When is a “Boyfriend Haul” Like a Slave Market?

Hello friends,

I’m going to be talking about enslavement, so if you’re a Black descendant of that experience and this is going to be triggering, feel free to skip it.

A while back, there was a “boyfriend haul” TikTok trend. It basically meant pretending you’d purchased your significant other and listing his attributes as if you’d bought something like a car.

In some circumstances, it might be funny, but forgive me if a meme about purchasing people doesn’t sit right with me, which brings me to the now infamous TikTok video where a white woman was showing off her Black boyfriend as part of the meme.

Now I get it, they were participating in a bit of TikTok fun. And yet it still sticks in my craw that they were both - for he appeared to be a willing participant - so devoid of historical knowledge that it never occurred to them how this could and would be read by people descended from the experience of enslavement.

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