AI Minstrelsy: Technology Amplifies America’s Oldest Tropes
By Kianna Amaya
Thanks to AI, racism just got an upgrade! Racism is more convenient than ever. We are now in a world where anonymous people can generate modern-day minstrel content in seconds. AI minstrelsy is here, and it’s more insidious than ever.
I’ve seen so many racist AI-generated videos of Black women on social media lately. Casual racism is so normalized on social media these days. It wears you down. Especially so when you’re exposed to it constantly on your phone, while so many people shrug like it is no big deal. When you call it out, you’re called “too woke” or told “it’s not that deep.” In this climate, none of this gets taken seriously. Now, AI videos are popping up everywhere as AI advances rapidly and new tools are released constantly. AI plugs right into the ecosystem of casual racism.
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You wake up for your morning doomscroll. In between cheating story times and obnoxious TikTok shop ads, you see a video of a “Black woman” shopping for groceries with SNAP and picking up junk food. A few scrolls later, you see a video of another AI Black woman screaming about how she doesn’t want a job, so she’ll just have multiple kids by different men to get EBT and child support. The welfare queen trope. Back in October, when people started sounding alarms about cuts to SNAP benefits, videos like these were everywhere. They receive so little pushback that the potential long-term consequences are genuinely worrying.
A few weeks ago, I saw an AI-generated video pretending that Angel Reese’s wig fell off as she walked down the Victoria’s Secret runway. That obviously didn’t happen. A totally unnecessary video that added zero value and is racially motivated. Angel Reese has dealt with racism from the media and WNBA fans. There was so much “drama” about her walking in the show and not meeting the superficial standards some people have about Victoria’s Secret models.
This isn’t new; it’s AI minstrelsy. Minstrelsy was a racist form of media created in the 1800s in America. It’s most recognized through minstrel shows, where white men perform in Blackface. Yet, minstrelsy was more than just entertainment, and it has led to decades of propaganda and stereotyping of Black people. It sold distorted videos of “Blackness” to white audiences. It promotes stereotypes that people believe and spread to this day. Stereotyping leads to discrimination and the justification of harm. Enslavers spread the lie that Africans were primitive and childlike to justify enslavement. After slavery, the “Black brute” was popularized to portray Black men as savage and criminal. This myth helped justify violence against Black men through lynching and police brutality. Even now, Black men are stereotyped as thugs and targeted by the police.
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There was an entire industry surrounding minstrelsy, which helped shape the American entertainment industry and the American consciousness. Stereotypes from minstrels, such as the “Jezebel”, which portrayed Black women as hypersexual and promiscuous, or the angry Black woman, are still prevalent today. The legacy of minstrelsy lives on in subtler ways, too. The classic white gloves worn by Mickey Mouse and other cartoon characters were inspired by the white gloves worn in minstrel shows.
Stereotypes breed apathy. It embeds in society and causes real harm. One reason the U.S. fails to progress is that many average white people vote against their own interests to protect an artificial racial hierarchy, while also harming themselves in the process. Many social programs, like SNAP, were turned into a racial issue despite white Americans making up the largest percentage of recipients. During slavery and Jim Crow, poor whites supported elites who exploited them economically just to preserve their position on the racial hierarchy. For them, the mentality is always, “At least I’m not Black.”
These AI videos are more insidious than old minstrelsy because they are so photorealistic. They look real and will only serve to desensitize people and allow them to be even more apathetic to Black people. Like the people responding to the AI videos of Black women saying they are happy SNAP is being defunded because then these “Black women” won’t be able to be greedy and spend all their money on junk food.
By nature, scrolling on social media is mindless. AI content is wedged between real videos, giving it an air of legitimacy and realism. Repeated exposure to these racist AI videos normalizes the lies. And the videos confirm the biases many people have about Black women.
Virality comes before verification. Many people will never realize it’s AI, and those who do often don’t care. I can’t count how many times someone has confirmed a video is AI, and people in the comments say it doesn’t matter because it probably happened in real life. When people are told it is, in fact, AI, some just say, “Well, it’s realistic anyway, this probably is happening somewhere.” See the danger? There’s no winning. It confirms biases, so no one will truly care. It’s like shoveling false confirmation to racists, allowing racism to fester even more than it already does. It’s absolutely dangerous and will contribute to the spread of racism and misinformation if there are no safeguards that prevent this kind of content from being produced.
The thing about AI is that it is not neutral. AI doesn’t just function on its own because the conscious and unconscious biases of developers affect it. Yet, with AI tech companies like OpenAI and Google, there are little to no safeguards to prevent harmful, racist, bigoted content.
Image Sourced from Stephanie Kenyaa Mzee via Instagram
AI is not neutral. It holds up a mirror to society. To the people who prompt the tools and the developers that build them. And it will only harm marginalized people, those seen as easy targets for mocking, like the BIPOC community, fat people, disabled people, and anyone outside of what is “acceptable.” And that’s the danger: AI is accelerating the rot that already exists in our society. It’s recreating centuries of harm with the convenience of an app. Without real protections, it will do untold harm to Black people and every marginalized community.
Sources:
https://www.tiktok.com/@dangerousaiofficial/video/7561633508267969814
https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/blackface-birth-american-stereotype
https://library.brown.edu/cds/sheetmusic/afam/minstrelsy.html
