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*If you’re over the age of 12, you’re probably not familiar with Lil Tay, known as the “Youngest Flexer of the Century.”
She’s an Instagram-famous 9-year-old who appears to be white-ish and claims to once have been “broke” in Atlanta, Georgia until she “started moving bricks.”
Tay has amassed a huge social media following by posting videos showing her hurling expletives from the driver seats of expensive cars that her parents may or may not own.
In one clip, she steps out of a Ferrari wearing a diamond-encrusted gold chain and explains that she’s “richer than all y’all haters.”
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Raz Robinson, a contributor for fatherly.com noted: What’s saddening about Lil Tay’s whole persona isn’t just her aggressively insensitive rendering of blackness, it’s that it’s clearly been shaped by an adult. That adult seems to be Tay’s mother, who was recently fired for shooting one of her daughter’s videos inside of her boss’s Mercedes. In that video, Lil’ Tay dropped some wisdom on her “broke ass haters.”
“I ain’t got no license,” she explained, “but I still drive this sports car. Bitch.”
In a lengthy piece titled “How Lil Tay’s Instagram Antics Hurt Black Kids,” Robinson further explores the viral Insta-blackface sensation.
Peep some highlights from the article:
“What Tay is doing for her intermittently adoring audience is performing blackness or, more cynically put, using a simulacrum of it to gin up views and follows. But blackness isn’t a performance or a tool. Surely Tay’s mother knows this. Seemingly, she does not care that treating it as such victimizes black children.
What was Tay’s mom trying to coach out of her daughter during that fateful Mercedes shoot? What inflections? What affectations? What language? If she didn’t ask her daughter to “act black,” she certainly coached her to put on a racialized performance and did so with the apparent goal of monetizing the behavior.”
“One could argue that Lil Tay isn’t so much appropriating black culture as aping it.”
“What makes this interesting isn’t Lil Tay’s actual performance… it wouldn’t work if Lil Tay was even a little bit black.
“The entire image that Lil Tay’s parents have allowed this child to build up around herself is predicated on the idea that blackness is a blank slate or an empty space for her to fill up with her distinct non-blackness, and then use in whichever way she (or, more likely they on her behalf) chooses.”
“In essence, she’s taking the very real historical trauma and systemic disenfranchisement that has sculpted black culture into everything it’s become, and throwing it out the window in favor of an aesthetic that she
can actually access by virtue of not being black.”
“What’s so worrying about the whole thing is that she’s a child. To her… the actual act of being black is still some kind of joke, a thing you can do for clicks or to make money without having to deal with even an iota of the baggage that actually comes with it.”
“For black kids, the fixation on the stereotypes that Lil Tay uses often creates stifling bias. Given the inescapable nature of racism, it’s more likely that people will look at Lil Tay’s behavior and think that blackness is more of a problem than that a hateful imitation of it is. There’s not a very good chance that many people will watch Lil Tay’s videos and think: This is why we can’t give Chinese people anything, they don’t know how to act!, or Look at this little Asian girl acting like new money.”
“Her mom seems to be really trying to milk the fact that no one actually wants to call out a kid, while at the same time relying on those same people to lack the rhetorical ability—or interest— to really look past Lil Tay’s antics and right at her.”
Read Robinson’s full report here.
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