● Anyone can get famous on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, but it’s a lot easier to make a living if you’re White. Link in bio for more.⠀
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● Since high school, Sydnee McRae had liked the idea of getting paid to make videos online. Then, a year ago, McRae, now 22, had a breakthrough on TikTok.⠀
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● It was just as Covid-19 lockdowns were beginning. McRae created and performed a dance to Captain Hook, Megan Thee Stallion’s sex-positive club banger. She encouraged others to try out the dance themselves with a hashtag, #captainhookchallenge, and a tutorial video that explained her dance step-by-step. The videos were popular, attracting more than 400,000 likes. Within weeks, many of the platform’s top stars—influencers with millions of followers—performed their versions of her choreography, helping the song soar in popularity, too. In April, Megan Thee Stallion herself joined in, posting a 15-second video from her kitchen.⠀
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● In May, McRae received $700 from Universal Music Group to promote a new song, Out of Love by the rapper Lil Tecca, with a new dance challenge. It was a hit, too, and McRae was excited a few weeks later when she saw Addison Rae Easterling repeating her dance. Easterling isn’t quite as famous as Megan Thee Stallion, though in the world of TikTok influencers she’s the queen: She has 70 million followers (to McRae’s 1.1 million) and has made, according to Forbes, millions of dollars off her dances and lip-sync videos, thanks to deals with brands that include American Eagle, Fashion Nova, and Reebok.⠀
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● McRae is Black and Easterling is White, which seemed germane when she learned from her manager that Easterling had also been hired to perform McRae’s dance and was paid substantially more. Instead of the hundreds of dollars Universal gave McRae to create the dance, Easterling had been paid thousands by Lil Tecca for just her performance. The news burned. “I’m creating the art, I’m giving you the art, without me there would be no art,” McRae says. “But I don’t get the same respect, the same amount that these White creators get.”⠀
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