Jalaiah Effect: A Story of a Stolen Dance on TikTok and Trans-Platformization of Ignorance

Abstract

This article explores how ignorance becomes a cultural affordance of trans-platformization, focusing on the Renegade dance’s evolution into a viral sensation that fueled TikTok’s rise and launched new teenage influencers. Employing new materialist feminist theory, Actor-Network Theory, and Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis, this article operationalizes the concept of trans-platformization. It examines race-technology entanglements as they manifest during trans-platformization, highlighting the illusory progress in recognizing Black creators and the resistance against a predominantly White, techno-capitalist patriarchy. The tensions arising from these complexities intensify the demand for a more nuanced understanding of ignorance as the affordance of trans-platformization and the potential pivot point for speculative hope.

Introduction

TikTok’s meteoric rise among social media platforms is closely linked to the surge of viral dance challenges, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Renegade dance challenge, the defining viral sensation of 2019 to 2020, epitomizes this trend. Whether the #RenegadeDanceChallenge drove TikTok’s popularity or vice versa, the dance remains one of the platform’s most influential phenomena and a notable case of cultural appropriation, amplified by digital interfaces and American technoculture.

This case study delves into the spring 2020 controversy surrounding Charli D’Amelio, a 16-year-old White influencer who amassed millions of followers through her performance of the “Renegade” dance, set to K Camp’s “Lottery (Renegade).” The viral dance, originally created by 14-year-old Black dancer Jalaiah Harmon, went uncredited until The New York Times profile (Lorenz, 2020) exposed the issue, sparking widespread media attention. It was only 6 months after Jalaiah invented the dance when the trend was fading, and after overcoming another layer of deliberate ignorance—this time by the NBA—that Harmon finally received mainstream media recognition. This belated acknowledgment included tweets from figures like Michelle Obama, an appearance on The Ellen Show, dedicated docuseries, a Netflix documentary episode, glossy magazine cover stories, and other media coverage.

Drawing on new materialist feminist theory, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Latour, 1993, 2005) and Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) (Brock, 2018, 2020). I operationalize the concept of trans-platformization. This concept highlights how digital artifacts gain agency as they move across platforms through playful memetics, virality machine, and joyful oblivion, which strip them of their original cultural context and attribution. This article argues that the trans-platformization of the Renegade dance afforded cultural ignorance and the appropriation of Black art.

The economic disparities stemming from cultural appropriation further indicate the pervasive inequities that persist even after Harmon’s belated recognition. Despite earning $1 million in 2021, Jalaiah’s profits pale in comparison to those of D’Amelio, her family, and other TikTokers who capitalized on her dance. Trevor Boffone (2022) coined the term “D’Amelio effect,” which describes the commercial success and cultural hype surrounding an influencer rooted in Whiteness and the cultural appropriation of Blackness. I shift the focus from D’Amelio to the originator of the Renegade dance—Jalaiah Harmon, offering the term “Jalaiah effect.” This term highlights a fleeting exception amid the broader pattern of Black cultural appropriation on TikTok and beyond, driven by trans-platformization. The significance of the “Jalaiah effect” lies not only in its exceptionality but also in the illusion of progress it presents in addressing cultural and technological racism, as well as anti-Blackness. This term can also be applied to other Black creators such as Keara “Keke” Wilson, Jordyn Williams, Mya Nicole Johnson, Chris Cotter, Dorian Scott, Fly Boy Fu and Indii, Greg Dahl, Adam Snyder, and Nate Nale, among others, who created viral dance trends, got belated and fleeting acknowledgment, but did not contribute to any systemic changes toward correcting the erasure of Blackness.

This article begins by discussing the theoretical framework and proposing the concept of trans-platformization. It then examines how trans-platformization plays out in the Renegade dance challenge, highlighting the perpetuation of ignorance and the potential for breaking through it. The article concludes by analyzing these dynamics within the context of American society and exploring their broader implications.

Theoretical Framework: Racializing New Materialism

This section seeks to bridge the inherent tensions between new materialist approaches and decolonial identity politics, proposing an integrated perspective that embraces both human and nonhuman forces in the study of social change. The premise of the new materialist feminist framework is that studying any social phenomenon, especially social change, requires looking beyond a sole focus on humans, their agencies, and their agendas (Betlemidze, 2021). A racialized version of the new materialist feminist framework continues to examine power and agency beyond anthropocentric perspectives through a focus on racial justice. The new materialist perspective may appear to deprioritize “human-oriented avenues” such as “discourse, performance, and identity” (Betlemidze, 2021, p. 94). Yet, it offers a more nuanced study of often overlooked aspects of racial justice, such as—bodies, objects, technologies, algorithms, and spaces—that shape our daily lives in embodied and digital milieux.

Digital social media posts can act as moral and political agents, transforming nonhuman actors into “nodal points” and “collectivizing agents” (Hagen, 2022). This approach allows for the study of social change through actor-networks, the blurring of boundaries between subject and object, and the mediatization of images and nonhuman actors. However, it adds a crucial focus on how digital artifacts traverse platforms, often shedding their cultural and racialized contexts. Such decontextualization creates fertile ground for examining social change through the dynamics of trans-platformization, with particular attention to the pervasive and implicit presence of Whiteness and anti-Blackness in the US technologies and culture.

