Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post presents three article excerpts about Black Tik Tok dance creators on strike and demanding credit for their work.
The content of this post is presented for socio-cultural purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to all the Black Tik Tok dance creators who are named and unnamed in these articles. Thanks also to all those who are quoted in these articles.
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Click https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/6/27/2036225/-On-original-Black-music-successful-white-cover-songs-and-a-culture-of-covetousness-and-cruelty for a related June 27, 2021 online article by Denise Oliver Velezentitled "On original Black music, successful white cover songs, and a
culture of covetousness and cruelty"
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EXCERPT #1
From https://news.yahoo.com/black-people-credit-black-tiktok-130054794.html "Give Black People Credit': Black TikTok Stars Strike, Demand
Credit For Their Work" by Ruth Etiesit Samuel Fri, July 2, 2021
"Whenever Megan Thee Stallion releases a new song, the
floodgates of TikTok open. From “Cry Baby” to “Savage,” the social media app
runs rife with multistep dances, complex challenges and various remixes. That
is, until Black creators decide to stop making them.
“Normally, once a Megan song comes out, there's a dance that night, a dance within the hour," TikToker Challan Trishann, who prefers to go by Challan T., 22, recently told The Times. "But I [was] noticing that there's no dance" for Stallion's latest song
[…]
Be it Keara Wilson’s “Savage” challenge, Layla Muhammad’s “Twerkulator” dance or the "Renegade" by Jalaiah Harmon, Black creators have birthed some of the biggest phenomena on the internet.
However, as the moves become increasingly widespread — and usurped by white faces — their origins fade into oblivion. While white influencers such as Addison Rae make late-night television show appearances, break records and profit from reality series deals, Black creators are left behind to beg for credit.
Tired of constant cultural and intellectual theft, Black creators on TikTok have been on strike since Juneteenth, refraining from making a dance to Megan Thee Stallion's latest single, “Thot S—.”
A recent Los Angeles transplant, living with other Black TikTokers in a house dubbed “The Crib Around the Corner,” Challan T. is a cosplayer and content creator on the app. Upon realizing the strike was in effect, the Barbados native tweeted June 20, “The way nobody knows what to do…. because we won’t make dances LMFOAJFKFOFKFJFOFK”
[…]
Cincinnati native Keon Martin, 17, stumbled upon a video of
white creators waving their arms from side to side when Stallion’s lyrics
clearly stated, "hands on my knees, shaking a—, on my thot s—." He
then made his own video poking fun at them, which racked up more than 368,000
likes.
“I just think that this is very long overdue. When I first learned that there was a strike, I was in such amazement," Martin told The Times. "Black creators are just really tired of our dances and our trends being stolen. We're not given credit, but a white person can do our trend and walk out with 100,000 followers."
The strike didn’t emerge from thin air. According to Erick Louis, a 21-year-old TikTok star, there has been ongoing discourse prompted by a lyric from “Black Barbies” by Nicki Minaj: "I'm a f— Black Barbie, pretty face, perfect body."
“When you click on a sound, you can see all the videos under it, and it was literally a bunch of white women singing that specific part,” Louis said. “Throughout the week, a lot of people, specifically Black women, were just explaining their uncomfortability with the situation. It didn't seem like white folk were willing to listen. It was a lot of gaslighting going on.”
Two hours before midnight on Juneteenth, Louis posted a video that arguably spurred the no-dance strike.
With "Thot S—" playing in the background and the words “MADE A DANCE TO THIS SONG” lingering above his head, Louis got ready — then waved both middle fingers in the air. The words above him changed to “SIKE. THIS APP WOULD BE NOTHING WITHOUT BLACK PEOPLE."
“We make the trends ... and when we remove ourselves from
the equation ... it's nothing left but mediocrity," Louis told The Times.
"I can't tell you how long it's going to last, but I do want to say that I
think this is an indicator of how frustrated the Black community is. I feel
like this isn't the last time something like this will happen."
[…]
Last summer's heightened activism led TikTok users to add “#blm” to their bios and change their profile pics to fists. However, Louis said many of his videos surrounding Black issues have been taken down overnight and that Black creators who have millions of followers are still not verified on the app.
[…]
There have been complaints that TikTok suppressed Black Lives Matter content after George Floyd's murder, which TikTok said in a statement was due to a glitch.
"We care deeply about the experience of Black creators on our platform and we continue to work every day to create a supportive environment for our community while also instilling a culture where honoring and crediting creators for their creative contributions is the norm," a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement when reached by The Times this week.
[…]
Challan T., who has more than 4 million TikTok followers,
said the platform needs to be more active in advancing and championing Black
creators. In her experience, there have been multiple instances in which she
hasn’t been credited for her work.
She said she often feels uncomfortable asking for credit from those who repost her content without attribution because someone will inevitably push back — and that aversion to crediting Black creators stems from one thing.
“Racism,” Challan T. said with a laugh. “People just don't want to give Black people credit for the things that we make. Because there's a lot of times where a white creator will make a dance, and I'll see that credit in the caption every time. If it's a Black person, it's invalid automatically to some people, and they just don't even want to attempt.”
