Every generation faces a version of the same question: what do you do with people who hate you out loud? For Foundational Black Americans in 2026, that question has moved from the courthouse steps and the cafeteria counter to the algorithmic feed. The provocateurs have new names — Charleston White, the Hodge Twins, Myron Gaines, a rotating cast of anonymous accounts — but the business model is old. It runs on one thing: our attention. And attention, unlike outrage, is a resource we control.
This is not a call to be silent about anti-Black hostility. It is a call to be strategic about it. Because the internet did not invent racism; it repackaged it. And the single most effective thing many of us can do about the loudest anti-Black voices online is the one thing we almost never do: nothing.
Outrage Is the Product
Every major social platform — YouTube, X, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook — is built on the same underlying machine. That machine measures engagement: likes, comments, shares, watch time, quote posts, reaction videos. It does not measure whether the engagement is loving, confused, or furious. To the algorithm, a two-thousand-word takedown of Charleston White is indistinguishable from a two-thousand-word endorsement. Both are fuel. Both signal to the system that this content deserves more reach.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the publicly stated design of recommender systems. Platforms optimize for time-on-app and interaction rate because their revenue depends on it. Controversial content produces higher interaction rates than calm content. Emotional content produces higher interaction rates than analytical content. Anti-Black content, aimed at a Black audience that will predictably respond, produces some of the highest interaction rates of all. The provocateur is not fighting the algorithm. The provocateur is usingit exactly as designed.
Every Response Is a Boost
Consider what actually happens when a well-known Black creator posts a thirty-minute rebuttal to something Myron Gaines said on a podcast. The rebuttal drives traffic to the clip. The clip's watch time climbs. The algorithm concludes the clip is "engaging." The clip gets recommended to more people — including people who had never heard of Myron Gaines and now will. The rebutter's audience is angry; the rebutted's audience grows.
Multiply that transaction by ten thousand quote-tweets, five hundred stitched TikToks, and a hundred YouTube reaction videos, and you have the actual growth strategy of nearly every online race grifter operating today. They do not have to advertise. They do not have to buy reach. We buy it for them, in the currency they need most: engagement.
Attention Is Currency
The economist Herbert Simon warned in 1971 that "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." He was right, and the market for attention has since become one of the most valuable on earth. Ad rates, sponsorship deals, book advances, podcast tours, speaking fees, merchandise sales — every dollar these figures earn is downstream of eyeballs. When we give them eyeballs, we give them income. When we give them outrage, we give them the specific kind of eyeballs advertisers pay the most for: the loyal, returning, emotionally activated kind.
Refuse to spend that currency and their business shrinks. Not instantly. Not dramatically at first. But over time, the way any business shrinks when its customers stop showing up. The provocateur who cannot provoke is just a person yelling into a room that has emptied out.
Trolls Do Not Want a Debate
There is a persistent fantasy that if we could just present the right facts, cite the right studies, and stay composed enough on camera, we could win the argument. This fantasy assumes that the argument is the point. It usually isn't. Trolling — as a genre — is the deliberate pursuit of an emotional reaction. The troll is not trying to be persuaded. The troll is trying to make you feel something on camera, in a quote-tweet, in a comment section, so that the interaction itself becomes content.
You cannot "win" a debate whose only rule is that you have to keep showing up. And you cannot fact-check someone whose goal was never accuracy in the first place. The only move that changes the game is walking away from the table.
The Modern Klan Mask
The Ku Klux Klan wore hoods for a reason. The hood was not decoration. It was infrastructure. It let a night rider terrorize a Black family on Tuesday and stand next to that same family in the general store on Wednesday without consequence. The mask was social technology: it separated the act from the actor. It made cruelty possible by making accountability impossible.
The internet is the modern mask. A username, a fake profile, a burner account, a VPN, a face-tracking avatar — these are the twenty-first century's white hood. They do the same job. They let a person say things at 11 p.m. on Tuesday that they would never say at their job on Wednesday, at their child's school on Thursday, at their in-laws' house on Sunday. The technology is new. The function is ancient.
