00:00:24.580Last week on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, TikTok dance star Addison Rae joined host Jimmy Fallon for a segment called Addison Rae Teases Jimmy Eight TikTok Dances.
00:00:34.240Now on its face, it was a cute segment where Addison Rae showed Jimmy Fallon how to do eight dances that have gone viral on the platform TikTok, as Jimmy held up signs for the audience with each dance's name.
00:00:44.260But the backlash started when folks pointed out that like most viral dances on TikTok, the dances were created by Black youth on the platform.
00:00:51.180Now, Jimmy Fallon's team says when they uploaded the segment to YouTube, they included the
00:00:54.880credits in the description, but that's pretty different from crediting them on the show.
00:00:59.220And it would have been pretty easy to put the name of the creator on the title card,
00:01:20.620Which, on its face, doesn't seem so terrible, but it actually does matter who gets credit for things that go big online and who doesn't.0.65
00:01:27.280Other people benefit materially from things that Black people create online, while those original Black creators go overlooked, and in some cases, completely unnamed.0.99
00:01:36.760We in this bitch, finna get crunk.1.00
00:01:42.780Most of us have heard the expression on fleek.1.00
00:01:45.420I heard it in advertisements from everything from hefty bags to Arby's.
00:01:49.320But Peaches Monroe, the Black teen who first popularized the expression in a Vine video,
00:01:54.640didn't see a dime from the corporations who capitalized off of her creation.
00:01:58.840This happens again and again, especially on platforms like TikTok.
00:02:02.860Last year, 14-year-old Jalila Harmon filmed herself doing the renegade dance on Instagram.
00:02:08.020TikTok user Global.Jones copied the dance on TikTok, and it started spreading.
00:02:13.160That's when huge TikToker, Charlie D'Amelio, who has over 100,000 followers on the platform,
00:02:19.400posted a video of herself doing it, and then it took off like wildfire.
00:02:22.940The dance showed up on big shows like Good Morning America.
00:02:26.120Only nobody credited Jalila, and Charlie D'Amelio became known as, quote,
00:02:30.760the CEO of the Renegade Dance Challenge.
00:02:33.580Now compare that to someone like Kombucha Girl, a white woman named Brittany Tomlinson.0.99
00:02:38.480When Britney's hilarious TikTok video of her skeptical taste-testing kombucha for the first time went viral,0.85
00:02:44.080she was credited and ended up being in a Super Bowl commercial because of that TikTok.
00:02:49.100Meanwhile, it took users on social media to aggressively advocate for Jalila,
00:02:53.840for her to even be credited with creating the Renegade Challenge.
00:02:57.540Getting credited for things that you create online can be life-changing.
00:03:00.560It can mean opportunities, endorsements, and more.
00:03:03.200And it shouldn't be such a fight for Black creators to simply be credited for what they create online.
00:03:07.760Law professor K.J. Green argues that both online and offline, Black public creativity has been rendered public domain in ways that can often leave Black creators getting screwed.0.96
00:03:18.320Now, Black folks have always had our stuff stolen, but the speed of the Internet means that our intellectual property, our dances and jokes and ideas, can be stolen really quickly.0.98
00:03:27.640As Shamira Ibrahim puts it over at broadly, this means the means in which Black niches0.99
00:03:32.880have been rifled through, hand-selected, and proliferated may not be new, but the advent
00:03:36.940of social media has accelerated the speed at which these trends have floored into the
00:03:40.900mainstream and ultimately corporatized for gain, especially in instances where the nuances
00:03:45.820of the privacy policy may contain obscure language that allows for corporations to own,
00:03:50.660license, and publish original and innovative content at their whim, however unethical it
00:03:56.080Now, Addison Rae has since acknowledged the backlash to the Jimmy Fallon segment.
00:03:59.900It's kind of hard to credit during the show, but they all know that I love them so much.
00:04:04.780And I mean, I support all of them so much.
00:04:07.180And hopefully one day we can all meet up and dance together.
00:04:10.840I want to see a world where crediting Black digital creators for their brilliance isn't just an afterthought.
00:04:16.400To hear more about Black digital creators and the struggle to be credited,
00:04:20.100check out the episode of There Are No Girls on the Internet with Black creator Mara Sebastian.
00:04:23.660You can find the link to the full episode in the show description.
00:04:54.440If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.
00:04:58.020For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:05:15.600If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:05:21.580Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:05:30.240Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.