“Blackfishing” is a recently-coined term used to describe someone accused of pretending to be black on social media by using makeup, hair products and in some cases, surgery to drastically change their appearance.
The phenomenon emerged in November, when a Twitter thread calling on people to post “all of the white girls cosplaying as black women on Instagram” went viral, garnering more than 23,000 retweets and thousands of responses criticising influencers for doing this.
Contributors to the thread posted a stream of before and after photos which show clear discrepancies in certain Instagram users’ skin tones.
Those engaging in blackfishing have often been seen to cherry pick aesthetics that they see as being stereotypically associated with black women and capitalising on these to land lucrative sponsorship deals that women of colour may not otherwise have access to.
Some influencers have been accused by Twitter users of manipulating their photographs or undergoing plastic surgery to change the appearance of their features so they appear to have fuller lips and curvier figures.
Critics of the trend describe it as a form of cultural appropriation, whereby elements of a minority culture are adopted by those in a more dominant culture without crediting the origin, leaving members of the minority culture feeling oppressed and marginalised.
But people who have been labelled as “blackfish” strongly deny that this is their intention.
Swedish influencer Emma Hallberg is one of the most-cited examples, with countless side-by-side images of the 19-year-old circulating online.
“I do not see myself as anything else than white,” she told Buzzfeed in response to critics. ”I get a deep tan naturally from the sun.”
Aga Brzostowska, 20, is another one of the women who has been described as a “blackfish” and admitted to BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat that she does make her skin darker with makeup.
While she understands the intentions behind the Twitter thread, Brzostowska, who is from Poland, went on to explain that the differences in her appearance as shown by comparison images are down to exercise and insisted she doesn’t think she has done anything malicious.
“I don’t feel like I need to stop doing something because... why would I stop doing something that’s benefiting me or that I enjoy doing?” she added.
Speaking to The Independent, writer Stephanie Yeboah describes blackfishing as a “type of blackface”, the deeply offensive practice whereby white people darken their skin tone with makeup as a form of fancy dress.
“What we are seeing – especially on social media – is another way of white women co-opting, profiting and benefiting from appropriating another race, and brands are encouraging this,” she says.
“A lot of these women receive endorsements from beauty and fashion brands based on the ‘black aesthetic’ but unfortunately when it comes to using real black women for campaigns, we are often sidelined and forgotten about.”
Wanna Thompson, the freelance writer who started the viral Twitter thread, has explained why blackfishing is so “troubling”, describing white women who do this as “dipping their foot into the pond without fully getting themselves wet”.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Thompson added that adopting the hairstyles, clothing and slang that is traditionally associated with black women is “just enough to hang on to racial ambiguity without fully dealing with the consequences of blackness.”
The 26-year-old added that this becomes even more problematic when you consider the number of black influencers who are “overlooked all the time” by brands.
“When you see that people who benefit from white privilege that are able to get both sides of the coin, it’s very troubling,” she concluded.
Almost everyone accused of blackfishing thus far is female. But one man has been accused of doing something similar last month. Artistic director Anthony Ekundayo, who runs one of the UK’s few black-led theatres, was criticised for masquerading as black, describing himself as an “African born again” despite admitting to being white and having white parents.
Blackfishing might be a new term, but the act of people pretending to be a different race was highlighted in 2015 when it emerged that the activist Rachel Dolezal, who claimed “self-identification with the black experience” and described herself as “transracial”, was in fact white.
