Digital blackface describes non-black people’s emulation of what they perceive as blackness in a digital space—blackness itself encompassing aesthetics, language, fashion, and culture. This can be witnessed in the digital social media stage through memes, appropriation of black vernacular english, and the proliferation of black aesthetics in mainstream fashion and music. The use of digital blackface is so commonplace that many people are unaware of or deny its existence, even while engaging in the play of digital blackface. 

Joshua L Green, in “Digital Blackface: The Repacking of the Black Masculine Image,” examines the lineage of minstrelsy and its connections to digital blackface, as a form that creates and codifies “dominant ideologies about black people” in order to legitimize racial hierarchies. Green also describes the black body as text, something to be read and categorized. I want to extend Green’s thinking about the black body as a text and draw connections to the way that archives are categorized and organized. 

In my essay, I’d like to argue that the way that black people’s bodies are categorized in the digital space reflects the nature and function of archives—a constructed organization influenced by political systems of power. I will examine the relationship between digital blackface and minstrelsy and make comparisons between the auction block, minstrel performance, and the digital social media space as different stages or interfaces where blackness is materialized as a legitimate racial category through the construction of racial archetypes within blackness. 

I will argue that, in the same way that the construction and organization of archives limits access to information about a given subject, digital blackface is a type of categorical process that limits the viewer’s information about the black subject. I will examine several black ‘texts’ or subjects, the use of their image in the process of digital blackface, and how the circulation of their image contributed to the decontextualization of that subject for the sake of the general public’s entertainment. 

Bibliography

Blay, Zeba. “Digital Blackface Is Back in the Form of Black AI Influencers.” Teen Vogue, 6 Nov. 2025, www.teenvogue.com/story/digital-blackface-is-back-in-the-form-of-black-ai-influencers. 

Farrior, Christian, and Neal A. Lester. “Digital Blackface: Adultification of Black Children in Memes and Children’s Books.” MDPI, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 11 July 2024, www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/13/4/91.

Green, Joshua L. “Digital Blackface: The Repacking of the Black Masculine Image” 

“hide your kids, hide your wife pt.1.” Sixteenth Minute (of Fame), 7 May 2024, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-sixteenth-minute-of-fame-172216473/

“hide your kids, hide your wife pt. 2.” Sixteenth Minute (of Fame), 14  May 2024, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-sixteenth-minute-of-fame-172216473/

Jackson, Lauren Michele. “The Undeniable Blackness of Vine (RIP).” Wired, Conde Nast, 12 Nov. 2019, www.wired.com/story/excerpt-white-negroes-lauren-michele-jackson/. 

Kaur, Jasdeep. “The Embodying and Commodification of Black Culture and Aesthetics in the Digital Age.” Anthways, sites.gold.ac.uk/anthways/am-i-an-anthropologist-if-2022/undergraduate-course-essay-showcasethe-embodying-and-commodification-of-black-culture-and-aesthetics-in-the-digital-age/. Accessed 24 Nov. 2025. 

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft : Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sdsu/detail.action?docID=1318298.

“The Americas.” National Museums Liverpool, www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/history-of-slavery/americas. Accessed 24 Nov. 2025.