In the age of YouTube, fame is not what it used to be. You don’t have to have any form of talent, or even a lot of money to make it to YouTube stardom. For instance, take Antoine Dodson. Dodson is a 24-year-old African American male who was interviewed on the news after an intruder came into his house in the middle of the night and attempted to rape his sister. Dodson is a resident of the Lincoln Park Housing Project in Alabama, which is a government funded, low-income housing project.
After the news interview was on local television, it hit YouTube and Dodson’s life changed entirely. Despite the fact that the interview was about an extremely serious matter, the interview became a complete joke. In the interview, Dodson tells to “hide ya kids, hide ya wife, and hide ya husbands ‘cause they’re raping everybody out here.” There is nothing inherently comical about rape. However, once this interview was turned into an autotuned anthem, it blew up on the Internet. The video of the song called “Bed Intruder” has over 73 million views on YouTube, and as of September, the song received more than 100,000 purchases on iTunes. Dodson began marketing this himself, and somehow received the invitation to perform this song at the BET awards.
How is Dodson a proper representation of African American culture, other than reinforcing stereotypes of lower class African American males? The only answer that I can come to is: he’s not. This is a type of joke I thought we had moved past in America—laughing at a black guy in a tank top and a red bandana because he has poor grammar and a Southern accent is really nothing but plain racist in my book, even if it is autotuned.
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