Entry · catalog no. 3015
blackfishing
/ /ˈblækˌfɪʃɪŋ/ /BLAK-fish-ing
noun · internet / nationwide · 2010s
✓ Verified
1.
The practice of a non-Black person — usually a white woman with a public platform — using tanning, cosmetics, hair, filters or surgery to present as Black or racially ambiguous, typically to build an audience or land brand deals in Black-coded markets. The charge is not borrowing a style but performing an identity: taking the look while staying insulated from the treatment Black women actually receive.
“Her tan deepened every quarter and her hair changed texture with it — the comments called it blackfishing before her publicist ever did.”
Origin & Attribution
Coined in 2018 by Wanna Thompson, a Black hip-hop journalist and critic writing as @WannasWorld, as a play on catfishing. Her thread inviting people to post white women cosplaying as Black women went viral that November, and she made the argument at length in PAPER magazine the same month. Correct the standing error: it is routinely filed as Gen Z or TikTok slang. It predates TikTok's American mainstreaming, came out of Black Twitter, and has a single named Black woman author.
2018
Wanna Thompson coins the term in a viral thread and argues it at length in PAPER on November 14
2019
Enters mainstream press through a run of pop-star and influencer controversies
2021
Enters peer-reviewed scholarship and dictionary treatment
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
internet / nationwide · 2010s
Spoken by
Black Twitter, North America; Black women writers and critics
$BLACKFThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady1 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
76/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
2018
in the culture
Mainstream crossover
2019
search interest spikes
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
How White Women on Instagram Are Profiting Off Black Women, Wanna Thompson — PAPER Magazine · November 14, 2018
archive-desk
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+ Cite a sourceBlackfishing on Instagram: Influencing and the Commodification of Black Urban Aesthetics, Wesley E. Stevens — Social Media + Society · 2021
archive-desk
See also