Black edits, reclamation, settler culture, and anime
“They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
If you're like me, you spent a large chunk of your childhood wondering why most of the characters shown on TV didn't look like you.
Why didn't my hair look like theirs? Theirs is straight; mine's rough and curly.
Why are my lips big? My nose broad? Why was my skin so dark??
You know the answer at heart, but it becomes less a genuine feeling of curiosity and more of a yearning. A frustration that you can't mesh with everyone you see on screen.
WHITE STATUS QUO
Since it's the only era I have some direct experience with, I'll limit my analysis to post-Internet culture and the increased interconnectedness of the world.
Whiteness isn't just "being European", it's a social "in-group" status. Minority cultures, especially ones that have had limited time to stand up on their own feet and start working their way out of ghoulish stigmatization by pop media, tend to gravitate towards that in-group either way. Being raised in a space that holds eurocentric beauty, culture and language as a metric for everyone's self-worth, white people are naturally elevated through algorithm and find themselves exposed to even larger groups than before. Conversely, racial minorities find any kind of dissent is elevated and find a role in an established settler culture once more. Black cultural output like hip hop? Stripped of its biting commentary and thoughtful refinement over the last few decades. What's left is palatable songs safe to bump in suburbia and lowly underground or "trashy" rap discarded and treated as worth disregarding. Black comedy? Fits nicely as long as they toe the line -- but even if they don't, you can stand by and laugh treating niggerspeak as minstrel show-style entertainment. In the 2010s, Black people became a huge cultural monument not through earnest unfaltering cultural output but through appealing to white tastes and allowing them to pick-and-choose what parts of us are worth displaying to the world. There's no conspiracy here -- I don't believe there's an evil honky cabal commanded by Yakub to keep us down. I think it's as simple as a white collective unconscious lodging itself in social media algorithms and the residues of in-group settler culture allowing them to nudge towards placing minorities in boxes. You can find it among Asians too -- filter out the bad stuff and keep the exoticism, the fun parts of their culture to ourselves. K-pop and weeb culture find themselves at this intersect.
If you're a child raised in a late DSL-early cable Internet world, it doesn't matter how much of your outside world is Black -- the Internet has established a hyperreality of in-group culture and hammers home these ideas through consistent exposure. Nobody will tell you to your face your hair is weird, but after enough videos of watching other Black girls throw on weave or straighten out their hair, who in turn try to emulate white girls that seemingly never have to try with this stuff, we reach a point where Blackness as an identity dissolves as a timid house nigger online. Predominantly Black spaces weren't popular and still often times find themselves drowned out by self-hatred. If you're online in the West, regardless of race, you're exposed to the same hyperreality of cultural norms and stigmas as everyone else.
Whiteness, as an established doctrine and spectre, didn't dissipate with the increase in dirty race-mingling, it spread. It made outsider culture more easily marketable and the outsiders in question settling for scraps. It's silly to oversimplify the strides we made via the Internet and the increased spread of Black music, art, film, whatever. While the aforementioned dynamic of "sellout" culture is still quite ingrained, it's still something and a big stride we've made for the better.
RECLAMATION
A common strategy to build a culture entirely insulated within a white in-group formed in the 60s as a reaction to the ingraine scientific racism and Jim Crow conditions. Rather than discard what we've built up, Black people started to internalize the idea of our unique conditions leading to a robust culture of its own. Black cooking, once a culinary space formed out of necessity from getting the kitchen scraps as slaves, grew into a unique and sought after fusion of West African tendencies and all-American Southern styles. Gospel become a transformative religious genre that kicked off others like hip-hop. "Nigga" became a widespread term we just started to use for everything. After all, who's there to tell us NO? Are white folks gonna tell us "hey, that's racist"?
Reclamation involves an oppressed group taking oppressive tendencies, slurs, epithets, and making them our own. It's de-fanging a tool of oppression for the sake of building up our own culture. It's building a sense of identity out of tools used to downplay it.
