Part of Culture in Motion — an ongoing series examining who defines culture, how it moves, and what it reveals about the moment.
I was watching a roundtable discussion on CNN the other day when a random white analyst, mid-sentence, looked into the camera and said — “How Sway?” Dead serious. No irony. No acknowledgment of where that came from or what it meant the first time someone said it. And in that moment it hit me, not for the first time, but with a particular clarity: Black culture is being commodified throughout everyday life, in real time, on cable news, between commercial breaks.
I chuckled. Because Black culture has been on the forefront of what is cool for my entire life. That part isn’t new. What’s new is how fast it moves now — and how completely the origin disappears in transit.
This is not a new story. It is an old story running on new infrastructure.
The economics of cultural extraction have always followed the same basic pattern: a practice, sound, or aesthetic originates inside a Black or Brown community, often as a response to specific material and social conditions. It gets noticed by outsiders. It gets named, packaged, and distributed through systems those communities don’t control. The returns — financial, reputational, institutional — flow outward. What stays behind is the origin story, stripped of its context, occasionally cited as inspiration.
What’s different now is the speed and the scale — and the role platforms play in both. The algorithm doesn’t just amplify content. It assigns value to it. Reach, engagement, and monetization are distributed through systems that have consistently shown they apply those rewards unevenly. Studies on TikTok’s recommendation engine have found that Black creators receive less algorithmic promotion than white creators producing similar content. Instagram’s own internal research, made public through leaked documents, acknowledged that its systems suppressed content from Black users at disproportionate rates. The trend gets extracted and then the pipeline that was used to extract it quietly closes behind it. As SSC examined in Black Twitter Was Infrastructure, the collapse of a shared Black digital space didn’t just scatter voices — it handed the distribution of Black culture over to platforms with no structural accountability to the communities generating it.
Trap music built an entire sonic infrastructure — hi-hats, 808s, the specific architecture of a drop — that became the operating system for a decade of mainstream pop. The producers who built those templates, many of them Black men from Atlanta, became wealthy. The aesthetic itself became so universal that it now belongs to no one, which in practice means it belongs to whoever has the most distribution. The originating community gets credited in the liner notes of culture. The royalties go elsewhere.
The same logic applies to language. AAVE — African American Vernacular English — has functioned as a generational source of vocabulary, syntax, and rhythm for American popular culture. “Slay,” “no cap,” “understood the assignment,” “it’s giving” — these are not slang terms that happened to cross over. They are linguistic innovations developed inside a specific community, carrying specific social weight, that were extracted, flattened into content, and turned into brand voice for corporations that would never hire the people who invented them. The words travel. The people don’t.
And then there’s the visual. “Clean girl aesthetic” — glossy skin, slicked edges, gold hoops, minimal makeup — was a look Black and Brown women had been wearing for decades before the algorithm gave it a name it could index. By the time it peaked on TikTok, it was being sold back to the culture that originated it through tutorials, product recommendations, and sponsored posts from creators who hadn’t grown up in it. The aesthetic didn’t change. The credit did.
What makes this structural rather than incidental is that it operates through systems, not just choices. A creator on TikTok doesn’t decide to extract a trend — they post content, and the algorithm decides who sees it and who gets paid for seeing it. A brand doesn’t decide to appropriate AAVE — they hire a social media manager who has absorbed the language from their feed, and the system that trained that feed was already doing the extraction upstream. The harm is diffuse and distributed, which makes it easy to locate everywhere and hold accountable nowhere. It connects to what SSC explored in “White Culture” Was Asked to Define Itself. It Couldn’t. — a culture that cannot name itself without borrowing from specific ethnic and racial communities has no origin to protect. It only has access to take.
The question worth sitting with isn’t whether this happens — the pattern is too consistent to debate. The question is what it would mean to interrupt it. Some answers are structural: platform policies that audit algorithmic equity, intellectual property frameworks that account for collective cultural authorship, monetization systems that don’t require virality to produce income. Others are more immediate: naming the origin, paying the source, and resisting the temptation to treat “inspired by” as equivalent to credit.
Black culture has always been the most imitated, least compensated creative force in American life. The internet didn’t create that dynamic. It just made it move faster, scaled it globally, and built an entire attention economy on top of it — one that profits most from the communities it compensates least.
The trend doesn’t leave the community. It gets taken. And the infrastructure built to take it keeps running long after anyone remembers where it started.