Megan Thee Stallion’s “Thot Shit” is a near perfect blueprint for a viral TikTok dance and sound. The beat is catchy, the chorus is easy to remember, and the lyrics offer clear — and fun — instructions for listeners.
But when the song released to the public in mid-June, something peculiar happened on the massively popular shortform video app: Instead of creating a viral dance trend to a clip from “Thot Shit,” several Black creators banded together for what has been described as a dance “strike.” One creator described the decision as an “experiment” to highlight just how significant the contributions from Black creators are to viral trends on the app — and what would happen if they refused to create new dances to the song.
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“I think we were all just like, ‘Let’s see what happens. Let’s see if what we’ve been saying is as true as we think it is,'” Marcus Greggory, a 21-year-old creator, says.
What ensued were plenty of questionable dance moves (hand waving and hand holding, to name a few) that failed to consider the directions in “Thot Shit” for listeners to put their hands on their knees and twerk — a far cry from the complex moves seen in other viral dances like the Renegade, created by Jalaiah Harmon, or Up, created by Mya Johnson and Chris Cotter.
In the years since TikTok became one of the most popular social media platforms around the world, TikTokers like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae Easterling — the most followed and third-most-followed creators on the app, respectively — have become popular for re-creating dances made by young Black creators. In late 2019, D’Amelio and Rae quickly shot to fame for dancing to K Camp’s “Lottery (Renegade),” sparking a viral trend on TikTok and earning the dancers millions of followers in the process. But it wasn’t until early 2020 that coverage in The New York Times helped identify Harmon as the original creator of the dance and called attention to how the Atlanta teen hadn’t been given credit.
Since then, D’Amelio and Rae have added dance credits to their TikTok videos, but frustrations around Black creators still not being recognized for their work were amplified earlier this year when Rae was invited to appear on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon to perform viral TikTok dances made by Black creators. (After public outcry, Fallon later invited the original choreographers to appear on the show, virtually.)
While not every Black creator decided to engage in the dance “strike,” the experiment succeeded in calling attention to the ways Black creators are often overlooked or not credited for their contributions to the app.
“It’s about damn time, actually. I’m super proud of all the creators that are speaking up and speaking out. It’s a highly important issue that’s oftentimes overlooked,” JaQuel Knight, the choreographer behind Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” and Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP,” tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Regardless of the level of the magnitude of what you’re creating, the least you can do is give credit.”
Knight says he wants to see choreographers get a percentage of compensation if their original dances help make a certain record blow up on social media. “The dances on TikTok — without a doubt, without a question — is what is selling records. In return, the records are making money. In return, only the records are making money, and not the choreography,” Knight says. “It’s all about starting to treat and respect the choreography in the same way that we’re respecting the music.”
The tension between Black creators and TikTok extends beyond just dance and who gets credited. Erick Louis, a 21-year-old creator in Orlando, Florida, sees the strained relationship as a labor issue.
“We drive all this traffic to the app. We run the trends, we run all the subcategories, yet we’re not propped up in the same ways that a lot of these white content creators are,” Louis says. “It was never about a dance strike for me, even though I’m a dancer.”
At the same time, Louis and other creators who spoke with THR acknowledge that engaging in a true strike against TikTok — by refusing to post or leaving the app entirely — would put Black creators at another disadvantage with their peers, especially if they are hoping to build successful careers on social media.
“It feels like, why should we have to leave?” Greggory says, questioning whether doing so would be akin to “giving up.” “We’re not going anywhere. This is it. I would like to be successful at this.”
And that isn’t to say other social media platforms aren’t without their problems, either. “I feel like there comes some point with every creator where they want to leave every app, at some point, because of the experience on it,” Challan Trishann, a 23-year-old creator with over 4 million followers on TikTok, says. “TikTok is just hard to leave. I don’t know what it is, but it’s like a relationship. I can’t break up with them.”
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Over the past year, TikTok has been making efforts to better support its Black creator community. Last summer, the company convened a handful of meetings with Black creators and TikTok executives — including then-CEO Kevin Mayer, general manager Vanessa Pappas and director of creator community Kudzi Chikumbu — to give creators a chance to speak up about the negative experiences they had with the app. The company has also hosted “office hours” with members of its Black TikTok creator community on a bi-weekly basis to help open lines of communication.
Trishann, who participated in one of the meetings, says she was able to speak up about the proliferation of trolls that would spam her videos with hateful comments and felt encouraged by TikTok’s efforts to open up direct communication with Black creators.
“I was like, wow, they actually took the time out to get some important people here to really sit down and talk to me about my experience,” Trishann says. “That’s just not something I’ve really experienced in the past. Nobody really cares about how the Black experience is, so I was just very taken aback by that in a good way.”
But TikTok’s outreach also comes amid several major technological missteps that have contributed to frustrations that some Black creators have with the app. Last summer, TikTok apologized to Black creators after a “technical glitch” caused videos tagged with #BlackLivesMatter and #GeorgeFloyd to appear as if they had zero views — a glitch that made some creators feel like their work was being censored. In early July, creator and comedian Ziggi Tyler discovered that when he tried to write a biography on TikTok’s Creator Marketplace, an invite-only platform that connects brands with creators, he couldn’t include phrases like “Black Lives Matter,” ”pro Black” or “Black success” — phrases that triggered the app’s content monitoring system to erroneously flag them as potential hate speech — while terms like “white supremacy” and “neo-Nazi” were not flagged.
“We recognize and value the impact that Black creators continue to have on our platform and across culture and entertainment. We’re committed to investing in resources and building technology that address their concerns, including finding solutions that help cement a culture of credit and working to ensure fair and equitable moderation policies,” a TikTok spokesperson told THR. “We wholeheartedly want to be part of the solution and will continue to share updates as we make progress toward these goals.”
While racial bias on tech platforms has been well documented, creators tell THR that the dynamics seen on TikTok are also a reflection of the racial inequity that exists outside of digital spaces.
“What we’re seeing is this sort of digital colonizing. And I think that’s the perfect way to describe it, just in the sense that Blackness and Black arts, Black sounds, Black creativity has always been appropriated, has always been taken from us,” Louis says.
And when it comes to something like a TikTok dance, the added effort of properly crediting the creator could help make someone’s career.
“It’s such an easy solution that can really take people very far. You can get into people’s music videos for getting credited for something you created, you can actually make money off of it, you can gain support, you can gain an audience,” Trishann says. “That’s what I would love to see for people, but that doesn’t happen to people because they’re not receiving credit for the things that they create, which is just not fair.”
