"Emoblackthot" and Modern Minstrelsy

Whew... guys... the [redacted for my personal safety] are at it again and the buffoonery has reached an all time high. Needless to say, as a black girl, there is a certain level of baseline nonsense that you grow to expect. You expect that if you get on a dating app, at least once, someone is going to tell you that they're "eager to try chocolate" and you'll be forced to swiftly block them and re-valuate your entire life. You expect that one day someone will reach up and yank on your box braids while proclaiming that they just "totally love your dreads like omg you have no ideaaa" and you'll have to decide what is more important: your pride or your freedom. You expect a multitude of things to happen to you and whether they are slight annoyances or actual tragedies, they aren't outside the realm of anything you or your friends have come to expect. HOWEVER (and yes this is a big however), the modern day impersonation and minstrelsy that has bloomed and grown, especially on social media, could not have been one of them. At least for me it sure wasn't and as it starts to become more frequent, I find it harder and harder to not only properly address but to even fully process it.

The most recent example of this is the popular "emoblackthot" account on twitter. Now, for LITERAL years, emoblackthot acted as a black woman online. They would regularly tweet from the experience of a black woman with threads discussing periods, 4C hair, colorism, etc. In fact, all of these topics, combined with the colloquial language, and their presented worldview gave emoblackthot a sense of authenticity that isn't easily faked. The experiences they described were so similar to my own life and to the lives of so many women I know personally, reading their tweets felt like reading my friend's tweets or even my own. So when I heard about emoblackthot doing a face reveal, I got excited. Finally, we'd see the girl behind the "wash your makeup off" tweets and get an understanding of why they kept hidden for so long and.... welp... we sureee did, huh? Not only did we find out emoblackthot was NOT A BLACK WOMAN AT ALL and had experienced so little of what they had tweeted over the years, but we found out with a full spread and photo shoot too, in true "gotchya bitch" fashion.

Now, unless you like to play dumb, you know exactly what the issue with this is and I don't even need to explain it to you I can just log off and take a nap or something. BUT, if you don't, here's why it's actually disgusting:

1. Black women are ridiculously underrepresented everywhere, even online. They don't get to become influencers or big accounts unless they are (typically) making fools of themselves. So for you to pose as a black woman, reap the benefits of social influence, and then literally cashout with a full spread in an acclaimed magazine is a slap in the face to all of the real black women who would never be able to dream of such success
2. Black men specifically have a long history of dressing up as black women and mocking us. Countless movies, TV shows, and even YouTubers feature mockery in which a black man puts on a wig and a dress and acts in a ridiculous manner. They do everything in these flimsy wigs and bad dresses from picking fights with men, to chasing and harassing people for no reason on the street and the list of embarrassing behavior goes on and on. This is bad and unfair representation.
3. Also, it's just gross man

There are so many more emoblackthots out there impersonating black women for attention and wealth and the best way to describe it is weird. You can't disparage black women, exclude them from your social circles, ... and then turn around and imitate everything they do without it being weird and I only hope in the future, we're able of doing a better job of weeding these people out.