#blaccent

Just because you haven’t read a book since high school doesn’t mean that caring about white people using Blaccents to mimic Black people is chronically online, it just means you’re stupid and have the brain of a fish.

Let’s really think about this. Were minstrel shows that deep? Just like Blaccents, they were a means of mocking Black people or rather caricatures of Black people for non-Black people to laugh at. If you were alive in the 60’s, would you know that that’s wrong, or would you tell people that it’s not that deep and that it’s just make-up? Because let’s really get into this comparison.

The primary effect of minstrel shows were amplifying negative stereotypes about Black Americans while also creating new ones. The stereotype of Black people liking fried chicken, for example, was popularized by white actors in blackface in the Klan propaganda film “Birth of a Nation” and through restaurants like Coon-Chicken Inn that used this logo. And because this iconography was developed by racists, it created a negative connotation around Black people and fried chicken.

And people that use Blaccents to mimic Black American culture have the same effect on how our culture is perceived in the modern day.

Take Awkwafina, for example, who made her career off of rap songs that parodied hip hop culture. She played on stereotypes of rap music being too materialistic, too sexual, or too obsessed with substances, which in turn validated the concerns of racists who actually thought rap music was like that. What’s more is that, because Awkwafina positioned herself as an outsider to the culture she was making fun of, her music was seen as a potent, intelligent satire of Black American culture. But when Black rappers like Meg the Stallion rap about the same topics, it’s seen as evidence of the degredation of Black America.

Through this minstrelsy, the actual minstrel shows and the Blaccents, these negative stereotypes about Black American culture get generalized to the entire culture. It’s why Darryl George, a Black high school student in Texas, was suspended for having dreads in 2024. Or why the white man Michael Dunn shot and killed* Jordan Davis, a 17-year-old in Florida, for listening to his rap music too loud.

Not being able to see these parallels doesn’t mean that it’s not that deep when celebrities use Blaccents, it just means that you’re susceptible to propaganda and don’t know it.