don’t let them label you cyber ghetto
Seen on many different social media platforms such as pinterest, tumblr, and tik tok, many non-black repost accounts have labeled ‘cyber street-wear’ or black people in ‘y2k’ which is a style black people have curated, as ‘cyber ghetto’.
Cyber ghetto was a word that was first created by a black tumblr user, Ruth, whose blog no longer exists. Her intention with this name was to fuse ‘elements of seapunk, kawaii, grunge, and late 90s early 00s urban fashion, oldskool as well as late hip-hop and electronic music.’ (Generation Bass) On her tumblr blog, she liked to reblog content that she deemed fit this aesthetic that she created. This was an outlet where she could reblog things that represented her being, her music taste, and her fashion sense. The internet being the way that it is, took this term and began to contort it to mean something opposite to what Ruth’s intentions were.
Although this term was coined and introduced to the internet by a black woman, here’s why we should not label cyber street-wear or black y2k as such.
As years have gone on, non-black repost blogs on tumblr have contorted the meaning of this word and labeled any black person they see with a certain aesthetic as ‘cyber ghetto.’ Now when we look closely, we all know why they label many of these pictures as ‘cyber ghetto’ … you guessed it, it’s because they are black. As a person whose pictures have been labeled as such, I was very confused as to why they would label my style and pictures as cyber ghetto when it’s nothing of what Ruth defined it as. My style is all over the place but it’s mainly bubblegum Y2K or mcbling.
Tiktok. Where to begin … Tiktok is a cesspool of ignorant teenagers who follow the trends of the week. One week they love a person or love a particular style and then the next week they all decide they hate that person or trend. When the term ‘cyber ghetto’ hit the tik tok streets, they all ran with it. It first started out with the pinterest repost pages posting black people wearing street-wear or y2k and captioned it as cyber ghetto pushing the wrong definition into these impressionable minds.
(these are examples of what they would label as ‘cyber ghetto’. this is just cyber street wear)
The biggest problem with the recent push of the new meaning of ‘cyber ghetto’ is that black y2k girls are being pushed out of the aesthetic they are aiming for and being pushed into the cyber ghetto box. As we know, black women are the blueprint for most of the early 2000s trends. Some icons that pushed many of these trends are Meagan Good, Missy Elliot, & Kimora Lee, just to name a few. Although black women are the sole reason for y2k trends, we’re being pushed out of those spaces. If you look up y2k, or even BLACK y2k aesthetic, there are barely any pictures of black women in these spaces. On the contrary, when you look up cyber ghetto black women show up.
All in all, non-black people need to stop overstepping and stop pushing black people out of the spaces that we created. Cyber ghetto is not a term that should be used to define black women who enjoy street-wear or wearing y2k pieces. If this term is going to continue to be used, use it the right way or don’t use it at all.
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