Deep, ancestral sigh.
First, they stated they “don’t see race.” Then got here the “reverse racism” crowd. Then “white lives matter.” Then “cease enjoying the race card,” “DEI is divisive,” and “Black persons are the actual racists conserving us divided.”
And now, as a result of white fragility is a snowflake-infused renewable vitality supply, the descendants of Europe’s criminals and failures, colonizers, enslavers, and segregationists have taken to TikTok and different social media platforms to announce that they’ve come down with a collective case of—await it … “Black fatigue.”
Don’t squint. Your face would possibly get caught like that.
Sure, chile, the very individuals who’ve spent complete centuries exhausting the hell out of Black our bodies, minds, and spirits now declare they’re so bored with us. And but, they’re so intellectually bankrupt that to elucidate their so-called exhaustion, they needed to steal the very language we created to explain surviving them. The time period Black fatigue was initially coined by Mary-Frances Winters in her 2020 guide, the place she describes how structural racism takes a relentless toll on Black lives day by day. However apparently, witnessing free Black folks exist unbothered, unbowed, and at full quantity close to the seasoning aisle is simply an excessive amount of for the delicate spirit of white America.
The controversy was ignited by a white TikToker who posted a now deleted viral video ranting that white persons are completely fed up with Black people’ “ghetto ratchet conduct,” entitlement, victimhood, appearing “animalistic,” preventing or dancing in public, being loud in Walmart whereas surrounded by a bunch of misbehaving youngsters, blaming slavery for our present issues, and supporting fundraising campaigns for Karmelo Anthony, Rodney Hinton, Jr. and his murdered son. (Be at liberty to click on these hyperlinks and donate to show her level.)
Since then, TikTok has exploded with movies from creators clarifying what Black fatigue actually means. In the meantime, different racist customers have shared their very own anecdotal tales about encounters with unbearable Black folks. These movies have ignited a broader dialog about cultural appropriation and white folks’s irksome behavior of colonizing the language of oppression to re-center themselves as victims in conversations about race, energy, and oppression.
The Root, Day by day Kos, and BIN Information have all revealed stable assume items calling out the harms of white people misappropriating the language of Black struggling. However I’m not excited by enjoying DEI doula by correcting or educating racists who’re totally dedicated to their epigenetic foolishness. That might not be a superb use of my time.
Be clear, this newest TikTok pattern shouldn’t be new. The truth is, it’s the continuation of a protracted heritage of cultural parasitism, narrative theft, and inversion of victimhood that has been a core function of white grievance politics ever for the reason that first colonizers confirmed up empty-handed and thanked the gracious Indigenous folks with genocide. In different phrases, that TikToker and all of the others who’ve adopted aren’t simply misusing a phrase out of ignorance or as a result of they’re misguided or tone-deaf. No, their confusion is an act of domination.
What we’re witnessing is ideological warfare and a sleight of hand the place Black people are being reframed because the supply of white struggling. They’re casting us as exhausting, aggressive, burdens, menaces, and threats to white lives. This isn’t simply rhetorical lynching cloaked in flipped language, this can be a propaganda marketing campaign the place racists are rehearsing for real-world violence, similar to they did to excuse every thing from genocidal violence to slavery, medical neglect and displacement, and segregation to mass incarceration. Historical past has proven us that when sufficient racist persons are primed to imagine {that a} marginalized group is the issue, deadly violence isn’t far behind.
Social media platforms, particularly TikTok, X, and Fb, have turn out to be fertile floor for this type of racist rot. These platforms aren’t simply passive hosts; they supply the algorithmic fertilizer that helps racism pattern and monetize. And ever since Donald Trump crawled again into the White Home on a pink wave of delusion, gerrymandering, and grievance, white people have felt emboldened to storm digital areas with racial slurs, canine whistles, memes, and performative victimhood beneath the guise of free speech.
They’re not simply trolling us. That is coordinated narrative warfare we’re seeing on social media platforms is a part of a full-scale cultural offensive in opposition to Black people and different marginalized communities. It’s a struggle on reminiscence, language, schooling, and reality. And this white panic is all related to the rollback of DEI packages, the whitewashing of textbooks, the assaults on public schooling, the government-sanctioned pity for white South African ‘refugees’, and the general public mourning of a burned-down plantation.
There’s a deep psychosis at play.
Whiteness is an id that continually calls for emotional assets from the folks it oppresses. It wants consideration and validation from the very folks it claims to hate. These white TikTokers didn’t steal “Black fatigue” as a result of they just like the phrase. They jacked it as a result of deep down they envy our potential to call ache and so they need entry to the ethical structure of our struggling, grief, resilience, and survival. However they need all of that stripped of its authentic context and reality and recast in service to their very own imagined victimization by immigrants, Black people, LGBTQ+ people, “the libs,” globalization, and their very own low delivery charges. Of their fragile minds, Black visibility is a prelude to white erasure, be it a statue of a Black lady in Instances Sq. or HBCU college students flexing at commencement. Let’s simply name it white fragility weaponized by way of cultural and linguistic mimicry.
What’s particularly bizarre is that they’re so bored with Black folks, however they’ll’t appear to cease orbiting us. As a result of most white folks in America don’t have Black pals or informal Black acquaintances they discuss to commonly, they’re obsessive about monitoring, mocking, and mimicking us on social media platforms. Parasocial engagement on social media lets them lurk, leech, and spew racist filth from the security of their echo chambers.
So “Black fatigue” isn’t coming from white people’ real-life interactions with us or their overexposure to blackness. It’s coming from their compulsive digital orbiting round us, their addictive consumption of our tradition, language, humor, fashion, trauma, and our pleasure. It’s not fatigue from us, it’s fatigue from being shut out of the intimacy, brilliance, and neighborhood we’ve constructed with out them.
These racists are bored with watching Black folks staying hydrated, minding our enterprise, caring for one another, and never centering whiteness. That is the resistance and the existential risk. And since whiteness beneath Trump can’t stand being decentered or not being the protagonist, it should steal the story and repackage their discomfort and envy as weariness.
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