So I want to introduce you guys to someone. This is my Bitmoji. She’s a little cartoon avatar that I designed to look like me and dress like me. And now, I outsource my emotions to her online. “Internetting With Amanda Hess.” (ALL IMAGES SOURCED FROM THE INTERNET.) The internet can be a place that’s devoid of affect. So now, all these little patches have popped up to help us express how we feel. Emojis, text formatting, and animated GIFs — which allow us to summon other people to feel our feelings for us. And that can get really complicated. Women of color in particular are called on really frequently to express emotions for us, from this unknown woman clapping in the Wendy Williams audience to Oprah, who has transcended the role of talk show host to become the queen of reaction GIFs. “This is the joy for me.” According to Giphy, the most popular way for Americans to express happiness is This. And sadness? This. These GIFs are not just popular in online black communities. White people use them too. Maybe too much. And there’s a term for that: “digital blackface.” As Lauren Michele Jackson wrote in Teen Vogue, “Digital blackface is the act of inhabiting a black persona, employing digital technology to co-op a perceived cachet or black cool.” So, for example, Meghan McCain said, “I think at this point, we need to ask whether or not Black Lives Matter is a hate group.” But she’s constantly using black lives as a digital accessory to express how she feels about, like, Republican politics. On the internet, white people outsource their emotional labor to black people. “We’re your sass, your nonchalance, your fury, your delight, your annoyance, your happy dance, your diva, your shade, your ‘yas’ moments.” And my Bitmoji is complicit too. Bitmoji take all of these black emotional reactions and verbal expressions and designs them to fit my white body and face. This is the kind of appropriation that makes most white people look real dumb when they try to pull it off in the context of their real lives. “Homeboys gonna, like, get it.” Manuel Arturo Abreu calls this phenomenon “online imagined black English.” And you can trace it back to the earliest days of the social web. There used to be a tool called the Jive Filter that would translate white people speech into Jive as a kind of gross curiosity. These days, imagined black English is now being appropriated on Twitter by actual white nationalists. Whiteness is enacted in GIFs too. But it’s suspect that black people are overrepresented in these kinds of cultural artifacts, but underrepresented in the seats of power that actually mold the world. The way the black people are turned into products online is rarely interested in their full humanity. Take the phenomenon of Black Neighbor memes. “Ain’t nobody got time for that” As Slate’s Aisha Harris puts it, “It’s difficult to watch these videos and not sense that their popularity has something to do with a persistent, if unconscious desire to see black people perform.” [singing] “Ain’t nobody got time for that.” “I’m talking with Charles Ramsey. He’s a neighbor.” “Especially in the case of something like the Cleveland kidnapper.” “And she says, ‘Help me get out.’ ‘I’ve been here a long time.’” “That was like a very serious issue that was distilled into just buffoonery.” [singing] “My neighbor got big testicles, ’cause we see this dude every day.” Scholar Sianne Ngai uses the term “animatedness” to describe the tendency to think of black people that way. A tendency that’s only exacerbated by the form of the animated GIF. None of this means that white people should only use white people GIFs and black people should only use black people GIFs. But it does mean that even something as seemingly simple as trying to express happiness on the internet is complicated by structural racism. That old structure keeps encoding itself into new technologies. But those same technologies can be used to create different images. “Nobody is coming to take your GIFs away. Ultimately, the point is to just be a little bit more aware, a little bit more cognizant of the way in which you’re sharing images that, you know, feature black people or feature people of color.”