Deep, ancestral sigh.
First, they mentioned they “don’t see race.” Then got here the “reverse racism” crowd. Then “white lives matter.” Then “cease taking part in the race card,” “DEI is divisive,” and “Black individuals are the true racists protecting 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—watch for it …“Black fatigue.”
Don’t squint. Your face may 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 uninterested in us. And but, they’re so intellectually bankrupt that to clarify 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 e-book, the place she describes how structural racism takes a relentless toll on Black lives day by day. However apparently, witnessing free Black individuals 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 individuals are completely fed up with Black of us’ “ghetto ratchet habits,” entitlement, victimhood, appearing “animalistic,” combating or dancing in public, being loud in Walmart whereas surrounded by a bunch of misbehaving children, blaming slavery for our present issues, and supporting fundraising campaigns for Karmelo Anthony, and Rodney Hinton, Jr., and his murdered son. (Be happy 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 individuals. These movies have ignited a broader dialog about cultural appropriation and white individuals’s irksome behavior of colonizing the language of oppression to re-center themselves as victims in conversations about race, energy, and oppression.
The Root, Every day Kos, and BIN News have all printed strong suppose items calling out the harms of white of us misappropriating the language of Black struggling. However I’m not concerned about taking part in DEI doula by correcting or educating racists who’re totally dedicated to their epigenetic foolishness. That will not be an excellent use of my time.
Be clear, this newest TikTok pattern is just not new. In actual fact, it’s the continuation of an extended heritage of cultural parasitism, narrative theft, and inversion of victimhood that has been a core characteristic of white grievance politics ever for the reason that first colonizers confirmed up empty-handed and thanked the gracious Indigenous individuals 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 of us 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, identical to they did to excuse the whole lot from genocidal violence to slavery, medical neglect, displacement and segregation to mass incarceration. Historical past has proven us that when sufficient racist individuals 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 develop into fertile floor for this sort 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 crimson wave of delusion, gerrymandering, and grievance, white of us have felt emboldened to storm digital areas with racial slurs, canine whistles, memes, and performative victimhood underneath 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 towards Black of us and different marginalized communities. It’s a warfare on reminiscence, language, training, and reality. And this white panic is all related to the rollback of DEI packages, the whitewashing of textbooks, the assaults on public training, 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 continuously calls for emotional assets from the individuals it oppresses. It wants consideration and validation from the very individuals 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 means to call ache they usually 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 of us, LGBTQ+ of us, “the libs,” globalization, and their very own low start charges. Of their fragile minds, Black visibility is a prelude to white erasure, be it a statue of a Black lady in Occasions Sq. or HBCU college students flexing at commencement. Let’s simply name it white fragility weaponized by cultural and linguistic mimicry.
What’s particularly bizarre is that they’re so uninterested in Black individuals, however they will’t appear to cease orbiting us. As a result of most white individuals in America don’t have Black associates or informal Black acquaintances they speak 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 of us’ 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, type, 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 uninterested in watching Black individuals staying hydrated, minding our enterprise, caring for one another, and never centering whiteness. That is the resistance and the existential risk. And since whiteness underneath 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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