This lack of credit breeds a familiar disappointment for Black creators, one that transcends the history of TikTok and is emblematic of American pop culture. In September 2019, Georgia native Harmon created the original "Renegade" dance, but a month later, the so-called queen of TikTok, Charli D'Amelio, went viral for the dance.
Only in February 2020 did Harmon finally receive credit after public outrage. On Tuesday, actor Leslie Jordan featured Harmon on his Instagram page, giving her credit for "Renegade."
From AAVE (African American Vernacular English) being reduced to "Gen Z language" on "Saturday Night Live" to Fortnite being accused of stealing popular dances from Black TikTok creators, cultural appropriation is rampant and has tangible, financial ramifications.
“I was hoping that people would see from this that this app actually has no creativity without Black people. So maybe we should actually credit them when they create these things, instead of making it difficult. Credit can take you very far, like crediting @yodelinghaley got her in Doja Cat's music video" for 'Say So,' " said Challan T.
Grace wants to believe that embedding attribution into these platforms shouldn't be such a big ask, but evidently that isn't true. She would like to see TikTok promote Black creators' content on the #ForYou page, which recommends videos curated to users' interests, the same way it does for white creators.
While no one knows how long the strike will last — or whether TikTok will placate concerns with an ephemeral #amplifyblackvoices hashtag and supplemental programs — Black content creators agree that it’s time for TikTok to prove it values Black creators' input and content.
"I would honestly hope [a strike] happens every once in a while just to shake the table a little bit, because it seems like it actually made a difference this time," said Challan T. "People were actually like, 'Whoa, I didn't realize how much you guys do on the app.'"
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2021-07-02/give-black-people-credit-black-tiktok-creator-are-on-strike-and-demand-change
****
EXCERPT #2
From https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/tiktok-strike-highlighted-issues-compensation-race-creator-economy-n1272903
July 4, 2021 By Kalhan Rosenblatt
"On TikTok, when Megan Thee Stallion drops a new song, a
dedicated dance trend is not far behind.
But that’s not what happened after the June release of her song “Thot S---.” Instead, Black creators on the app announced a kind of strike, saying they would abstain from creating a dance trend for others to co-opt.
The strike is at least the second time the Black users have held an on-app protest regarding their treatment on the platform, igniting an even larger discussion about ownership, compensation and equity within the digital economy. Black creators and creators of color say they are frustrated and fed up with being major contributors to not only the content and culture of a platform like TikTok but also a driving force behind the popularity of an app run by the $250 billion company ByteDance.
“African American youth have always been early adopters of different social platforms, if it's Twitter, if it was Instagram. Certainly Snapchat, TikTok, Vine," said S. Craig Watkins, director of the Institute for Media Innovation at the University of Texas at Austin. "A whole sort of long laundry list of platforms that Black users were some of the earliest adopters, some of the most inventive content creators, and yet have never been really adequately recognized or compensated for what they bring to those platforms,”
In response to these growing concerns, some major platforms have made attempts to support their Black communities.
After a May 2020 Blackout on TikTok, an on-app protest to fight censorship and other concerns, TikTok announced it would create an incubator for Black creatives as well as a fund to support Black creativity. Other platforms, like YouTube, which announced a fund for Black creatives called the #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund, made similar moves.
But funds and countless statements about the importance of diversity within their communities are hollow when creators of color say they see few systemic, long-reaching benefits.
“Let's stop celebrating creator funds, incremental creator features, and shallow rhetoric about creator empowerment. All of these will fail to solve creators' economic precarity, so long as we fail to fix the fundamental issue, which is OWNERSHIP,” tweeted Li Jin, managing partner at Atelier, an early stage Venture Capital firm.
Jin went on to write that without ownership of their content, creators are merely enriching others.
“Without ownership, creators are ultimately enriching and empowering *someone else* — platform owners — with their work. The value they create is fed back into a system that commoditizes and treats creators as disposable labor,” she wrote.
[…]
But the influencer world is a comparatively new part of the
economy, and there is less regulation, less emphasis on compensation for
somewhat ephemeral trends, and greater confusion about who is considered the
owner of intangible pieces of internet culture.
[…]
These issues also tap into larger societal issues of
cultural appropriation and oppression, according to experts like Raven
Maragh-Lloyd, an assistant professor of African and African American Studies at
Washington University in St. Louis.
Maragh-Lloyd said unfair labor and compensation practices
are not new with the advent of the creator economy and influencer culture, but
date back decades and touch every facet of our culture from film to music to
fashion. She added that while appropriation and the co-opting of Black
creativity in some industries and platforms is more obvious, apps like TikTok
are somewhat more complicated.
[…]
Similar to the incidents of appropriation and repackaging of
Black culture offline, there are numerous examples of incidents of
misappropriated fame and compensation happening online.
One of the most famous examples from recent years is that of Jalaiah Harmon, who choreographed one of TikTok’s biggest dance phenomena, the "Renegade."
