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I often unwind by watching Twitch streams (btw, if you didn't know, @BananaRex is playing Spelunky 2 and getting world records again!). So, I thought it was a little weird when I kept seeing bois in the chat.
But I didn't really get curious until I read some pieces about the Boogaloo Bois... and none of the sources said anything about why they were spelling the name of their racism-adjacent pro-Civil War group with an i.
In the piece I lay out boi's trajectory from the black community to Outkast's Big Boi to skateboarding to gay men to queer women to queer AFABS and then, after a long pause there to blackface accounts and racist memes, from which it made the jump over to mainstream meme culture.
The one consistent aspect of boi's use was that it had to do with atypical or countercultural masculinity. Black masculinity, skateboarders' masculinity, gay masculinity, or female masculinity. Well, it didn't just fall from there into the mainstream- it was pushed.
It was pushed by white racists using "digital blackface" to portray black people as negative stereotypes, with the hopes of turning white liberals against them.
And, it was pushed by white supremacists who fixated on a small controversy over whether the Dat Boi meme was culturally appropriative, seeing it as a challenge to take boi away from the communities where it was being used.
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