Black wife,upgraded life: An examination of the commodification of Black womanhood and racework in interracial relationships on social media

Abstract

The Black Wife Effect (BWE) trend took TikTok by storm around May 2024, when predominantly white men showcased makeovers attributed to their Black wives. We used a multimodal critical discourse analysis of BWE posts to evaluate how these media construct Black womanhood and their intimate labor in the context of interracial relationships. The findings show that, through digital racework, the BWE trend constitutes a set of replicable controlling images that commodify Black women’s intimate labor while rendering it invisible. Although Black women’s influence on their husbands is celebrated, most social media users constructed the BWE as a “natural” outcome of healthy interracial love, a non-market activity expected from Black women. These findings reflect the contradictions at the foundation of racial heteropatriarchal capitalist systems in the information age, wherein white men and others seek after, symbolically celebrate, and monetize the labor of racialized women while denying its economic value.