Building on the insights of André Brock in race and technology studies and Latour’s (1993, 2005) ANT, this new materialist approach explores the intertwined nature of discursive-material and cultural-technological dynamics, particularly through the study of the Renegade dance challenge’s trans-platformization. Brock (2020) advocates for CTDA, a method that centers Blackness without essentializing it, examining how technocultural mediation shapes discursive actions within online platforms and digital interfaces. Like ANT, CTDA examines “how actors shape technologies and themselves in response to the technologies they use” (Brock, 2018, p. 1019). Both perspectives emphasize the necessity of “assembly” to fully grasp these dynamics (Brock, 2020, p. 43).

Latour (2005), cognizant of the indifference to inequalities critique in ANT, stresses that “hierarchies, asymmetries, and inequalities” (p. 63) are processual (p. 64). This focus on processes allows us to view the construction of (racist) ignorance as an affordance of trans-platformization, manifested through the movement, displacement, transformation, and translation of elements across platforms (Latour, 2005, pp. 64–65). Furthermore, Latour (2005) notes that social ties can reveal “hidden” social forces (p. 5), with their significance becoming apparent only in relation to other ties (p. 32). Brock’s (2020) concept of “weak tie racism” plays a crucial role in this process. Through the process of trans-platformization “weak tie racism” (Brock, 2020) not only perpetuates the systemic erasure of Blackness, as exemplified in the case of the Renegade dance, but does so through innovative and accelerating modes that I discuss later in this article.

According to Brock (2020), “weak tie racism” can be understood as “machinic racism,”—which is the indirect experience of racism through digital representation and algorithmic amplification on social media rather than through individual acts of racism. It manifests through minimal direct interactions such as likes, shares, and reposts, which, while not inherently racist, contribute to the “reproduction of banal social signals” (Brock, 2020, p. 157). This process creates an atmosphere of “social death” experienced secondhand by Black users (Brock, 2020, p. 158). For instance, in Jalaiah Harmon’s dance appropriation, the viral spread of content completely removed its original creator as though she had never existed.

A closer examination of “weak tie racism” (Brock, 2020) and the development of nuanced awareness are essential steps toward mitigating the erasure of Blackness. Latour’s (2005) ANT helps here as “the theory of action” (p. 217), explaining how mediators/actors make other mediators/actors do things. This understanding of action and influence can be further detailed by incorporating Brock’s concept of Black kairos. Through his analysis of Black Twitter, Brock (2020) reveals how the platform utilizes “Black discursive identity and intentionality” to create an emotional space focused on catharsis and creativity (p. 214). Brock defines Black kairos as a dynamic interplay of “racial performance, discursive invention, and timely engagement within a cultural context” (Brock, 2020, p. 218), which is crucial for understanding the mobilization of Black Twitter’s collective outrage over Jalaiah Harmon’s exclusion from the NBA All-Star Weekend. This pivotal incident, marked by the appropriation of her Renegade dance by TikTok influencers who profited from her creativity, underscores the power of Black kairos in confronting cultural injustices.

This section has laid the groundwork for a new materialist framework that integrates posthumanist with the race and technology perspectives, emphasizing the significant role that nonhuman elements play alongside humans in social change. By incorporating insights from Brock and Latour, it addressed how digital platforms often subtly embed racial. The following section discusses trans-platformization, a concept derived from the new materialist framework to analyze Jalaiah Harmon’s Renegade dance.

TikTok and Trans-Platformization

The scholarly literature on TikTok continues to expand, addressing a wide array of topics ranging from fast politics (Pérez Rastrilla et al., 2023) to social movements (Lee & Abidin, 2023) to creativity (Kaye et al., 2022) to algorithm awareness (Siles et al., 2022) to platformization from China (Lin & de Kloet, 2023) and beyond. Despite this extensive coverage, relatively few studies (Davis, 2022; Peterson-Salahuddin, 2022; Turner & Hui, 2023) have focused on how systemic racism is manifested and perpetuated through TikTok, highlighting a significant gap in the study of the platform’s role in exacerbating racial disparities. This article suggests that TikTok accelerated racist ignorance through the process of trans-platformization, which erased the cultural and contextual roots along with the Black creators such as Jalaiah Harmon.

The role of platforms is important here. Through the lens of “platform capitalism” (Srnicek, 2017), platformization is a process of optimization of cultural production (Morris, 2020) for capitalistic profits. Platforms are manifested through a “centralized, proprietary mode” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018, p. 4279) of content delivery and consumption. These processes are shaped by “algorithmic logic” (Gillespie, 2014, p. 192), where users engage in a “visibility game” (Cotter, 2019) to become “algorithmically recognizable” (Gillespie, 2017, p. 64). Yet, this “pursuit of visibility” (Bucher, 2012) is hardly equitable for non-White users due to algorithmic oppression (Noble, 2018). The inequitable representation [on platforms] and platformed racism (Matamoros-Fernández, 2017) influence not only our daily lives but also the ways in which interactions and exchanges take place between and within these platforms. These processes form new ignorant states of awareness, which trans-platformization brings into focus.