Hamilton
I'm not Latino. The intersect of culture, identity, and ethnicity for them and how they navigate it is gonna be different from us. However, I'm pretty sure I get the idea behind Lin-Manuel Miranda's project to rehabilitate Alexander Hamilton. Looking past how I think trying to "babygirl" bougie settlers has harmful tendencies, Miranda intentionally pushed for POC actors to play the various American founders he wants to portray in a time capsule. Thomas Jefferson is a lightskin nigga with locs, Aaron Burr is a baldhead dark brother, and Hamilton himself is Miranda, an Afro-Latino from Puerto Rico. People will take issue with the idea of destroying White History being attributed to minority groups, and the metaphor is definitely flawed. However, there's a provocative nature inherent to reclamation that Hamilton highlights. It's solidifying a seemingly immutable aspect of settler history (the foundation of America) and attaching people of color to its public consciousness. When people talk about Alexander Hamilton, the image in their head is of a brown guy.
The logic behind Hamilton is the same logic behind the Black edits that span the Internet nowadays. It's seeing spaces where white or white-passing characters exist in spades and giving them nappy hair, big lips, and a darker complexion. It's provocative, distinctly Black, distinctly afrocentric. It's taking a non-Black story or piece of art and transforming it as part of our own in fandom.
ANIME
Japan is distinct from Western cultural output in that seemingly "white-passing" characters are in reality generally Japanese. From the perspective of a Black American, Goku and his friends seem white-coded. Add on top a dub full of the whitest voices on Planet Earth and you can start to see how people read them as white. This is the case for a lot of anime. And because from the perspective of a lot of Black people, anime is "white", reworking white characters with locs, dark skin, thick lips, etc. becomes a common sense choice. For a lot of niggas, anime is a kind of counter-culture that find themselves aligning with easily. Bucking the trend of Western media with heavily eurocentric culture and ideas and enjoying something that feels fresh and unique seems like a reasonable conclusion to make. There's a commonality there and a kind of energy you can't get anywhere else. Add on top often times shounen anime open with themes of rising from the bottom or confiding in strong role models and you can see why Black kids love this shit so much. But Japan isn't white. We can't just handwave their cultural output as ingrained settler work. In fact, Japan has a unique relationship with the US and oppression and subjugation. Orientalism haunts the Western anime sphere constantly and there's a tendency to lean into it. There's something to be said about taking Asian or race-ambiguous characters and promptly reworking them to fit our struggle as Black people. However, there are plenty of darker Asian people, even in Japan. The idea that they're BLACK might be off the table, but asking "why isn't there more variation in skin color" is reasonable. Why does anime seem to have an ingrained colorism to it?
Ultimately, it's important to understand WHY these edits are made. It's because of a lack of representation and a desire to have people that look like you fit in the kinds of stories you enjoy. This makes certain right-wingers FURIOUS, but wanting people in the stories you engage with to look like you is a sentiment you're inevitably going to have when Dark-ness is stigmatized.
Anime often finds itself in the donut-lips camp when having to portray niggas. When they have such limited exposure to our culture, it's a reasonable misstep to make. Considering the intersect here, I feel the best way to move forward here is to just encourage more and more proper Black characters in the stories we enjoy. Instead of potentially disparaging another racial minority, there's a space to appreciate both.
Of course, an even easier solution is to just make our own animation.
A manifesto for Black cultural output
The Black edits, the reclamation, the Black spins on established superheroes or white protagonists, it's all in the spirit of building a bedrock of our own culture. That culture, while subsumed by white capital and drained through a filter of suburbia, is growing rapidly. We exist as a robust and burgeoning scourge on whiteness and challenge its hegemony with flair. We export a lot of garbage, but I have real hope we can dismantle the social structures binding us down. A Black liberation is a liberation from colorism, from feeling stranded from our own heritage. It's a liberation that addresses the effects of diaspora and centuries of ingrained self-hatred and eurocentrism. It's not Black nationalism, it's not Black anti-semitism, it's a desire to exist freely as Black alongside everyone else.