholding white supremacy and having it be a white dominant hegemonic space where that is seen as like something that they don't want to touch a 12th tiktok that beautifully encapsulates the philosophy to video is sandwiched between two transphobic Tik Toks that are null .

The form the platform represents the spectrum of the human condition and the addictive quality of the app is in its algorithm .

This series of zeros and ones may know you better than you know yourself rather than consuming content from the people that you follow tiktok tells you what you like and oftentimes it's eerily accurate .

I am one of those people that figured out they're autistic because of the tiktok algorithm essentially over the pandemic .

Tiktok has helped me figure out that I am autistic and trans .

Yeah , you can get to know someone a lot better from watching an hour long youtube video , right ?

But there's something really magical in just watching five seconds of another person's human experience and connecting with them in a way that you have never connected with or felt validated by another human your entire life .

In fact , tiktok users take advantage of the algorithm's mind reading qualities by leaving comments like for the algorithm so that the algorithm would serve them more of that content or swiftly swiping past Tik Toks that they don't want to be shown more of this is akin to youtube in this manner .

But one thing about tiktok separates it from all the rest of these platforms and that's its viral with a low bar to climb in order to create an algorithm that seems to serve content that viewers voraciously consume going viral .

Isn't this extremely rare moment that requires energy , talked or even a following .

It is so commonplace that it seems obtainable to not only creators but consumers , you know , the dopamine boost you get when like your video just hits like 10-K likes out of nowhere .

You're like , wow , people love me like I was just addicted to that .

But then I got taken down , I got taken down and that was one of the most depressing moments of my life .

There's something about the power of tiktok , like the power of likes the power of instant gratification that tiktok brings that's so exclusively different from any other app and then they like take it away from you , you know , then you just , then you start posting more , you start becoming like more addicted .

It's a low risk , high reward scenario like lip syncing or better yet .

Eyebrow to a beat .

But this creates a culture of shared behavior that transcends Tik Tok Will Michael Jackson's moonwalk or Soulja Boy's cranked up with dance is inextricably attributed to a spawn point .

A tiktok dance or trend can be replicated into this postmodern paradox .

Well , with every replication , every imitation , the dance can be immortalized and anonymized .

The choreography to Megan the Stallion Savage is so synonymous with the song that it becomes a sense of belonging .

For those who participated in the trend , the sense of solidarity .

And this shared experience is culture and this culture is Tik Tok .

Tik Tok is a matrix for many defying belonging meaning and most of all identity .

And as many creators know , if you can get your audience to identify with you , you can exploit them way that they're pushing um mutual people and friends only videos .

They are trying to reinforce the paras social relationship .

They're trying to make you become more emotionally enmeshed with other people on the app because building those friendships and relationships is gonna make you stay there longer .

It's the same thing is like when big corporations uh install , yeah , we got a bowling alley and an open bar and you can come hang out and be friends .

That's why thousands of pubescent adolescent and Russ riddled adults flocked to Dunkin Donuts when the Charlie was released .

And one would wonder what would I have to say about a seemingly innocuous beverage ?

But this is less a drink rather than it being a manifestation of colorless capital , Tiktok's Eastern origins didn't protect it from Western white supremacy is a currency and we ain't talking about coins .

We talking about color or maybe the lock off Charlie is bigger than Charlie with all the 141 million followers .

She has the Charlie quality which is responsible for propelling others that look just like her to tiktok stardom .

It's a cultural conveyor belt that doesn't seem to be slowing down Charlie Emilio's success and affluence is a result of her success already in terms of just being born into the right attributes and class in the Renegade Dance .

Um She is a conventionally attractive Eurocentric white teenager on an app that is full of either teenagers who are looking to follow conventionally attractive Eurocentric white teenagers because of implicit racial biases or hormonal stuff or whatever and then adults who are creepy who aren't looking to follow Eurocentric white teenagers because they're weirdos if the video of the original girl who had created the dances had gotten on their for you page , I don't think she would have gotten Charlie Demil level while tiktok has a revolutionary air that only youth culture can create .

It also creates a mainstream that resembles much of the old Western white supremacist ideals that we see in old media .