Trans-platformization reflects Karen Barad’s (2007) concept of intra-action and Stacey Alaimo’s (2008) trans-corporeality, emphasizing the entangled and co-constitutive forces of material, discursive, technological, and cultural phenomena. Drawing from ANT (Latour, 10993. 2005), the concept incorporates a hyphenation. “Between the two elements in its name,” a hyphen suggests that actors and networks are interchangeable, potentially elevating a single part of the network above the whole upon close examination (Betlemidze & DeLuca, 2021). In trans-platformization, this process of transitioning across platforms may become interchangeable with the platform itself, complicating our understanding of agency and influence within digital environments. It aligns with CTDA (Brock, 2020), which “interrogates culture-as-technology and culture-of-technology, examining information technologies alongside discourses about them” (p. 8). Contrary to Sarah Florini’s (2019) characterization of multimedia transplatform networks as “flexible, multilayered spaces” (p. 29) for negotiating racial discourses, I argue that trans-platformization—with the hyphen emphasizing its processual nature—illustrates the erasure of original creators of color and the obscuring of the origins of digital content.

Method

This study employed multimodal qualitative and digital methods (Rogers, 2013), CTDA (Brock, 2018, 2020), and ANT (Latour, 1993, 2005) to analyze how nonhuman actors within the Whiteness-centered infrastructure of information and communication technologies influence social change through historical, cultural, economic, and material factors. The primary artifact was the original Renegade dance created by Jalaiah Harmon, with secondary artifacts comprising videos, media articles, and social media posts related to the dance’s rise and spread as a viral TikTok trend. Artifacts were selected using keywords such as “original Renegade dance,” “Renegade dance challenge,” and “Renegade Jalaiah Harmon.” The analysis focused on content published between February 2020 and September 2022, when the Renegade dance was most actively discussed online.

To investigate the interplay between artifacts, users, and practices, I combined insights from CTDA and ANT and conducted a multimodal analysis. This involved examining social media posts, media coverage, docuseries, YouTube videos, and TikTok interface features by engaging with Renegade dance videos through viewing, creating, and interacting. This approach allowed me to identify three key dynamics of trans-platformization that TikTok ignited: (1) playful memetics, (2) virality mechanisms, and (3) joyful oblivion. Guided by ANT, I traced significant “nodal points” (Hagen, 2022) in the dance’s trans-platformization process, revealing how these points perpetuated exclusionary ignorance while also creating opportunities for breakthrough via Black kairos (Brock, 2020).

Introduction to Jalaiah

The trailer of the docuseries “I am Jalaiah” (Togethxr, 2021) begins with a young White woman dancing, featured in a portrait video at the center of the screen, flanked by similar videos of a young Black woman and a Black man in the next second accompanied by the clicking sound. A female voiceover announces, “The biggest dance trend on the internet right now is called the Renegade” (Togethxr, 2021, 00-04). The four-part docuseries about Jalaiah Harmon premiered on October 13, 2021, on Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube (Rosenblatt, 2021). It showcases multiple videos of people dancing, highlighting Jalaiah at the center. The trailer (Togethxr, 2021) also features soundbites from interviews:

“Not only did you take her work without giving her credit, but you also watered it down, so it’s not even good. I think Jalaiah is a prime example of how young Black creators do not receive the credit they deserve,” stated one of the featured interviewees.

Toward the end of the trailer, the camera circles Jalaiah, capturing her serious expression before the text “I am Jalaiah” appears in a yellow girly font.

Few knew her story for 6 months after creating the dance and before The New York Times profile “The Original Renegade” (Lorenz, 2020). As Taylor Lorenz noted, despite her efforts to promote her creation, she faced ridicule. Only after Lorenz published a profile about Jalaiah did her name begin to gain significant online and offline recognition.

By the time the docuseries premiered, Jalaiah had already become “a household name” (Rosenblatt, 2021, para. 3). She had already appeared at the NBA All-Star weekend celebration, on The Ellen Show, in Teen Vogue, Seventeen, and Atlantic, as well as in the Netflix show Explained (Dance Crazes, Season 3, Episode 11). Despite her widespread recognition, these stories, articles, segments, and videos rarely centered on and celebrated her with the nuance that “I am Jalaiah” provides. Even when Jalaiah Harmon received recognition, the conversation overlooked the systemic nature of racist ignorance and the history of cultural appropriation. This superficial recognition contributed to the “Jalaiah effect”—the transient spotlight on one Black creator while systematically sidelining others. The analysis section reveals how the trans-platformization of the Renegade dance perpetuated this ignorance, yet Jalaiah’s moment of breakthrough, rooted in Black kairos (Brock, 2020), exemplifies the “Jalaiah effect.”

