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Black Culture, White Face: How the Internet Helped Hijack Our Culture
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We see the great white heist that is continuing to happen in the White House, but we missed another hijacking right at our fingertips.
Black culture hasn't just set the tone; it's the creator of it. From fashion to food, music to memes, the soul of what we now broadly call 'American culture' is actually a siphoning system. A system that has modernized its extraction of Black creativity, voices, and flavor, only to repackage it, sterilize it, and serve it back to the world, sans credit or context.
This modern-day cultural hijacking didn't start with TikTok or X, formerly Twitter. It began in earnest when the internet first offered Black millennials and Xennials the opportunity to be heard on their own terms. For the first time in history, young Black people were able to bypass traditional gatekeepers and broadcast their lives, their humor, and their hearts.
Message boards, early YouTube, and social platforms like Blackplanet, MySpace, Tumblr, Facebook, and eventually Instagram became digital cookouts—public yet intimate gatherings where our inside jokes, slang, family dynamics, and generational quirks were put on display, not for mass consumption, but for communal oneness.
Unfortunately, the cookout didn't stay private.
Without the gatekeeping wisdom of our elders—you know, who taught us what goes on in this house, stays in this house—we threw open the doors of the culture, posting everything from grandma's peach cobbler recipe to the exact tone of our mothers' 'don't touch nothing in this store' warning. We uploaded our sacred, nuanced, and deeply specific experiences for laughs, likes, and validation, not realizing the internet has no context, care, or conscience—only consumers.
And consume, they did.
The vitality of the content and the influence of our voices fed the machine that doesn't care that 'Black people be like…' was an inside joke for overcoming code switching, while passing down cultural survival and the ability to stand with joy in the face of oppression; it just cared that it was funny and millions of others thought so too. So the shared experiences of a group of people who have always had to push through quickly became memes and stereotypes for the masses, turning what we used to affirm us into trends that started to erase us.
Because here's the gag: when Black people say 'Black people be like,' it's a nod to our shared rhythm, our inherited wit, our ancestors, and our community codes. When white creators mimic it, it becomes Blackface, a costume or cosplay rooted in caricature, not kinship, and that is the real danger of giving them a peek into intimate Black culture.
Cultural expression void of cultural understanding becomes cultural theft, and while the old adage goes, 'imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,' what we've witnessed is not flattery; it's flattening. It's a long-standing practice in white America's history of not assimilating or integrating, but absorbing and erasing. Extracting what's valuable, profitable, and cool, while discarding the people who produced it.
But this isn't new. From Jazz, Blues, Rock and Roll, Hip-Hop, we've seen this play of culture jacking before; but the internet has accelerated, gentrified and commercialized the process in such a rapid way that it's becoming hard to keep up.
In today's social media economy, white influencers lip-sync Black vernacular and at times even cosplay as being Black or bi-racial, all while amassing millions of followers and brand deals. Meanwhile, the Black originators are flagged, shadowbanned, or worse, copied without acknowledgment.
Even our most sacred colloquialisms—terms like 'woke,' 'period,' or 'it's giving'—have been repurposed in white mouths and have now been rendered meaningless or mockable, with AAVE now being labeled as Gen Z slang. Our pain turned into punchlines as our cultural currency is laundered and redistributed, without us seeing a dime.
But per usual, it's strategic.
Hijacking Blackness becomes a way to eliminate the very markers that make us distinct, powerful, and proud. When whiteness wears Blackness like a costume, it is not trying to understand us; it's inherently trying to replace us.
It's digital gentrification. Just as they take the neighborhoods our ancestors built and rename them while attempting to hush the very soul that brought them to the area, they've taken the internet blocks we made vibrant and claimed them as their own. What we are witnessing is the slow bleaching of the Black Internet, and it's time we admit our part in it, too.
In our quest for visibility, we mistook exposure for equity, confused virality with validation, and uploaded everything under the guise of finally being heard, but it came at the cost of context and control.
For those old enough to understand, we have entered an age in society where 'culture' is no longer tethered to the people who created it, and if we're not careful, our stories will be remixed, redacted, and retold by those who were never meant to tell them in the first place.
So, where do we go from here?
As a community, we have to become better stewards of our cultural inheritance. That means reinvesting in Black platforms, protecting our digital spaces, and not being so quick to make our culture content on their platforms so specific. That means teaching the younger generations that not everything is for everybody while reinforcing that some things still belong in the house.
Because if we don't gatekeep, they will.
So the next time you see a viral 'Black people be like…' meme or viral Black sound bites used by someone who doesn't look like us, remember this isn't just about jokes. It's about protection, because culture is not just what we create, it's what we preserve.
And Black culture deserves to remain ours.
SEE ALSO:
New African American Dictionary: Homage Or Appropriation?
When Outsiders Speak Freely About The Black Community
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