Despite the democratic facade of this tiktok has a hu from the fallen show , an NBA All Star Game and even a super commercial .

It's clear that tiktok fame doesn't stay on the platform .

It can be turned into real life capital .

If tiktok was a person , it has a type , it likes young , slender and conventionally attractive white women .

And this bias is it a bug ?

It's a feature .

Where do you still live ?

Ok .

I , you're still on the call on one side .

I'm just like posted on the camera .

There's totally a , a genre of like the Thirst Trap like white boy .

Usually it's all appropriating some kind of dance that was invented or popularized by a person of color .

There's no chronological timeline on tiktok , whether you're an F Y IP or browsing A hashtag It serves the most viewed videos to you which are typically young white women dancing to the latest hip hop tune , typically recorded by a black artist and dance by a black creator .

And this black dancer will most likely never grace you .

I , every time I hit 100 K , I'd just be taken down , taken down , taken down .

And like , I didn't really see that trend that tiktok has this anti-black .

I was so infatuated with the idea of like I have this platform and people love me .

I had no idea that tiktok was so bias , race and the pernicious nature of this is in order to chase that Tik Tok stardom , one that appears more obtainable than old media .

And definitely youtube at this point , the tiktok user will replicate that Charlie dance and create a cascading effect where everybody is , which then deepens the indelible mark that Charlie and those like her leave upon the platform , it promotes a homogeneity that results in culture and this method of replicating behavior in order to replicate success extends beyond the platform .

It's no longer you wanting to simply dance like Charlie , but you wanna look like Charlie ultimately finding yourself for the Dunkin Donuts purchasing an overpriced or whatever it is simply because it carries the Charlie brand , a more sophisticated emilio now gives dance credits and captions like the choreography of the Torcula challenge being attributed to Lela .

But this is after establishing an entire career off the proverbial black box of black women .

When you search for on the app , you will find Charlie's not Layla's or the countless other black women that also performed it because his algorithms is yet .

But another of the master's tools in his tool belt and the master's tools never dismantled their institutions .

Tiktok engages in what I call soft supremacy appearing to be democratic in its distribution across platform .

Almost giving a taste tester to the digital crocket pedals to users by showering them with a modicum of success , but they only give you just enough so that you chase that high .

Yet again , six hours a day , I was just adding these Tik Toks .

I was pushing three Tik Toks today .

Those who were sustained with success are typically upholding Western beauty standards .

So the supremacy is so subtle that you may not even realize it exists .

Whiteness .

In this case isn't only normalized , it's lionized .

I want to be clear that it's not Charlie's individual fault , but it's systemic perpetuation that propels a Charlie and Alyssa look like her .

However , there's a new answer to this .

There's a reason why white supremacy is so powerful is that these individuals reify their white privilege .

It's not asking too much for Charlie and Addison and those like them to be cognizant of their contributions to this institution of White supremacy .

How their investment into these biased algorithms can end up digging a deeper hole into the canyon that we're already in .

And this is why I have such a love hate relationship with tiktok because I want to be mad at it for the way that it radicalizes people , but it's also so beautiful because it's just bringing like minded people together .

Whiteness isn't real .

It's a construct created to consolidate power to a particular people and exclude another white people aren't white , they're European .

I mean , you're being robbed of your own historical heritage in the name of political warfare .

So when thousands of teenagers imitate the new Charlie dances in order to get a paucity of tiktok traction , they're reifying whiteness and com modifying it in a very compelling way to the point where Whiteness feels unintrusive .

Whiteness feels comfortable that's making anything that isn't white , feel forced feel unnatural , which is why you hear Caucasians clamoring about why their favorite character is now black or queer .

Why do these cartoons have to be so political ?

And many will write off these observations as it's not that deep , it's Bay .

However , in the context of culture , what happens when Charlie dances a dance of black women of whose name you probably don't even remember .

At this point , the choreography loses context and simply becomes content .

And I grew up in a very white town and rap music or like a , a V when it starts to pop up in like suburban areas , just white kids doing it .

It's like , that's a totally real thing that happens all the time weirdly like disconnected .