Analysis Part I: Trans-Platformization of Renegade Dance

One of the most recurring videos for keywords “original Renegade dance” is a duet of 14-year-old Jalaiah Harmon with her 12-year-old online friend, Kaliyah Davis (Figure 1). This 20-s Instagram video is set to the chorus of the song “Lottery” by Atlanta rapper K Camp. Jalaiah, as she shared in various interviews, created a dance using popular moves such as the woah, the wave, and the dab. Soon after having created the dance in September 2019, Jalaiah recorded a duet video with Kaliyah on the Funimate app, where she had over 1,700 followers. Jalaiah later re-posted this Fanimate dance duet to her Instagram account of 20,000 followers (Lorenz, 2020). At the time, Instagram had not yet introduced reels or duet features.

Figure 1.

The original video from Jalaiah Harmon’s Instagram account is no longer available, but it has been widely shared and remedied across various accounts and platforms.

The trans-platformization of the Renegade dance reached its peak on and through TikTok. Playful memetics fueled a surge in user-generated videos, while TikTok’s virality machine—an algorithmically fine-tuned technocultural assemblage—propelled the dance into a pop culture phenomenon. The contextless spread of the dance thrived on the joyful oblivion of users, who enthusiastically participated without reflecting on its origins or implications. It began when @global.jones posted a slightly simplified version of the dance on TikTok in October 2019. Its popularity soared as rising TikTok influencers Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae replicated it with further simplified and sexualized modifications, such as undulations of the hips, accentuations of the chest, and pouting of the lips, without crediting the original creator.

One key feature driving TikTok’s playful memetics is the “Use This Sound” option, which Zulli and Zulli (2022) describe as encouraging “imitation and replication” (p. 1880). During the Renegade dance challenge, users saw crawling text with the song’s name and a static ♫ (U + 266B) inviting them to click. This led to a page displaying the song’s video thumbnail and a list of videos using the sound, typically spotlighting the most popular. This setup amplified existing trends, limiting the visibility of Jalaiah’s videos explaining her authorship of the dance. A bright TikTok pink (Hex: #ff0050) button with a camera icon urged users to “Use this sound,” driving participation fueled by the fear of missing out (FOMO) and the desire for cultural relevance, which intensified the memetic spread of Renegade dance videos (Zulli & Zulli, 2022).

The user-friendly interface for video creation on TikTok has significantly enhanced playful memetics. The platform offers intuitive features like timers, recording pauses, and a variety of filters, stickers, and effects. These tools, alongside the quick 15-s format of TikTok’s Renegade dance challenge, streamline content creation and sharing. With just three taps, users can record, edit, and post their videos, fostering a playful proliferation of trends (Cervi & Divon, 2023). TikTok’s innovative features encourage playful liveliness through imitative videos, creating a sense of “(co)presence at a distance” and shared experiences (Lupinacci, 2021, p. 287). The duet feature, prominent in the video-sharing options, amplifies this liveliness within the Renegade dance memetics. This feature encouraged replication of already viral Renegade dance content, allowing users synchronicity and co-presence via side-by-side performance with TikTok’s celebrities, such as Charli D’Amelio (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

A screenshot shows a TikTok creator using the app’s duet feature to create a side-by-side video of the Renegade dance with Charli D’Amelio.

The more the trend blew up, the more people were drawn to join its virality machine, an algorithmically fine-tuned technocultural assemblage. Under the guise of participatory culture (Burgess, 2014), TikTok’s personalization algorithms for the “For You” page (Chu et al., 2024), coupled with intimate settings like bedrooms and bathrooms and the vertical orientation of videos emphasizing the face, hands, arms, chest, hips, and butt, created a sense of intimacy and authenticity. This appeal compelled users to participate—creating content or engaging in affective scrolling—via algorithmic automation (Anikina, 2021) without critical self-encounter (Pastel, 2024, p. 12) and self-reflexivity.

TikTok’s “For You” page algorithm is a crucial part of its virality machine, but it is not the only factor at play. As Anikina (2021) notes, this algorithm operates as a surveillance tool disguised as a “personalization service,” keeping users in a sort of hypnotic state where their attention is focused on the videos curated for them (p. 118). Although TikTok lacked an auto-scroll feature at the time, users’ thumb-eyeball automated movement became the cog in the human–machine assemblage of virality.

Studies (Boffone, 2022; Ile, 2022) reveal TikTok suppresses non-White creators, deeming non-White content as interruptions. Therefore, scrolling on the platform transforms from a mere habit into an “ideology in action” (Chun, 2016, p. 7), which often traps users in “filter bubbles” (Mirrlees, 2019, p. 37) that favor Whiteness. This virality machine fosters “affective attachments” compelling users to follow trends in the hope of gaining some of the spotlight for themselves (Cervi & Divon, 2023, p. 4).