Some of these accounts are foreign, run out of engagement farms and influence operations abroad. Others are entirely domestic — neighbors, coworkers, classmates typing from bedrooms three miles away. Their geography barely matters. Their objective is the same: provoke, divide, monetize. And they keep returning to Black online spaces for a simple, unflattering reason: those spaces reliably deliver the emotional reactions that make the mask worth wearing.
A Thought Experiment
Imagine, for a moment, a month in which Black audiences collectively stopped feeding the machine. No reaction videos. No quote-tweets. No long threads. No angry comments under the clip. No group chat forwards. Nothing.
Within a week, watch time on the most notorious anti-Black creators would fall. Within two, the algorithm would start recommending them less. Within a month, sponsors would notice softer numbers. Within a quarter, some of these accounts would be indistinguishable from any other dying channel: still posting, no one listening.
This is not utopian. It is arithmetic. Recommender systems reward interaction. Remove the interaction and the reward disappears. Every marketing team on earth understands this. The only people who seem determined to forget it are the ones being trolled.
In Person Is Different
None of this applies to face-to-face life. If a coworker, a stranger, or a neighbor says something anti-Black to your face, you are not obligated to disengage. You are in a real space, with a real person, governed by real social and legal rules. You get to respond however the situation, your safety, and your judgment allow.
Online is different because online is optional. There is no algorithm forcing you to click the notification. There is no law requiring you to quote-tweet the clip. The provocateur cannot reach you unless you reach back. That asymmetry is the entire point. In person, silence can look like consent. Online, silence is a starvation strategy.
Reclaiming the Attention
Every minute spent arguing with a race grifter is a minute not spent building. Not building a business. Not building a school. Not building a home. Not building a family archive. Not building the kind of institutions that outlast an algorithm change.
Foundational Black Americans built jazz, blues, gospel, rock and roll, hip hop, and house music while the country was actively trying to break us. We built colleges under Jim Crow. We built Greenwood before it was burned and rebuilt it after. We invented, patented, organized, marched, litigated, and legislated our way through conditions that make a comment section look like a joke. The people who built all of that were not spending their evenings quote-tweeting bigots. They were spending their evenings building the next thing.
The generational question is whether we will do the same, or whether we will spend the most connected decade in human history in a comment war with people whose entire business is comment wars.
Disengagement Is Not Surrender
The instinct to answer every insult is understandable. It feels like self-respect. It looks like defense. But strategy and reflex are not the same thing. A boxer who swings at every feint loses the fight. Disengagement, chosen deliberately, is not retreat — it is redirection. It is choosing where your energy actually produces a result.
There is also a longer game here, and it is the sharpest reason to step back. Racism has been broadly regarded as socially unacceptable for two generations now. That is precisely why people hide it. They hide it behind usernames. They hide it behind "just asking questions." They hide it behind irony, performance, and character work. The mask is not decoration; it is protection.
Take away the emotional reaction the mask exists to harvest, and the mask stops paying. Some of these figures will simply fade. Others, deprived of the reward loop that anonymity provides, may drift toward saying openly what they used to say only in costume. That is not a bad outcome. Visible prejudice is easier to name, easier to challenge, easier for institutions and neighbors and employers to judge. It is the hidden version — the one wearing the digital hood — that has always been the harder problem.
The Mask, Removed
The Klan hood worked because the surrounding society agreed, in practice, not to look under it. Our grandparents and great-grandparents spent lifetimes forcing that society to look. The online mask works the same way, and it will come off the same way — not by our shouting at it, but by our refusing to feed it.
Attention is power. It is one of the few forms of power the internet cannot take from us without our cooperation. The most disciplined, strategic, generationally intelligent thing many of us can do with the loudest anti-Black voices in our feeds is deceptively simple. Do not argue with them. Do not stitch them. Do not quote them. Do not react to them. Do not click.
Let the algorithm learn that we are not interested. Let the sponsors learn that the numbers are not there. Let the mask learn that it no longer hides anything worth hiding. And let the builders among us — which is most of us — go back to the work our ancestors would recognize.
The mask only works when we keep looking at it. So stop looking. Then watch what it has to become when it can no longer hide.
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