It is from just actual black people and what they're saying and what they are portraying and what they're making in their art .

It's like , it's , it's taking something and making it this insular thing .

Wilson took the Tik Tok to create choreography to Megan , the stallion savage dance infected users that replicated it and ultimately had Megan herself using that very choreography in our live performances .

That's the Hallmark version of Karras story .

What really happened is Kia did that dance on tiktok a bunch of times until Charlie came and made the dance famous by doing it herself is a capitalist dystopia because K R is absolutely alienated from her own label .

And this disproportionate distribution of success is stark amongst black and white creators , you could say something and it'll probably get 10-K views or something like that .

But like if the same person says what you're saying and they're white , they'll , they'll get .

So , have you experienced that ?

Yeah .

Yeah .

Yeah , 100% .

I've experience .

I was about to be like , I don't know .

But , yeah , I have , I mean , there , there are two trends that I created on tiktok last year .

And in both of the cases , I made the initial joke and then a white person recreated an almost identical joke and the video did way better .

So yes , comedic imperialism , but the method of meritocracy suddenly suggests that this is a post race platform .

Unfortunately , we know better than to believe that since we had a black president .

But these racial biases aren't baked into the literal foundation of America tiktok has also been a place where political discourse like this can ensue .

I have the craziest story .

OK .

Back in the day , back in the day , there was something called poly talk , right ?

Which was basically like a whole bunch of these creators P O C creators predominantly that just talked about politics during the months of like last year .

During the months of like June to August , the Feds did a sweep , you know what I mean ?

Like you like *** , I got taken down five times .

Poly talk was just destroyed and I feel like that was a targeted attack because every time I got taken down was for minority safety because I showed my shoulders .

Apparently , the platform has transformed from dances to discussion , which is a lot for an audience that typically wouldn't watch a video .

I say as long as this one to participate and engage in ideas , they otherwise wouldn't .

But social media phenomenon has brought to light some other interesting aspects as well .

And that is the aesthetic of activism during the George Floyd protests .

Many influences Charlie included , gestured in support of Black Lives Matter by posting up black squares or in Charlie's case , putting up B L M in their profile picture and moves like this could very well be in good faith .

Thus garnering glowing support from critics and fans alike .

But the irony is that these individuals go right back to their social media practices that pop up institutions that marginalize Black people .

Where do we give space to white allies ?

Because that is the reality , no matter how poignant and eloquent we are , they just need to hear it out of a white face and we do need white people to fulfill that role in the movement .

But also white people be problematic .

White people censor them censor themselves .

And I empathize with these people .

I truly do because it is genuinely difficult to navigate this political landscape even as an ally .

However , it's not impossible .

I've essayed about minstrel c my commodification of N video .

But tiktok has a very interesting implication when it comes to powering blackness no longer does Shay and Dawson need to throw a Black sense .

White tiktoker could literally use a sound created by a black voice and simply lip it , which allows these white creators to circumvent the pain and the marginalization that the black creators that actually did the voice have to go through in real life as well was on the platform .

And the white tiktoker skipped straight to the fame straight to the success and divo it of black people of Black pain .

It is akin to a Kim Kardashian appropriating the features of black women .

The very features that black women are degraded for is beyond non black people sharing black means and vernacular and colloquialism in an effort to communicate with non black people in a particular hip and urban way is now to the point where you can literally race role play and get fame for it .

Talking to a quote from bell hooks eating the other when race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure .

The cultural of specific groups as well as the bodies of individuals can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of the dominating race , gender sexual practices affirm that power over and intimate relations with the other tiktok is tourism for non P O C creators to enjoy P O C culture without the pain .

And while on the topic of non P O C something piqued , my curiosity on curiosity , shrimp it's literally called your mayonnaise like Mr Mayo .

I , it sounds like something I would write .

My father is making mayonnaise .

He loves making it .

And I begin to wonder why are you always making mayonnaise ?

Dad ?

The sheer mayonnaise .

This is not satirical .

I did not make this .

It's amazing .

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I'm not sure exactly what I'd call my race brown .

Maybe I faced very racially motivated bias on tiktok .