The Renegade dance challenge gained immense popularity on TikTok, leading to its virality machine expanding to other platforms, while the creator’s identity remained in joyful oblivion. The dance was ubiquitous, with everyone participating “except for the girl [Jalaiah Harmon] who invented it” (Jennings, 2020, para 2). Initially appearing on Funimate and later on Instagram, the dance lost its contextual and cultural roots as it transitioned to TikTok, and then returned to Instagram, along with YouTube through both tutorials and compilation videos, reaching Twitter threads and numerous other platforms.

Joyful oblivion is a seemingly benign form of ignorance that is co-constitutively created with playful memetics and the virality machine discussed earlier in this section. The word “joyful” comes from TikTok’s mission statement to “bring joy.” The sense of joyful oblivion is intensified further in the remix and rip culture of TikTok. The Renegade dance challenge exemplified how the platform made it “advantageous for users to merely remix popular videos” (Zulli & Zulli, 2022, p. 1881) via duet and the “Use this sound” features rather than invent their own dances.

White creators benefiting from Jalaiah’s dance through the joyful oblivion of remix culture is further sharpened by the historical connotations. According to Abigail De Kosnik (2019), “Black men and queer women invented digital remix culture” (p. 156). She notes that the history of digital sampling in the 1980s and 1990s led to the rise of remix culture in rap and hip-hop. Yet, those who pioneered these innovations were often denied profits due to legal decisions. De Kosnik (2019) asks whether a White-dominated genre would be free from the “chilling burden” of exorbitant licensing fees if it popularized digital remix (p. 159). Given the lack of accountability surrounding D’Amelio and her followers’ appropriation of Jalaiah’s dance, one can infer an answer to De Kosnik’s (2019) question.

The trans-platformization of ignorance is evident in the appropriation of Black creators’ dances on TikTok, originating from platforms like Thriller and Dubsmash (Lorenz, 2020). Trevor Boffone (2021), in his book Renegades: Digital Dance Culture from Dubsmash to TikTok, describes TikTok as a predominantly White space (p. 20). This appropriation is compounded by “rip-off and remix techniques” (Delfanti & Phan, 2024, p. 730). While remix culture extends beyond TikTok and plays a crucial role in corporate cultural production (Delfanti & Phan, 2024, p. 721), TikTok’s trans-platformization has intensified the normalization of cultural appropriation and its social justice implications as evidenced by the “Jalaiah effect” which are not unique to Jalaiah Harmon.

An important aspect of joyful oblivion in cultural appropriation under remix culture is the loss of cultural and racial context. Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández (2020) highlights that decontextualization is a key feature of remix culture and meme creation. She cites Phillips and Milner (2017), stating that on the internet, “decontextualization isn’t a bug, it’s a feature” (p. 124). Building on Nakamura (2014), Matamoros-Fernández (2017) argues that “platforms’ promotion of share-ability encourages users to circulate racist visual content in a decontextualized fashion” (p. 934). While the Renegade dance may not seem explicitly racist, it proves so upon closer cultural examination. Cienna Davis describes this phenomenon as a “discreet yet insidious form of digital blackface minstrelsy that troubles the contours of Gen Z’s supposed racial progressivism” (Davis, 2022, p. 30).

At first glance, copyrighting intellectual property rights might seem like a guardrail against the spread of digital Blackface, such as the Renegade dance. However, registering copyright for short dances is nearly impossible, and historically, copyrighting dance has been “a White choreographer’s endeavor” (Aldape Muñoz, 2024, p. 231). In a roundtable on TikTok’s short-form screendance, Crystal Abidin (Harlig et al., 2021) argues that the platform’s remix culture puts ownership and authorship in tension with spreadability (p. 191). Ile (2022), citing Morris (2022), refines this by stating that copyrighting choreography can be counterproductive on TikTok, as value lies not in the dance itself but in “exposure and possibilities” of becoming a recognizable online personality (Ile, 2022, p. 69). This may not signify Roland Barthes’ “death of the author,” as Delfanti and Phan (2024, p. 733) point out, but rather that remix culture and its decontextualization manifest joyful oblivion as a form of racist ignorance exacerbated by trans-platformization.

Analysis Part II: Ignorance

One of the biggest TikTok dramas of 2020 involved the Renegade dance (Shadijanova, 2020), which did not receive proper credit for about 6 months, and many continued to ignore the inequity at the heart of the matter. A highly criticized example of this was the NBA’s decision to exclude Jalaiah Harmon from the initial line-up of TikTok performers during its All-Star weekend celebrations in Chicago, February 14 to 16, 2020 (Madu, 2020). Instead, the league invited White TikTok influencers Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae, whose popularity surged as the Renegade dance challenge peaked. Why was she excluded?

