Joshua Lumpkin Green used the term in a 2006 master's thesis on how technology lets non-Black people assume Black identities. Writer Lauren Michele Jackson brought it to a wide audience in a 2017 Teen Vogue essay about reaction GIFs, which noted how often white users reach for images of Black people to show big emotions.
The concern is not any single GIF. It is a pattern that reduces Black people to stereotypes of loudness or sass, echoing 19th-century minstrel shows in which white performers wore blackface. It also includes white users adopting African American English online, and fake accounts posing as Black people.
Digital blackface has a political edge. During the 2016 election, Russian operatives ran fake Black activist accounts to discourage Black voters, according to a 2019 Senate report. Today, AI tools that generate Black voices and faces raise new versions of the problem.