In the latest Tik Tok Trend, Black Tik Tokkers Turn White for their Crushes

On tik tok, users are using a filter to turn themselves white and get their crush. Yes, it’s embarrassing. Someone call their aunties.

🧑🏻‍🦱🧍🏻‍♂️🧎🏻‍♂️🙇🏻‍♂️🏃🏻‍♂️ #bi #gay #lgbt — www.tiktok.com
1.8K Likes, 40 Comments. TikTok video from Nol🤠 (@sweetbabynolly): “🧑🏻‍🦱🧍🏻‍♂️🧎🏻‍♂️🙇🏻‍♂️🏃🏻‍♂️ #bi #gay #lgbt”. “Sorry I’m not into black guys” | “🧑🏻‍🦱”. ALL THIS IS HERE FOR UU.

By Steven Underwood

Boo! Tomato! Tomato! Tomato! I’m throwing tomatoes —

The year has barely rounded out seven full days and already the hydra of anti-blackness has come to strangle my people and bodyflopped them into the lowest trenches of hell. It’s a steep fall, but it’s not unfamiliar to those who’ve been around long enough to know that social media will appetize the gullet and desperate for success. Tik Tok recently debuted a filter that can only be likened to skin bleaching and Black people in white face.

The filter has little to do with what’s going on, though. It’s a simple brightening complete with thinning up lips and a pinker shade to those lips. There is a big problem in Black people whitening their skin for a joke — something that reminds me that I’m turning into a Big Grown Uncle with how much I need to pull these young folk to the side and have a negro to negro conversation on embarrassing themselves and their Aunties on the internet.

What is the major problem is on Tik Tok, filters often accompany a trend of some sort — a general blueprint that users can follow to generate content and easier access to a viral opportunity. The trend itself is Black users, desperate for validation, change their skin color and lips to appeal to a crush. That’s it.

I came across it in bits and pieces. I’ve recently started wrestling with my presence on Tik Tok as the entire algorithm seems to be extremely fun for non-Black users, but extremely and intentionally triggering to Black users, especially any who showcase even a hint of political leaning or ideology. After a single video discussing the offensiveness of racist caricature months ago, I was bombarded for a week straight with Trump Supporters, Racist Debaters and what can only be called “Flame Kindling” to get me to respond and engage. That type of environment, as an adult, gets stressful.

It’s at most a fifteen second video for any user. But it’s not comforting at all. It’s actually quite alarming that it’d be something anyone would think is funny. In the more prominent user’s comments, I saw a number of queer men laughing it off.

“I date Black men!” one user laughs.

“Black is okay! We prefer Black!” was one of the more embarrassing comments.

I sent the video to a few of my friends for confirmation on my disillusionment. It’s always important, to me, to get secondary insights into things I see Gen-Z doing. I’m born in ’95. It’s the cut off age. I’m more of an older brother to these new adults than I am a parent.

They had less kind things to say than I did. “It’s truly one of the most disgusting things I have ever seen. Wow.”

All of the users were Black queer users, which was important for me to present as I discovered the trend because of queer users. Of course, there are straight users partaking in it as well, but there is a culture surrounding this conversation and the enigma of the “Snow Queen”, or a Black queer man who exclusively dates white men. I’m being generous when I say ‘exclusively’, too. As this definition should also include Black queer men who obligate a flirtation with others of their race to subvert their shame about being a Snow Queen. I’ve entertained men like that too and I learned quickly they only twirled me along casually, but only ever wanted to seriously date White men. I don’t really like that.

Just days before seeing this trend, a clip from A Jenkins Family Christmas discussing why the main character only dates white men. The character blamed the oversaturation of whiteness in media. It’s an embarrassing moment in queer media. To look into the camera and to suggest Black queer men idolize whiteness like that as anything other than a personal character flaw is disingenuous. Just days following this, someone entered my mentions on Twitter to accuse Black queer people of trying to become engines for white liberal agendas for this very same reason.

I can’t say I haven’t come across people who have an explicit requirement that their partners be white. Those people, though, have always been iffy to begin with. They have an attachment to class and privilege in a way that I find white men who date exclusively Asian women to invoke misogynistic and abusive tendencies they project onto Asian women. Queer Black Snow Queens are not any different. They disavow proximity to Black Queer space and they perform a caricature of their Blackness with an air of luxury. They dip into Blackness as a zeitgeist, but it’s always in an effort of centering themselves and uplifting themselves with their exotic nature of our culture as an incentive.

In all efforts to gatekeep our culture for its protection and preservation, they become smugglers and fences. (It isn’t lost on me that the only Black Bisexual Superhero in Marvel, Prodigy, is not only a Snow Queen, but a pirate of memories and skills and a walking representation of respectability politics).

Black Queer men hold a stigma because of how media centers this perspective and media centers this perspective, because white creators only give platform and an ear to people who are like that. Who make them feel good and comfortable about the complicitness of their whiteness. I recently left a digital community as an outcast because that kind of implicit demand for comfort in their whiteness was being required of me. However, I don’t coddle: I have bleeding edges or I have silence.

However, I didn’t just keep this perspective to Black Queer men, because as much as people point out that Black Queer men are forced to consume media where white men as exceptionalized share a gender with a slew of cis-straight Black men consuming media of white women and successful white men.

On the other side of the trend, more Black men are doing that. And while they do this, the stigma isn’t sticking that these men are pleading for a white woman’s acceptance. These men will put down their own sisters and mothers in any number of trends just to turn these girl’s heads at them. This hasn’t been a shock to me since I was a freshman in High School and a kid laughed when I asked if he was going to talk to another Black girl in our class.

It’s where I learned where a “snow bunny” was. The mantra of that year for them was, “If it ain’t snowing, I ain’t going.”

I don’t suppose we’ll ever get a bit of media that seriously critiques the other side of this gaze in cis-straight men. Likewise, none of the cis-straight men I inquired seemed to see the problem in subverting their Blackness or sacrificing it to appeal to a woman who don’t even want them because they’re Black. To get what you want, you do as you please and no one can criticize you. I believe that is the definition of privilege. And that is not to say the glorification of whiteness like that is okay.

Hell, this isn’t even to say there’s a problem with interracial dating. There is a problem with interracial dating when it is used as a weapon for privilege or distance from blackness. And as much as any of these users in this trend, all who are above the age of 18, want to call it just a jokey joke —

If this is a joke, what is the punchline? Why is it so funny to you? Whose laughing? Because I know I felt ashamed as soon as the filter activated.