Where are all the Black girls on TikTok?: Exploring in-group community and (in)visibility through #BlackGirlTikTok

Abstract

Since the global virality of the ‘Renegade’ dance on TikTok and beyond in 2020, concerns regarding the erasure of Black girls have been noted. This paper extends the conversation by considering how Black girls and teenagers may continue to wrestle with visibility and suppression even within a more intimate in-group community of Black TikTokers. In this paper, we assemble an original corpus of TikTok posts purposively sampled from #BlackGirlTikTok and apply content analysis guided by critical technocultural discourse analysis. Our findings reveal that the dominant discourse on #BlackGirlTikTok focused on embodied self-care (i.e. body and beauty care, health and wellness) and Black popular culture (i.e. audio memes, parlance), constituting a niche community for users to commune. However, despite the nomenclature of the hashtag, the users dominating the community were overtly Black women rather than Black girls or teenagers, thus raising issues of visibility, competition, and suppression within the in-group community.