Blackfishing: the commodification of Black aesthetics without Black experience
"It's So Popular to Have the Black Woman's Body But Not Have the Black Woman's Experience"
-Jessie Woo
I consider racism, whether individual, internalized, structural, or institutional, to be an ideology that should be fought by any means necessary.However, in 2022, blackfishing, the heir to blackface, is an acceptable form of racism that still thrives.
Months ago, I questioned my audience: "How come you follow me and also follow Kim Kardashian?" I received no appropriate response, except that it was a sincere question. Why would my followers, aware of my work on social and racial justice, appreciate this wealthy and privileged individual? How could my dedicated audience, who usually fight racial prejudice as hard as I do, be tracking the private life of a woman who embodies racism, fetishism, capitalism, and white supremacy?
ARIANA GRANDE
Coined by Canadian activist Wanna Thompson, blackfishing tends to occur in online spaces where people find it easier to intentionally alter their identities and appear different from who they are. It's a trend of non-black public celebrities and influencers who do everything in their power to appear black or racially ambiguous by excessively tanning their skin, getting plastic surgery, wearing clothes, and adopting hairstyles popularized by black women or, in some cases, falsely claiming to be black.
As a privileged group, they capitalize on historically oppressed groups’ appearance and choose attributes like lips, hair, buttocks, and skin, which represent blackness in their eyes.
Now, a new trend called Fox Eyes surgery has emerged as another problematic example of how people are commodifying specific ethnic features.Asianfishing is about to be next problematic trend.
"A racial masquerade that functions as a form of racial fetishism,"
Leslie Bow, Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin.
Blackfishing is the result of a series of conscious choices to commodify and domesticate blackness by embodying it. The fact that white women use their privilege to pick and choose which parts of the black experience they want to engage with forces me to think of Jordan Peele’s movie Get Out. The movie brilliantly illustrates how white people tend to take possession of blackness appropriated by them without comprehending the magnitude of what they are doing.
An American horror film that focuses on racial fetishism and compulsive obsession with the black body.
EMMA HALLBERG
Blackfishers are making blackness something that can be consumed, and through this process, they are dehumanizing black people.
Genuinely concerned by this trend, I engaged in a difficult conversation with a longtime friend after he had posted a picture of Ms. Kardashian's Vogue Arabia cover. He did not, however, understand the problem. I explained to him that although Ms. Kardashian may have looked stunning on the cover, her appearance was achieved through an artificial process of blackfishing and it perpetuates the oppressive history and present-day reality faced by black people.
BHAD BAHBIE
A family is obsessed with blackness and use their daughter to lure young black men to their home where they perform brain transplants, transferring the spirits of white men into black men’s bodies.
The film is somewhat a variant of blackfishing as a body is appropriated in an attempt to prolong the life of privileged non-black populations.
For all of the above, I struggle to properly understand how a trend rooted in bigotry that falsely portrays black people as stereotypes and black culture as a product is somehow acceptable to my dedicated audience.
Fine, blackfishing is not as obvious as cultural appropriation; it's more about appearance rather than cultural heritage.
But, I find it worse, as it is desperately trying to embody the appearance of another ethnicity, minus the social prejudice nor the political discrimination that comes with it.
He did not thoroughly grasp why I felt insulted by his post, why his story was promoting capitalism, and why I was irritated. White women have access to blackness and black culture without experiencing emotional pain. Why didn’t he consider his post to be inappropriate and hurtful?
Why didn’t he consider his post triggering to black women who have been constantly bombarded by European beauty standards in the media?
Seeing your distinctive features adopted by other women who enjoy the privilege of matching the European standard is the reassertion or repetition of the widespread belief that people desire blackness but not on black women.
"Blackness is profitable in the hands of whiteness."
In the nineteenth century, it was quite lucrative for whites to use blackface in their comic performances. Blackface was a marketable commodity that they could simply put on and take off as they pleased. The blackfishers are undoubtedly doing the same thing; they are always capable of promptly removing that "black aesthetic." Did you notice how the Kardashians progressively reduced their buttocks? They can choose when to withdraw their earrings, fake tan, and blackness from their bodies in a context where whiteness will be more beneficial.
While we, black women, are black 24/7, we cannot just take off our features and swap them out to be accepted by society.
By "wearing" black womanhood, non-black women allow themselves to extract the marketable and pleasurable components of black identity, free from the systemic oppression that shapes it.
References
Anatomy of a Black Woman: My Body is Beautiful (no date). Available at: https://www.edi.nih.gov/blog/communities/anatomy-black-woman-my-body-beautiful.
Black History Month: Is Blackfishing A Sinister, Millennial Form Of ... (no date). Available at: https://www.media-diversity.org/black-history-month-is-blackfishing-a-sinister-millennial-form-of-blackface/.
Blackfishing on Instagram: Influencing and the Commodification of Black ... (no date). Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051211038236.
COLUMN: Get Out highlights racial fetishes - Daily Trojan (no date). Available at: https://dailytrojan.com/2017/03/07/column-get-highlights-racial-fetishes/.
Ten Celebrities Accused of Blackfishing - AceShowbiz (no date). Available at: https://www.aceshowbiz.com/news/view/00178650.html.