The Digital Double Life: When Pro-Black Performance Masks Anti-Black Fetish

This story goes a little NSFW, but stay with me. You know what a burner account is, right? For the uninitiated, it’s that second social media profile people use to keep certain behaviors away from their main page. Celebrities use them to scroll in peace or clap back at critics. Some folks just use them to mess with the algorithm. And some use them to get freaky without the spotlight being put on their main account.

We don’t believe in doxing over here, so the account names will remain anonymous. The only people who would be able to deduce who we’re talking about are my homegirl, anyone else he may have revealed his identity to, and him.

If you happen to come across this in your travels, try thinking about the meat of this piece. The roast comes because you deserve it. But you might really want to do the internal work necessary to get a release from what's plaguing you.

Ok, I'm petty and innuendo is funny. I digress.

The way this story plays out tells you everything about how digital double lives hide behavior and expose the uncomfortable cracks in a person’s identity, their politics, and their relationship to the community. It’s a recurring pattern of hypocrisy that is exhausting to watch unfold time and time again.

The Pro-Black Mask Slips

My homegirl was talking to a man who, on the surface, was everything she was looking for. He was publicly and loudly pro-Black, and that mattered to her. His main page was a curated gallery of all the right things: propping up Black women and condemning any form of bigotry he came across. It was the right performance of solidarity.

He seemed safe. So safe that when he trusted her enough to share his burner, she didn’t think twice. And that’s when the mask started to slip.

At first, the signs were small enough to ignore if you weren’t paying close attention. The profile picture on the burner was of a wolf. The implication of “alphas” doesn’t need much explanation. Those kinds tend to be white incels, so it was overlooked. He reposted an NSFW post from a white woman, which is not necessarily a red flag. Like who you like. But it was this post that led to us looking a bit deeper.

The hashtags told the story of a crimson flag waving in broad daylight. Attached to his posts were tags like #BBC, #BlackCock, #BlackBull. The deeper she looked, the worse it got. Of the dozens of people he interacted with on a regular basis, almost none were Black women. It was just her, one other Black woman, and a Latina in a sea of white women.

His excuse was the same tired line men have used for generations: “Black women don’t really interact with my content.” It was the digital version of “Black girls never liked me in high school.” With 2,000 followers while only following 500, he was clearly selective and intentional with who he gave his energy. Those hashtags were never meant to draw in Black women. They were magnets for a white gaze with a mandingo fetish.

A Fractured Self: The Psychology of the Digital Double Life

To exist while Black is to be in a constant state of negotiation with a world built on anti-Blackness. Many of us learn to code-switch, adapting our speech and behavior to navigate different social contexts as a means of survival. That’s not what this was.

What this man did was a perversion of that reality. He didn’t use a mask for survival. He used it for deception. His main account wasn’t a defense mechanism. It was a coward’s cloak, a space he deliberately constructed to escape the integrity demanded by his public “pro-Black” performance. Instead of living up to the politics he preached, he created an anonymous playground to indulge the very ideologies he claimed to oppose.

This is a classic case of the online disinhibition effect, where anonymity lowers the moral barriers that govern decent behavior. He leaned on dissociative anonymity to build a firewall in his mind, giving himself an excuse to believe his private actions had no connection to his public self. This wasn’t a complex psychological burden. It was a calculated strategy of hypocrisy. The burner became a tool for identity segmentation, a deliberate fracturing of the self designed to indulge in anti-Blackness without guilt.

For someone performing activism, this moral failure is grotesque. Real activists grapple with the online authenticity paradox—the tension between being authentic and the risks of public life. He didn’t grapple with it. He abandoned it. His pro-Black persona wasn’t held to a high standard. It was a hollow performance he refused to back up with private integrity. He built an ideological bunker, not as a safe space, but as a sewer where his anti-Black desires could fester without consequence.

