#BlackFatigue: Linguistic Appropriation, and Anti-Black Rhetoric in Social Media Discourse

The concept of “Black fatigue,” coined by Winters (2020), describes the psychological and physiological exhaustion of Black Americans resulting from systemic racism, a phenomenon empirically validated in scholarship such as Racial Battle Fatigue (Smith, 2004; Smith et al., 2007). This study draws on prior literature on the linguistic appropriation of African American vernacular language (AAVE) and on affordance theory to understand how social media is intentionally being used to change the meaning of “Black fatigue.” We employ a mixed-methods approach, combining topic modeling, network analysis, and qualitative thematic analysis to systematically examine how the term is being co-opted on X (formerly Twitter). We extend existing research on association affordance theory to discuss how semantic association is aided by the hashtag and quote retweet features. Topic modeling identified six distinct patterns, five through which the term has been discursively appropriated, with anti-Black framings overwhelmingly dominating the corpus, and one pattern pushing back on the appropriated usage. Network analysis further reveals that this appropriation circulates predominantly as reactive commentary, driven by a concentrated group of mostly anonymous and White-identified accounts replying to content that systematically depicts Black people in stereotypical and criminalizing contexts, while attracting a broad and diffuse pool of users. We argue that platform features like hashtags and quote tweets enable actors to strategically associate “Black fatigue” with content portraying Black people as socially disruptive thereby changing the original meaning of the term. Implications and limitations are discussed.