ABSTRACT
During the coronavirus pandemic, TikTok dance challenges offered an escape for isolated young Americans of all backgrounds to play and connect. For Black femme creators like Keara Wilson, who choreographed one of first viral challenges of the pandemic, however, the uneven rewards for white influencers performing Black dances within TikTok’s digital attention economy implicitly signals what Jason Parham refers to as an “evolution of digital blackface.” On TikTok, digital blackface is characterized by predatory inclusion, cultural extraction, and fungibility. Encompassing these features, dance challenges offer a complex site to examine the racial and gender violence of platform capitalism within today’s most ascendant social media platform. Placing Wilson’s #SavageChallenge within the historical context of blackface minstrelsy and chattel slavery, this chapter argues that the uneven rewards for white performers of Black dances on TikTok constitutes a discreet yet insidious form of digital blackface that troubles the contours of Gen Z’s supposed racial progressivism. This chapter offers a scale for evaluating cross-racial intimacies of dance challenge participation, from playful exchange to cultural extraction. The chapter concludes by considering how platforms and influencers might undermine this exploitative digital economy through legal intervention and justice-oriented investments.