Jalaiah created the moves when she was 14, and the dance exploded in popularity on TikTok. However, those who were most associated with the moves, and thus profited off them, were white TikTok stars like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae. In 2020, Forbes listed Rae as the highest-paid TikTok star at $5 million and D’Amelio as the second highest-paid at $4 million. Both made their multimillion-dollar careers, in significant part, by posting dance trend videos to the platform. While Jalaiah has earned brand deals with major companies like Samsung, Netflix and Prada, according to Forbes, it’s unclear how much money she makes.
“On TikTok, these black creators, we run these subcategories. We're at the forefront of dance trends, music, fashion, etc. We drive all this traffic to TikTok, and it feels like that’s all we're there for. We’re black bodies who feed into this system and who give this single, insurmountable amount of popularity to the app, and we don’t get any credit, we don’t get the same clout,” said Erick Louis, 21, a content creator from Orlando, Florida.
One way to ensure that creators are compensated and given ownership of their work would be something akin to a digital labor rights movement, which may already be in its infancy, Watkins said.
It appears that digital labor is already on the minds of some unions. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA, a labor union representing performers, announced this year that the union would cover internet influencers and content creators.
“I can imagine, in the not too distant future, these content creators, people who are working in the digital economy, organizing and mobilizing for greater rights, greater power and greater influence in terms of how these platforms operate,” he said.
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EXCERPT #3
From https://www.popdust.com/bring-it-on-tiktok-strike-2653635059.html "Before Its Time: "Bring It On" and the Black
TikTok Strike"
If you've watched "Bring It On," the ongoing
TikTok drama should feel familiar
by Langa, July 3, 2021
…"Over the years, the first in the Bring It On series has
proven its longevity. Why wouldn't it? It has everything: the magnetism of a
good high school drama, the tension of a gripping sports film, and an
incredible cast including Gabrielle Union and Kirsten Dunst (meanwhile, the
only redeeming factor of the sequel, Bring It On: All or Nothing, is that it
has a cameo from literally Rihanna).
While cultural appropriation has existed in media and entertainment for decades, it finally started making its way into the mainstream lexicon in the mid 2010s, as hip-hop culture and other elements of Black culture started to become more popular.
From Miley Cyrus's twerking phase to the entire Kardashian-Jenner empire, as culture vultures began to profit more and more from cultural appropriation, Bring It On entered the chat. Social media memes circulated as a way to explain what the issue was with cultural appropriation.
[…]
In the seminal 2000 film, Dunst plays a cheerleader who is surprised to find that the dances she learned from her former captain were not the originals she thought and had been directly stolen from Union's Black cheer squad in Crenshaw.
The movie is a perfect allegory for what's going on with TikTok — dancing and all.
When the new Meg Thee Stallion song — which was primed and ready for a TikTok dance — was released, Black TikTok creators refused to choreograph dances to the song. Instead, they have been sitting back, watching all attempts at virality to the tune of "Thot Shit" fail.
While some critics of the Black TikTok strike say that most white dancers don't purposely steal from Black creators, Bring It On illustrates the difference between intent and impact.
Though Dunst's character inherits the stolen dances without knowledge of their origin, once she finds out, it's up to her to right the wrong and, beyond just apologizing, go out of her way to make it right with Union's team and never repeat the mistake again.
The film also shows the effect of demonstration and collective action. In order to get recognition for their cheers, the Black cheer squad, the Crenshaw Clovers, could not just say the cheers were their own — they had no clout or power, despite having all the creativity. Instead, they showed up and demonstrated knowing the dances as Dunst and her team performed them.
What the TikTok creators are doing is similar. After so long trying to advocate for themselves with only paltry offerings from giant media companies to show for it — while their pretty, straight, white counterparts cash in giant paychecks — Black TikTok creators took a stand and demonstrated what happened without them: nothing.
[tweet] DEFUND & ABOLISH POLICE, REFUND OUR COMMUNITIES
@BreeNewsome
The TikTok strike truly is amazing b/c it shows not only how
US pop culture is built on stealing from Black people, but how the music
industry depends on this cycle of theft & white washing in order to
monetize the music.
7:47 PM June 24, 2021
[end of tweet]
Part of why Bring It On is such a feel good movie is that the underdogs win. Despite not being the center of the film, Union and the Crenshaw Clovers win the nationals tournament that they could never afford to go to in years prior — with the dances that the Toros had tried to steal.
As TikTok as a platform and the entertainment industry in general watches the strike unfold, we can only hope for an ending to all this as happy and resolute as the one in Bring It On. If this were a movie, the lessons would be learned, Black creators would get the recognition and partnerships they deserved, and TikTok would be less of a cesspool of cultural appropriation and misattribution.
However, history shows us that, most likely, placating gestures will be offered to Black creators, but the pattern will continue. And in a few years, when some other hell-platform emerges and some other element of Black culture is being diluted by the mainstream, we'll dredge up Bring It On references and hope this time something finally sticks."
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