BuzzFeed has apologized for a video it published last week that featured black people asking questions that seemed to generalize the black experience.
“We’ve heard your concerns about last week’s video. We made a mistake, and want to get better at earning the trust of our black audience,” the site tweeted Monday.
The video, titled “27 Questions Black People Have For Black People,” was widely criticized by black news sites, columnists and Black Twitter, the influential virtual community.
“I’m not sure about you, but no black person in my circle would be caught dead asking, or even thinking, these ridiculous questions about other black people,” The Root’s Yesha Callahan wrote.
At NPR, Leah Donella wrote that several questions “rest on seriously flawed premises.”
“Many of the questions seem to presuppose that blackness exists in a vacuum, and that the actions, beliefs and perceptions of black people haven’t been shaped by, say, housing segregation, mass incarceration, poverty, underfunded schools and the like,” she wrote.
Among the questions asked in the video: “Why do we call each other the N-word, but get vehemently upset when a white person uses the N-word?” and “Why do we think people with light skin look better than people with dark skin?”
On Twitter, hashtags like #RealBlackPeopleQuestions and #BuzzFeedVideoQuestions went viral, with readers expressing outrage over what they saw as a tone-deaf characterization of African Americans.
Judging by the initial responses to BuzzFeed’s apology — most of them videos and gifs expressing annoyance or skepticism — the site still has work to do in terms of earning back the trust of its black audience.
And while BuzzFeed has called the video a “mistake,” they have not taken it off of the website.