From Liberation to Libido: The Betrayal of Self-Fetishization

Let’s be clear about what those hashtags represent. Racial self-fetishization is not a harmless sexual preference. It is rooted in a violent history of white supremacist ideology. To participate in it is to internalize and enact the very stereotypes that Black liberation seeks to dismantle. It is self-objectification that reaffirms the colonial gaze, turning the Black body into a commodity.

This history isn’t just academic. It is the foundation of modern racism. Colonizers built dehumanizing narratives of Black sexual excess to justify conquest. Black men were cast as the Black Buck, animalistic and predatory, especially toward white women. That stereotype was used to rationalize lynching and other violence. Today, the pornography industry keeps it alive. “BBC” is its most direct modern descendant, reducing Black men to a fetishized body part.

When a Black man chooses to perform this stereotype, that is internalized racism in action. It may not even be conscious, but it is an attempt to gain value in a system structured by white supremacy. It is an attempt at power through a stereotype designed to render you powerless. This stands in absolute opposition to Black liberation, which is built on self-love and rejection of the white gaze.

By choosing the “BBC” trope, this man wasn’t dismantling the master’s house. He was redecorating it, settling into the familiar confines of his own objectification.

The Unholy Alliance: The Black Manosphere and Misogynoir

The absence of Black women on his burner puts the wolf avatar in a different light. It reeks of the Black Manosphere, a space that emerges from real racial grievance but twists it into intracommunal conflict. It borrows from the misogyny of the broader manosphere and directs it specifically at Black women.

In these spaces, Black women are scapegoated for systemic issues. This rhetoric is not harmless. It contributes to a culture that devalues and endangers Black women, feeding the crisis of Black femicide. By engaging in this culture, Black men become complicit in patriarchal violence that fractures the community.

His curated following, excluding Black women almost entirely, reflected this ideology in practice. It was a textbook move from a playbook that frames Black women as adversaries rather than partners in liberation. That is not preference. That is politics.

The Collapse: When Accountability Becomes a Block Button

So what happened when my homegirl gently called him in on the disparity? His reaction told the whole story. He didn’t get defensive directly, but the next day he went into overcorrection mode, liking every picture she ever posted that showed skin. She told him she wasn’t a NSFW page, but he missed the point entirely. Then he blocked her.

Afterward, he posted through it on his burner. First came the defiant line: “That’s the best part about my page!!! It’s MY page!” A day later, he doubled down: “I will not argue and or break my peace to prove my point to someone that I can permanently delete out my life with a push of a button.”

This is the final move in the playbook. A man who performs pro-Blackness in public collapses into fetish and misogynoir in private, and when called out, he calls his refusal to be accountable “protecting his peace.”

This is more than one messy interaction. The harm runs deep. It fractures the self, forcing an individual to live a lie. It harms the community by spreading ideologies that devalue Black women. And it harms the struggle by making activism look like a hollow performance.

Conclusion

This behavior represents betrayal, rejecting the work of building a liberated identity in favor of performing the oppressor’s fantasy.

Maybe his behavior is innocent in intention, but impact is always more important. The account where he preaches the sentiments of Pro-Blackness? He has about 500 followers. The account where he's putting himself on display using racial descriptors and white-coded words to describe his member? 2000.

Here’s the ultimate truth: the private self and the public self are not two different countries. Pro-Blackness isn’t a cloak you can put on for your main account while you indulge in anti-Black fantasies on your burner. If the person you are in private still clings to the logic of white supremacy, then the public persona was never pro-Black to begin with.

What’s Your Take?

This is the kind of cultural autopsy we specialize in at Black Culture Geekz. We don’t just state the facts; we explore the flawed logic behind the headlines.

• Have you ever encountered someone whose “pro-Black” public persona was a mask for something else entirely?
• Where do you draw the line between private behavior and public hypocrisy, especially when it comes to activism?
• Can someone truly be “pro-Black” if they participate in ideologies that fetishize and objectify Black people?

Let us know your unfiltered thoughts in the comments. We read everything.

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