YouTuber sister spill’s (2020) video “The Original Renegade—Did Charli Steal this TikTok Dance?” helps explain how the original dance creator was ignored for months and continued to be dismissed even after the word got out in mainstream media. Although she incorporates mixed comments regarding Jalaiah—with some supportive and others dismissive—the video concludes with a troubling justification for this ignorance. She poses a question to her viewers about the significance of dance credit, referencing a quote from prominent TikToker Max Dressler: “Dance creds is the most childish sh*ever” (sister spill, 2020, 2:22). This term “childish” is particularly noteworthy given that Jalaiah was only 14 at the time. This term “childish” is significant because Jalaiah Harmon, during the scandal, was only 14 years old. Max Dressler’s comment underscores one of the many factors contributing to the striking gap in the representation of Black girls online (Taylor & Abidin, 2024). In addition, sister spill features a clip of “some TikTok boys” discussing the Charli-Jalaiah incident casually while eating at a fast-food restaurant, further emphasizing the trivialization of the issue:

she’ll [Jalaiah Harmon] be relevant for a couple of days and then fall off. . . if you made the dance, you should be happy that they are even doing it. . . it wouldn’t have gotten as big as it was if Charli and Addison did not do it. . . and they did not know it was her dance. . . no one knew it was her dance. . . I did not know it. (sister spill, 2020, 2:35–2:59)

Downplaying the importance of the original invention, these individuals engage with the virality machine by idolizing the playful memetics of the White influencers while justifying their ignorance through the joyful oblivion of the dance’s origins. Boffone (Harlig et al., 2021) has observed a similar trend where White TikTokers appropriate dances, such as the Renegade dance. They are fully aware of the implications but downplay the appropriation by stating, “We’re just having fun” (Harlig et al., 2021, p. 203). According to Davis (2022), the popularity of dance challenges such as the Renegade attests to the fact that the “mimicry of Black cultural expression remains a viable rite of passage for white youth” (p. 33). As Brock (2020, p. 46) notes, digital content is often assumed to belong to Whiteness. Aldape Muñoz (2024) points to the entrenched colonial thinking and the legacies of Black people’s enslavement in the United States, which helped assumption about Jalaiah’s dance being “a common good without an owner” (Aldape Muñoz, 2024, p. 237).

Charlie D’Amelio became the face of the Renegade dance challenge through her uncredited performance, fitting the technocultural identity of White Internet users (Brock, 2020) like Max Dressler and “some TikTok boys” highlighted by sister spill (2020). Latour (1993) argues that an actant gains prominence within a network by defining associations, which are “always a misunderstanding” (p. 169). This “misunderstanding of association” (Latour, 1993) can be identified as “weak tie racism,” operating without a clear author, perpetuating White techno-capitalist patriarchal norms through machinic and infrastructural processes (Brock, 2020). In the case of the Renegade dance challenge, trans-platformization intensified “weak tie racism” through playful memetics, the virality machine, and joyful oblivion, allowing D’Amelio to overshadow the original Black creator, Jalaiah Harmon.

Fight Against Deliberate Ignorance and Black Kairos

The Black Twitter community erupted in outrage when videos (Figure 3) surfaced of Addison Rae teaching the Renegade dance to Chicago Bulls cheerleaders during the NBA All-Star weekend on February 14, 2020. Memes and comments criticizing the NBA’s decision quickly spread, questioning why Jalaiah Harmon, the original creator of the Renegade dance, was not given the opportunity. Memes such as “No” and Hell No” were emblematic of Black “signifyin’” (Brock, 2020) featuring Black people and comments such as the ones below (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

This screenshot shows one of the numerous Twitter posts commenting on and sharing Addison Rae’s video teaching the Renegade dance to the Chicago Bulls cheerleaders during the NBA All-Star weekend on February 14, 2020.

Comments to this post included the following:

“Look at her acting like she didnt steal this smh” (Terry, 2020)

“THE DAB, I’m screaming” (911@NamasteBitchies, 2020)

“NBA should be ashamed of themselves” (Auntie @DutchessCharm, 2020)

“Like fr @NBA? This is absolutely an opportunity that should have went to Jalaiah Harmon the creator of the Renegade” (۞Whole Ass Capybara۞ @ThatsSoTunde, 2020)

On that same day, the rapper from Atlanta, K Camp (2020, February 14), tweeted a video thanking Jalaiah and her friend for making his song “the BIGGEST song in the world” with a video post on Twitter. Indeed, his song was the most popular on the app due to the Renegade dance challenge. Drawing on ANT (Latour, 1993, 2005), I suggest that K Camp’s video Tweet (Figure 4) became a nodal point (Hagen, 2022) with its almost instantaneous widespread retweets and remediations across platforms, drawing more attention to the NBA’s omission of Jalaiah during the event. For example, “Nneka’s Fashion Fair Makeup Compact” (2020) retweeted K Camp’s video, pointedly addressing the NBA with the suggestion that Jalaiah should have been the one teaching the cheerleaders: ““Hey @NBA Look . . . this is who should have been teaching your cheerleaders ✌” with hashtags #renegadechallenge #NBA #BlackGirlMagic.” Tweets like this kept pouring in.

Figure 4.

This screenshot shows a Twitter user, Ugg Lee, PhD @_iGrizz (2020), sharing K Camp’s video post from February 14, 2020, where he thanked Jalaiah and her friend for making his song “the biggest song in the world.”

