December 4, 2025

Let me start with the moment that sparked this whole line of thinking.

The other day, I was watching a TikTok of a Black man in Chicago casually reaching out and touching white men’s hair without their permission. Just walking up, asking to touch their hair, not waiting for consent, grabbing a handful of curls, and remarking on the texture, color, etc. No threat, no violence, nothing dramatic — just a taste of what Black folks, especially Black women, have been dealing with for decades.

And the reactions? Chef's kiss!   One white man recoiled like he’d been grazed by a hot stove. Another pulled back with straight-up disgust. The third? He froze and let it happen — that soft, stunned compliance of someone who’s never had their personal space breached in their entire life. Watching it unfold, it hit me: white people understand the violation. They just don’t extend the empathy to us.

We all know the script.  If this had been a white person doing this to a Black person, and the Black person reacted the way these white men did, the Black person would have been told that it was a joke and to stop playing the victim.  It's been sometime in our shared history that the word victim has been weaponized against Black people, especially when our boundaries and bodily autonomy have been violated.  Let's dig into it.

“Stop playing the victim.”

That’s the line. The go-to. The rhetorical knee jerk reaction that whiteness relies on whenever Black people tell the truth about racialized harm.

Name your pain?  You're playing the victim.

Set a boundary? You're playing the victim.

Say “don’t touch my hair”? That's right, you're playing the victim.

It’s a slick little move. If Black pain is framed as exaggeration, hypersensitivity, or attention-seeking, then white behavior never has to be examined. The word doesn’t dismiss our suffering; it protects their comfort. And in the American racial imagination, white comfort is practically sacred.

The irony, of course, is that white people absolutely recognize what harm feels like — their bodies told the truth the moment someone flipped the script.

Why mirroring freaks them out

Mirroring is powerful because it interrupts the entire story whiteness tells itself.

White people are used to being the ones who touch, inspect, intervene, critique, handle, correct, and take up space. They are not used to being the object of someone else’s choices. So when a Black man reaches out and does the very thing they do to us?  The hierarchy shatters for a second.And in that split-second, three things happen:

1. The power dynamic flips:  Instead of being the ones who move freely through the world, they’re suddenly the ones being acted upon.
They don’t know what to do with that.

2. Their bodies betray the truth.   All these years of “It’s just hair!” evaporate. Their shoulders snap back.  Their faces twist up.
Their boundaries scream.  So no — they weren’t confused all this time.  They knew.

3. It threatens the myth of white innocence.  Because if they admit it feels violating to them, then they have to admit it’s been violating for us.
And that means giving up the cherished fantasy that their curiosity is harmless.  Mirroring doesn’t cause the harm — it exposes the architecture of domination they’ve been standing on.

The history behind the touch

See, this isn’t new. White entitlement to our bodies has a long, ugly lineage.  From slavery, to scientific racism, public spectacle, Jim Crow and policing, Black bodies have always been treated as touchable, examinable, available.  During slavery, Black bodies were inspected like livestock — touched, grabbed, prodded, opened, measured, stripped. No consent required; consent wasn’t even imaginable.  Anthropologists, doctors, and “researchers” used us as specimens — our skulls measured, our skin examined, our features catalogued like artifacts.  Scientific racism anyone?  From minstrel shows to human zoos, our bodies were displayed, handled, performed upon, and consumed for entertainment and public spectacle.  White hands controlling Black movement was the purview of Jim Crow.  Police officers were empowered to grab, restrain, search.  This mode of policing in our communities became the state’s default setting.

The “liberal” present

Now the language is softer:  Think:  “I just love your curls!”  But the entitlement is the same.  The assumption of access remains.  Black bodies have always been treated as touchable, examinable, available.  That TikTok?  That was a reminder of what it feels like when that assumption is reversed.

The white men were the point

People in the comments said, “He should’ve done it to white women—they’re the worst offenders!”  But no. He knew exactly what he was doing.  White women may be the more common violators, but white men are the ones the system revolves around. They’re the group least accustomed to being treated as objects, physically vulnerable to unwanted touch. They're the most shielded by racial taboo.  So when a Black man touches their hair?  That hits the root of American panic.  It’s not just about hair.  It’s about the unspoken rule:  Black men are not supposed to touch white people unless told they can.  Watching those men flinch made the centuries-old script visible.

And here’s where “victim” comes back around

Whiteness weaponizes the word victim to avoid accountability, to make sure the discussion stays centered on their feelings, not our experience.  It works extra hard to  delegitimize the harm while maintaining the hierarchy. Calling us “victims” is how they dodge responsibility while still enjoying the privileges that cause the harm in the first place.  Because if Black people aren’t “victims,” then whiteness isn’t “innocent.”  And the whole system ruptures.

Seeing through the trick

On the surface, that TikTok seemed to capture a harmless prank.  But what happened went much deeper.  It showed that the harm we speak of is real, embodied, and deeply understood — just not acknowledged.  Our boundaries are not victimhood.  Our truths are not exaggerations.
Our insistence on bodily autonomy is not some fragile overreaction.  It’s sovereignty, clarity and a refusal to be an object in someone else's twisted game.
And if that unsettles the people who’ve spent centuries holding the upper hand?  Well… that says a lot more about them than it does about us.

Watching that TikTok did something to me — something I didn’t expect. It was funny, yes, but it was also strangely healing. There was something about that tiny moment of reversal, that harmless act of boundary-flipping, that cracked open a little space inside me. A space where I could breathe. A space where I didn’t have to explain why something hurts — I could just watch the discomfort land where it usually doesn’t.

And it reminded me that liberation isn’t only built in courtrooms, city halls, or policy documents. Sometimes it’s built in the quiet satisfaction of seeing someone else held to the same mirror they’ve pressed against you your whole life. Sometimes the small, symbolic actions — the ones that restore a bit of balance to an unbalanced world — are just as necessary as the big structural battles.

It's also a reminder that healing doesn't just come from changing discriminatory laws.  It’s also about reclaiming one's dignity in real time.
It can also be about disrupting the script AND reminding the world that our boundaries are not optional.

And maybe, just maybe, those moments of subversion matter more than we’ve been taught to believe.