Black Skin, Digital Masks

Within the past two decades, social media has reformatted public performance. As digital interactions become increasingly common, the uniquely anonymous and opaque qualities of social media networks have brought with it new forms of racial domination and new methods for reproducing racial hierarchies. Leveraging cultural studies, psycho-analysis, and Saidiya Hartman's contributions to blackface studies in "Scenes of Subjection", I intend to analyze the use and proliferation of digital blackface on social media apps and websites. Through a close examination of black ontology and whiteness as a political project, I'll interrogate the parasitic nature of digital blackface and identify it as a means of self-constitution for non-black users. In doing so, I hope to outline the way it renders black subjectivity null and maintains the anti-black relational dynamics that have historically made legible racial categories and ontological boundaries.