The collective mobilization around Jalaiah on Black Twitter is a powerful example of callout culture, specifically what Brock (2020) terms “Black Kairos”—a dynamic, immediate engagement with the present moment, amplified by the interconnected nature of digital platforms. Black Kairos is characterized by its ongoing, real-time interaction with events and the “immediacy afforded to Black discourse by network protocols, communal structures, and the instantaneity and archival capacities of information networks” (Brock, 2020, p. 219). The intensity of Black Kairos in the case of Jalaiah Harmon’s due credit was heightened by its timeliness and the fact that it happened during Black History Month. For instance, Twitter user @dizzzykicks (2020) posted the original video of Jalaiah and her friend on Instagram, urging others: “For black history month imma need all Tik Tok influencers to do one of those duet/side by side view of the #renegadechallenge with the ORIGINAL vid/creator please and thank you ☺” (2020) (Figure 5). This request exemplifies how Black Kairos fosters awareness and active participation in reclaiming cultural contributions.

Figure 5.

A screenshot of a tweet showcases the first dance video from Jalaiah’s Instagram account, featuring Jalaiah and her friend performing the original Renegade dance. The post invites TikTok influencers to join a duet or side-by-side video for the #RenegadeChallenge, honoring the original creator for Black History Month.

Brock effectively clarifies that Black Kairos is not to be mistaken for “mob mentality” because it “is often a critique of systemic inequality rather than an attack against specific, individualistic transgressions” (p. 220). The magnitude of the trans-platformizing uproar over Jalaiah’s initial exclusion was so profound that event organizers had to respond to the backlash. In a last-minute decision prompted by the massive criticism on Twitter, they invited Jalaiah, positioning her to participate in the event alongside TikTok celebrities. This move seemed to downplay the earlier exclusion, presenting a semblance of normalcy. The sequence of events highlights the influential role of trans-platformizing Black postpresent and Black Kairos (Brock, 2020), compelling organizers to rectify the perceived injustice by including Jalaiah.

Analysis Part III: Breaking Through Ignorance

On February 16, 2020, on the last day of the NBA all-star weekend event, just 2 days after the Black Twitter online movement (Madu, 2020), the NBA posted a video (2020) of Jalaiah performing Renegade at Chicago’s United Center. The event, broadcast widely on television, significantly extended Jalaiah’s visibility beyond the confines of digital platforms. The video captures a heartwarming moment where basketball stars, cheerleaders, and the Chicago Bulls mascot join Jalaiah on the court, all while the crowd cheers enthusiastically to the song that had gone viral due to the Renegade challenge. The video quickly resonated across social media, garnering 29,000 retweets, further amplifying Jalaiah’s recognition on a national scale. One particularly notable retweet came from Michelle Obama (2020), who tweeted, “Jalaiah, you crushed it—love seeing your talent shine!”. It was retweeted 32,000 times (Figure 6). So, this shout-out from the former first lady became a crucial nodal point (Hagen, 2022) of hope for amplifying the visibility of Black creators not just in the United States but also globally.

Figure 6.

A screenshot captures Michelle Obama’s congratulatory retweet of the NBA’s video showcasing Jalaiah performing the original Renegade dance on the final day of the NBA All-Star Weekend event on February 16, 2020.

Another pivotal instance of Black kairos’s (Brock, 2020) positive culminations occurred on the same day when TikTok influencers Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae posted a video featuring Jalaiah and the Renegade dance (Figure 7). Charli’s caption, which included Jalaiah Harmon’s TikTok handle, read: “guys i would like to introduce you to @_.xoxlaii i am so happy that she was able to teach me the original choreography that she made she is the best!” (Charli D’Amelio, 2020). This video sparked massive engagement, transcending TikTok to permeate other social media platforms, news outlets, and blogs. Yet, this engagement mainly centered around quick self-congratulatory acknowledgment of Jalaiah Harmon, characteristic of the “Jalaiah effect”—a fleeting recognition of one Black creator while systemically excluding others. A notable example of similar self-congratulatory acknowledgment of Jalaiah was her guest appearance on The Ellen Show, where Ellen gifted Harmon $5,000. Mainstream media and White influencers, by overlooking the historical context of cultural appropriation in the United States, condition the “Jalaiah effect,” which highlights the fleeting recognition of one Black creator while perpetuating a broader pattern of deliberate ignorance for others on a massive scale.

Figure 7.

This screenshot shows Charli D’Amelio’s TikTok video featuring Jalaiah Harmon dancing the Renegade alongside another influencer, Addison Rae, in which D’Amelio introduced Jalaiah’s TikTok handle and expressed gratitude and praise for her.

The “Jalaiah Effect” is also evident in the content of YouTubers like MitchellReacts, who produced five videos about Jalaiah Harmon and the Renegade dance but failed to address cultural appropriation and digital Blackface. He initially expressed disdain for Charli, stating, “No, Charli! . . . We need to ban Charli,” but later acknowledged his stance, saying he would be upset if he didn’t receive credit for his popular creation (MitchellReacts, 2020). Rebecah (2020) critiqued D’Amelio’s post, questioning whether it genuinely corrected past wrongs and how different Jalaiah’s trajectory might have been with earlier recognition. True to the Jalaiah effect,” both YouTubers bypass the racist ignorance exacerbated by trans-platformization.

