CNN’s “Digital Blackface” Commentary Takes Fake News to New Levels of Lunacy

The war on truth is raging in corporate media, as it has for many years. The difference today is that without Donald Trump in the White House the hacks in corporate media are having to manufacture outrage out of thin air in order to justify their virtue signaling existence.

The latest version of this comes in the form of a “commentary” about “digital blackface.” I won’t go into too many details because it’s the most idiotic thing I’ve read in years, but the gist is this: If you use a GIF of a person of color on social media and you’re white, then you’ve just committed an egregious crime akin to blackface.

"If you're White and you've posted a GIF or meme of a Black person to express a strong emotion, you may be guilty of wearing 'digital blackface,'" writes John Blake | Analysis https://t.co/KlHkWWHq6x

— CNN (@CNN) March 26, 2023

According to Daily Wire:

CNN writer John Blake accused white people of wearing “digital blackface” if they shared memes or gifs featuring black people and expressions in order to “convey comic relief or express emotions.”

Referring to the most popular memes and gifs as “radicalized reactions,” Blake argued that black people “get a pass” for using them — but when white people did so, they had “inadvertently perpetuated one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism.”

Blake went on to quote a 2017 Teen Vogue article written by Lauren Michele Jackson — in which she argued that people often cherry-picked gifs that featured black people when attempting to express extreme emotions.

“While reaction GIFs can and do every feeling under the sun, white and nonblack users seem to especially prefer GIFs with black people when it comes to emitting their most exaggerated emotions,” Jackson wrote. “Extreme joy, annoyance, anger and occasions for drama and gossip are a magnet for images of black people, especially black femmes.”

Blake went on later in the article to refer to “digital blackface” as a “modern-day repackaging of minstrel shows.”

But when Blake’s article made the rounds on Twitter on Sunday, critics had a field day with the idea.

Thankfully, the people weren’t having it. This Tweet may have the worst ratio of all time. As of this article, it has nearly 40,000 comments and over 12,000 quote Tweets. Almost all of them are negative. Compare that to under 2,000 retweets and 7,000 likes.

CNN should switch to satire. Their “news” is ludicrous enough to qualify. Perhaps they could become more accurate for once by trying to be funny.