Buzzfeed's 'Questions Black People Want to Ask Black People' was eye-opening - in a very bad way

Every day, conversations unfold on the internet that feed the growing cross-cultural appetite for discussions about things like race and culture.

BuzzFeed, and BuzzFeed Video in particular, have played a huge part in that, helping race to edge away from its elephant in the room status and to become a widely discussed phenomenon with observational shorts such as: “If Asians/Black People/Latinos Said The Stuff White People Say” and “24 Questions Black People Have for White People”.

Last week however, BuzzFeed’s winning streak was broken with “27 Questions Black People Have For Black People”, a largely off-colour video featuring a slew of black BuzzFeed staff airing gripes such as: “Why are we more likely to engage in a new dance trend than we are to get involved in politics?” and “Why do you protest Black Lives Matter and then tear each other down in the next breath?”

The questions, almost all of them surprisingly short-sighted given BuzzFeed’s track record with discussions about race, seem to have been devised as a means of criticising a specific type of blackness as opposed to thoughtfully addressing intra-community issues.

One after another, the obtuse and haughty misgivings of the BuzzFeed contributors are presented as genuine observations of the behaviours of black people, the kind that suggest that our supposed misconduct as a community - as opposed to systemic racism - is the root of our oppression.

Criticised heavily online, the video seems like it’s actually, as the title of Blavity’s spoof video suggests, more along the lines of “Questions White People Want Black People to Ask Black People”.

The suggestion, for example, that failing to blindly support fellow black people negates our right to make the argument that black lives matter is a common argument put forward by racists. As is the notion that becoming “vehemently upset when a white person uses the n-word”, as one BuzzFeed contributor in the video put it, is unwarranted because of our choice to reclaim it.

In the past, BuzzFeed has done a good job of acknowledging the consequences of pegging individual persons of colour as representatives of their racial groups. Which is why its choice to posit a series of generalisations about black people - such as the idea that judging other black people for failing to conform to traditional blackness is common practise in the black community - under the guise of addressing questions that “black people have” for each other was so disappointing.

Eight years ago, when Morgan Freeman made the suggestion that talking about race fuelled racist acts, every white person with reservations about addressing real racial hierarchies used the statement as a shield, referring to his words as though they had come from a universally accepted manifesto on blackness. If one black person says it, the logic went, then it has to be the truth.

The “27 questions” BuzzFeed video played into similar ideas to Freeman. It seemed to suggest that “looking for the discount” or failing to “open a business” are symptoms of inherent cheapness and incompetence amongst blacks, as opposed to consequences of racially informed economic discrimination. This viewpoint is quite simply morally irresponsible.

Hopefully, BuzzFeed Video, which has yet to address the catastrophic failure that resulted in the hashtag #BuzzFeedVideoQuestions (an ironic take on some of the illogical musings from the video) will tread more carefully when tackling such complex subject matter.

Fair and nuanced representations of marginalised groups are rare in mainstream media outlets. In order to retain the trust that BuzzFeed has earned by trying to improve on that with genuinely laudable acts such as hiring diverse staff and launching black-led media like the hugely popular podcast Another Round, it needs to avoid complacency. This video seems to be an ill-considered manifestation of that.