Influencers and platforms like the NBA, Michelle Obama, and prominent social media figures have expanded Jalaiah Harmon’s network as an artist. They amplified her story through “duplication, dislocation, and translation” (Latour, 2005, p. 217). As Latour (2005) states, “The more attachments it [actor/mediator/network] has, the more it exists” and becomes more “real” (p. 217). However, in the case of Jalaiah Harmon, this reality remains fragile, shaped by systemic biases that marginalize Black creators. The “Jalaiah effect” reveals the paradox of Black resistance against the White-centric, techno-capitalist patriarchy, where fleeting recognition can obscure ongoing struggles for equity and representation.

Conclusion

This study examined the trans-platformization of the Renegade dance and its implications for racial disparities in the United States. Part one of the analysis detailed this process through the co-constitutive dynamics of playful memetics, the virality machine, and joyful oblivion. It demonstrated how trans-platformization affords ignorance but also offers opportunities to temporarily disrupt it through the actor-networks (Latour, 1993) and nodal points (Hagen, 2022) in the Black Kairos (Brock, 2020). Using a new materialist feminist framework alongside ANT (Latour, 1993) and Brock’s (2018, 2020) CTDA, the study explored how trans-platformization simultaneously intensifies and obscures racial inequities across social media platforms and traditional media coverage.

This article introduced the “Jalaiah effect,” a phenomenon emerging from the trans-platformization of the TikTok Renegade trend. This effect illustrates the deceptive nature of progress in addressing racial inequities. It shows how the brief and superficial recognition of Blackness in a single instance can mask the ongoing systemic marginalization of millions of other Black creators, who continue to be largely ignored and overlooked within White-centered cultures and technologies.

Despite Jalaiah Harmon being adequately credited and making it to the Top Creators 2022 Forbes list of 49 creators, she ranked at number 40. Her earnings of 3.5 million pale in comparison to the 17.5 million earned by Charlie D’Amelio, who ranked at number 2, and Addison Rae’s 8.5 million, who ranked at number 8 on the list (Forbes, 2022). The Renegade scandal did not seem to affect their net worth or opportunities. While D’Amelio and Rae gained fame through Jalaiah’s dance and leveraged it into lucrative opportunities (Chan, 2021), Jalaiah’s visibility appears to have faded, as indicated by her absence from the 2023 list. As of December 2024, she has 3.3 million TikTok followers, 664K on Instagram, and 7.67K YouTube subscribers, far less than D’Amelio. This disparity underscores the “Jalaiah effect”—persistent systemic racial issues in social media, despite temporary recognition of one Black creator and advancements in technology.

A notable example of the illusion of progress is TikTok’s introduction of a “dance credit” (DC) feature in 2022. This feature was intended to address the issues raised by the #BlackTikTokStrike in the summer of 2021. However, the ongoing erasure of Black creators remains evident in viral dance trends, such as Paige White’s “Pretty Girls [Walk Like This]” (Dodini, 2023) and Jordyn Williams’s “No Love” (Mendez, 2023). These dances were largely uncredited and received fewer views compared to imitation videos created by White creators. Even when credit is given, as Pamela Krayenbuhl noted, “the structures remain the same” (Fuhrer, 2023, para. 21). This shows that technological solutions, like adding user credit functions, cannot resolve deeply ingrained ignorance.

One limitation of this study is its primary focus on the US context and how trans-platformization affords ignorance. This focus led to an under-examination of a troubling pattern observed during the review of mainstream media and influencer content. Whiteness-centered narratives around the Renegade dance challenge often lack self-awareness and tend to adopt a self-congratulatory tone. This was particularly evident in The Ellen Show (2020) and in Charli D’Amelio’s social media post introducing Jalaiah Harmon. In contrast, content centered around Blackness (Amandabb, 2020; Jouelzy, 2020; Taylor Cassidy, 2021; Tee Noir, 2020) shows a much greater level of self-awareness, reflexivity, and commitment to social justice at both individual and collective levels. Unfortunately, this content was excluded from the study as it exceeded the scope of this article.

Future studies could investigate the dynamics of trans-platformization, particularly regarding (self)reflexivity within technocultures outside of the United States. There is a growing demand for cultural sensitivity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, as highlighted by various scholars and online trend experts (ABC News, 2021; Amandabb, 2020; Brock, 2020; Davis, 2022; Jouelzy, 2020; Steele, 2021; Taylor Cassidy, 2021; Tee Noir, 2020). Further research should examine how these issues manifest across different cases, social media platforms, and diverse technocultural contexts. Exploring the potential of de-whitening (self)reflexivity as a pathway to speculative hope may offer valuable insights into achieving meaningful social change while remaining vigilant for the persistent illusions of progress.