White Folks Gave Us ‘Black Fatigue,’ Now They’re Trying to Steal That Too
Deep, ancestral sigh.
First, they said they “don’t see race.” Then came the “reverse racism” crowd. Then “white lives matter.” Then “stop playing the race card,” “DEI is divisive,” and “Black people are the real racists keeping us divided.”
And now, because white fragility is a snowflake-infused renewable energy source, the descendants of Europe’s criminals and failures, colonizers, enslavers, and segregationists have taken to TikTok and other social media platforms to announce that they have come down with a collective case of—wait for it … “Black fatigue.”
Don’t squint. Your face might get stuck like that.
Yes, chile, the very people who’ve spent whole centuries exhausting the hell out of Black bodies, minds, and spirits now claim they’re so tired of us. And yet, they’re so intellectually bankrupt that to explain their so-called exhaustion, they had to steal the very language we created to describe surviving them. The term Black fatigue was originally coined by Mary-Frances Winters in her 2020 book, where she describes how structural racism takes a relentless toll on Black lives every day. But apparently, witnessing free Black people exist unbothered, unbowed, and at full volume near the seasoning aisle is just too much for the fragile spirit of white America.
The controversy was ignited by a white TikToker who posted a now deleted viral video ranting that white people are absolutely fed up with Black folks’ “ghetto ratchet behavior,” entitlement, victimhood, acting “animalistic,” fighting or dancing in public, being loud in Walmart while surrounded by a bunch of misbehaving kids, blaming slavery for our current problems, and supporting fundraising campaigns for Karmelo Anthony, Rodney Hinton, Jr. and his murdered son. (Feel free to click those links and donate to prove her point.)
Since then, TikTok has exploded with videos from creators clarifying what Black fatigue really means. Meanwhile, other racist users have shared their own anecdotal stories about encounters with insufferable Black people. These videos have ignited a broader conversation about cultural appropriation and white people’s irksome habit of colonizing the language of oppression to re-center themselves as victims in conversations about race, power, and oppression.
The Root, Daily Kos, and BIN News have all published solid think pieces calling out the harms of white folks misappropriating the language of Black suffering. But I’m not interested in playing DEI doula by correcting or educating racists who are fully committed to their epigenetic foolishness. That would not be a good use of my time.
Be clear, this latest TikTok trend is not new. In fact, it is the continuation of a long heritage of cultural parasitism, narrative theft, and inversion of victimhood that has been a core feature of white grievance politics ever since the first colonizers showed up empty-handed and thanked the gracious Indigenous people with genocide. In other words, that TikToker and all the others who’ve followed aren’t just misusing a phrase out of ignorance or because they are misguided or tone-deaf. No, their confusion is an act of domination.
What we are witnessing is ideological warfare and a sleight of hand where Black folks are being reframed as the source of white suffering. They are casting us as exhausting, aggressive, burdens, menaces, and threats to white lives. This isn’t just rhetorical lynching cloaked in flipped language, this is a propaganda campaign where racists are rehearsing for real-world violence, just like they did to excuse everything from genocidal violence to slavery, medical neglect and displacement, and segregation to mass incarceration. History has shown us that when enough racist people are primed to believe that a marginalized group is the problem, lethal violence isn’t far behind.
Social media platforms, especially TikTok, X, and Facebook, have become fertile ground for this kind of racist rot. These platforms aren’t just passive hosts; they provide the algorithmic fertilizer that helps racism trend and monetize. And ever since Donald Trump crawled back into the White House on a red wave of delusion, gerrymandering, and grievance, white folks have felt emboldened to storm digital spaces with racial slurs, dog whistles, memes, and performative victimhood under the guise of free speech.
They’re not just trolling us. This is coordinated narrative warfare we’re seeing on social media platforms is part of a full-scale cultural offensive against Black folks and other marginalized communities. It’s a war on memory, language, education, and truth. And this white panic is all connected to the rollback of DEI programs, the whitewashing of textbooks, the attacks on public education, the government-sanctioned pity for white South African ‘refugees’, and the public mourning of a burned-down plantation.
There’s a deep psychosis at play.
Whiteness is an identity that constantly demands emotional resources from the people it oppresses. It needs attention and validation from the very people it claims to hate. These white TikTokers didn’t steal “Black fatigue” because they like the phrase. They jacked it because deep down they envy our ability to name pain and they want access to the moral architecture of our suffering, grief, resilience, and survival. But they want all of that stripped of its original context and truth and recast in service to their own imagined victimization by immigrants, Black folks, LGBTQ+ folks, “the libs,” globalization, and their own low birth rates. In their fragile minds, Black visibility is a prelude to white erasure, be it a statue of a Black woman in Times Square or HBCU students flexing at graduation. Let’s just call it white fragility weaponized through cultural and linguistic mimicry.
What’s especially weird is that they’re so tired of Black people, but they can’t seem to stop orbiting us. Because most white people in America don’t have Black friends or casual Black acquaintances they talk to regularly, they’re obsessed with monitoring, mocking, and mimicking us on social media platforms. Parasocial engagement on social media lets them lurk, leech, and spew racist filth from the safety of their echo chambers.
So “Black fatigue” isn’t coming from white folks’ real-life interactions with us or their overexposure to blackness. It’s coming from their compulsive digital orbiting around us, their addictive consumption of our culture, language, humor, style, trauma, and our joy. It’s not fatigue from us, it’s fatigue from being shut out of the intimacy, brilliance, and community we’ve built without them.
These racists are tired of watching Black people staying hydrated, minding our business, caring for each other, and not centering whiteness. This is the resistance and the existential threat. And because whiteness under Trump can’t stand being decentered or not being the protagonist, it must steal the story and repackage their discomfort and envy as weariness.
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