For decades, scholars have viewed racial passing as a phenomenon belonging to a different era—a literary specter of condemned practices born in the segregated world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, despite the complicated and antiquated nature of racial passing, a distinct fascination with all that the idea encompasses has captivated online communities in recent years. There has been an explosion of online discourse surrounding the way that terms such as “white-passing,” “white-presenting,” and “white-assumed” should or should not be used by multiracial people, and a large number of these conversations have taken place on TikTok, a platform designed for the transmission of information, stories, and humor through both audio and image. In 2020 multiple TikTok audios were made popular by users sharing their personal experiences of being mixed-race and “white-assumed.” Thousands of people began using their TikTok accounts as a space to facilitate the performance of their experiences with either racial ambiguity or assumption, often through humor, music, or both, developing tightly knit discourse communities around proclaiming and performing identity. However, even within these seemingly insulated communities, users experience the outer-worldly pressures of systemic and interpersonal racism. “‘Whose Goddamn White Baby is That?’: The Movement of White Assumed People of Color Through Online Space,” is an exploration of performances of racial identity within the discourse communities that form on TikTok, as well as the ways that they address and resist the policing of racial identity within systems of white supremacy through humor. Building upon Julia S. Charles' theoretical framework for racial passing and movement through space, this project examines the modern movement through online space of those who are burdened by the term “passing” in its historical, literary, and practical contexts.
“Whose Goddamn White Baby is That?”: The Movement of White Assumed People of Color Through Online Space
Category
Gender, Ethnicity, Diversity, or Cultural Studies 2