When Bhad Bhabie first entered our cultural zeitgeist in 2016, I don’t think any of us could have predicted she’d be beefing online with Kim Kardashian‘s step-niece Alabama Barker through musical diss and digs. The two started off as friends, but along the way, wires got crossed, infidelity took place and now two of the biggest purveyors of cultural appropriation are beefing it out.
But what makes this especially interesting is that Bhad Bhabie, an indisputable culture vulture, called out Alabama Barker for being a “Cracker.”
It is clear who they adopted their looks and personality from
To be clear, these are two white women who have both adopted their personalities and aesthetic centers from Black women. Bhad Bhabie went on to say Barker wasn’t “invited to the cookout” despite surrounding herself with “Blacks.”
Now, the use of the term “Blacks” in and of itself exposes so much about Bhad Bhabie, AKA Danielle Peskowitz Bregoli’s perception of Black people. The same Black people whose steelo she has bastardized and hodge-podged into a racist caricature that lauded her into stardom almost 10 years ago.
Why this behavior is ironic
This behavior is made all the more ironic by its orbit around the gravitational force that is the Kardashians, the most famous and, by all accounts, successful culture vultures. They inhaled the “desirable” aspects of Blackness, ranging from braids and grills to plastic surgery and Black face adjacent makeup dabbles and pimped it back out to the masses. Who could forget the decades-long racial fetishization of Black men that seemed to wane right as conservative cultural biases began to re-emerge? Interesting.
This desire for racial ambiguity was a throughline of mid-2010s culture, especially online, and what we are seeing now with both Bhad Bhabie and Alabama Barker is just a mangled fruition of the Blackfishing seeds planted by some of the most famous women in the world almost 20 years ago. This is a cultural reaping of what was sowed long before “Catch me outside, how ’bout that?”
