Black TikTokers Stand Against Dance Theft in Refusal to Choreo “Thot Shit”

So much of global pop culture couldn’t exist without the contributions of Black Americans — especially TikTok, where some Black TikTokers took a stand this week by refusing to make dances to Megan Thee Stallion’s new song “Thot Sh*t.”

From streetwear trends to most of modern music, Black Americans are responsible for the development of what people across the world think of when it comes to pop culture. However, Black creators are often left behind once trends pick up speed; non-Black creators – especially young, white people – get the credit and media attention for things they didn’t create.

Case in point? The visibility of viral TikTok dances and who gets credit for creating and performing them. In 2019, teenager Jalaiah Harmon choreographed a difficult routine to rapper K-Camp’s “Lottery” and then posted it to Funimate and other platforms. By early 2020, Jalaiah’s “Renegade” routine was everywhere on TikTok… but her name was nowhere to be found at first. Further, when Addison Rae went on Jimmy Fallon to teach him eight TikTok dances in March 2021, initially, there was no credit given to the largely Black creators who’d put those dances together. After the segment aired and Fallon and Addison received backlash, Fallon hosted the creators on his show and highlighted their creativity.

Usually, however, when Black people ask for (or demand) credit for the pop culture innovations we’ve created and powered – especially in the face of cultural appropriation — we’re accused of being “selfish” or trying to “cancel” the non-Black people thriving on our creations. (If you’ve ever seen people say, “so do Black people think they own braids now” in response to conversations about the problems present when non-Black celebrities like the Kardashians slap on box braids… that’s a prime example of the reaction.)

Viral dance trends are everywhere across TikTok and other forms of social media. Some of them — like K-pop dance challenges from Jessi or Zico’s respective summer singles last year — pull from a segment of the official dance moves performed onstage or in music videos. Others, like the dance challenge associated with Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage,” are choreographed by Black fans like Keara Wilson who want to show their appreciation for their favorites. Usually, these choreographed routines go up within a day or two of a new song’s release.

So, when Megan Thee Stallion dropped her latest single “Thot Shit” on June 11^th, people expected a new dance to drop. However, two weeks after the song’s release, there’s still not a widely released, repeated dance routine for the single – not even one pulling from the music video. One big reason why? Black TikTok users who normally choreograph these routines have decided they’re not doing all the work only to have white creatives take their content and run with it.

One TikTok user who’s refusing to create a dance for “Thot Shit” on the platform is Erick Louis. One of his videos about this “boycott” and how TikTok would be nothing without Black users went viral on Twitter after digital strategist Leslie Mac posted it in a thread along with attempts by white TikTok users to make “their own” routines.

“I’ve been a content creator on TikTok for about nine months now and within that short period of time, I’ve seen countless videos/dances/ideas created by Black creators stolen and repurposed on TikTok without proper credit being given,” Erick tells Teen Vogue. “Even outside of dance challenges, I’ve seen a lot of white content creators bank off discourse and conversations that Black activists and thought leaders have been having for ages all just to gain social capital. The problem is far beyond the scope of a dance challenge and has been ongoing since the virality of that app.”

As Erick points out, this sort of theft goes beyond dances, and beyond TikTok. People steal tweets, informational threads/videos, and blog posts from Black creators with smaller digital footprints every single day. And when Black creators like Erick speak out about what’s happening everywhere, things often don't go well for them.

“I’m always very outspoken when it comes to the misappropriation of anything relating to Black folk,” Erick says about his choice to call out and speak about intellectual theft. “It was definitely something I used to make videos about as my following grew but over time I stopped doing so because TikTok has huge issues with censorship. Videos like that will get taken down for ‘hate speech’ or ‘bullying’ which I feel is the app’s way of muzzling Black content creators.”

When reached for comment, a TikTok spokesperson shared a statement with Teen Vogue that reads, “TikTok is a special place because of the diverse and inspiring voices of our community, and our Black creators are a critical and vibrant part of this. We care deeply about the experience of Black creators on our platform and we continue to work every day to create a supportive environment for our community while also instilling a culture where honoring and crediting creators for their creative contributions is the norm." TikTok also directed us to their recent blog post about their commitment to diversity and inclusion.

In 2020, Black TikTok creators said that their content was being removed from and censored by the platform. As Time reported, Black users who interspersed their funny content with critical commentary on Black Lives Matter, transmisogyny, and other important social justice issues often saw their content “shadow-banned” and view counts drop drastically. When they report racist responses to their work — sometimes with people “stitching” content to their initial video — they receive feedback that the posts do not violate community guidelines. While most of the responses to Erick’s video have been positive, he’s had some people (like these two white creators) jack his video sans credit and get over a million hits. It feels like a reward for retaliatory anti-Blackness that shows that people would rather mock Black TikTokers than make something all their own.

So, what might TikTok users – Black or otherwise – take away from the semi-official boycott and Black creators’ refusal to create easily-consumed “Thot Sh*t” dances? 

Dr. Matthew D. Morrison, an assistant professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, is the author of Race, Blacksound, and the (Re) Making of Musicological Discourse. “My work is on the history and continued legacy of blackface minstrelsy, so I see the relationship between the attempts to harvest Black creative practices without giving proper recognition or compensation on social media sites like TikTok as a direct through-line to this first original form of American pop (blackface),” Morrison said via DM. “What I’d like to see happen, in general, is that Black people recognize the power of their creative work as intellectual property to be protected.”

The process is a difficult one, he points out, since performances are taken more as “public domain” and “social dance” as opposed to choreography. Meanwhile, TikTok appropriation is part of a long history of Black cultural contributions being taken up by other groups and repackaged in a way that’s more acceptable and “accessible” to a wider audience. More than rhetoric about dance trends, these discussions are about entitlement to Black creators’ labor, creativity, and cultural consciousness.

And so Morrison hopes this latest move will be a fruitful step toward Black creators owning the power and influence they have on culture at large. “I hope they see the power in staging these sorts of boycotts and leaving large corporations and people outside of the community without our Black content to exploit,” he says, “until these practices and their original creators are properly honored and compensated (and in a reparative way, too).”

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue