So today is April 20, aka 4/20, aka the unofficial weed holiday. And it’s also the day that Snapchat chose to launch an offical Bob Marley filter. Those two things can’t be unrelated, right? There’s nothing official to say they’re connected, but you’re not fooling anyone, Snapchat.
Ok, so using Bob Marley as a shorthand for cannabis is kinda reductive — he was also a pretty talented musician, y’know? But that’s not what has caused a commotion on social media. Like most Snapchat filters, the new add-on maps your face digitally, then superimposes something over it. In this case: it puts dreadlocks, rasta headwear and Bob Marley’s actual face over your face.
People are calling it digital blackface.
So yeah, it’s not using make-up or anything, but it’s designed to put a black person’s face over the faces over non-black people. Which is, well, ill-advised. Generally, you want to avoid anything that could be seen as blackface, right? That’s something that really shouldn’t get past the planning stage (plus it looks scary AF).
Even if you ignore the skin thing, just adding the dreadlocks and rasta iconography is pretty ill-timed as well. Cultural appropriation of things like that is a hot topic right now, and it was only a few weeks ago that Justin Bieber got called out for having dreadlocks.
Let’s just stick to face-swaps, yeah?
