by Naomi Foster

How Black Celebrities Function as Intermediaries in the Sale of Black Culture for White Consumption

Over the past decade, African American Vernacular English (AAVE) has emerged as a prominent and highly commodifiable form of digital expression. Lexical terms such as “it’s giving,” “lit,” “ate”, and “period” permeate advertising content, social media discourse, and popular memes frequently abstracted from their sociolinguistic origins and appropriated as branding signifiers. Although these linguistic features originate within Black communities and encapsulate rich historical and cultural meanings, corporations increasingly repurpose them to project an image of cultural currency, youthfulness, and social awareness. A prevalent mechanism facilitating this appropriation is the enlistment of Black celebrities, whose cultural capital ostensibly confers authenticity upon this otherwise contrived usage. These mediated endorsements thus function to convert vernacular identity into marketable commodities.

This study interrogates the processes by which AAVE is commodified within advertising ecosystems and examines the pivotal role of Black celebrities in legitimating such practices. Situated within cultural and media studies paradigms, the analysis contends that celebrity-driven campaigns deploy Black vernacular not merely as linguistic variation but as a symbolic resource, invoking notions of coolness, authenticity, and desirability to advance corporate profitability. Employing case studies of celebrity endorsements in the last decade and supplementary insights from celebrity endorsement research, I intend to explore the ways in which brands encode Black vernacular within their promotional narratives and how high-profile Black figures function as cultural intermediaries within these commodification circuits. The research on advertising and cultural appropriation shows a conflict between selling products and being authentic. Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding framework helps us understand how media meanings are created. Bell Hooks criticizes how racial differences are presented. Recent studies by Kamins, Brand, and Hoeke find that when celebrities AAVE endorse brands by mentioning both positive traits and criticisms, they seem more credible. This suggests that acknowledging cultural contexts may reduce negative reactions to appropriation.

Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model offers a foundational framework for comprehending how media messages are constructed and interpreted. Hall posits that producers “encode” content with particular ideological inflections, which audiences subsequently “decode” through dominant, negotiated, or oppositional readings. Crucially, Hall asserts that “codes of encoding and decoding may not be perfectly symmetrical,” underscoring the potential for interpretive divergence (Hall,131). Within advertising contexts, brands deliberately encode AAVE as a semiotic marker of cultural relevancy and contemporary coolness. Yet these encodings invariably operate within the logic of consumer capitalism, wherein cultural identity is repurposed as a market resource rather than honored as a lived sociocultural praxis.

Bell Hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” provides an incisive critique of the commodification of racialized difference. Hooks contends that within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, “the commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling” (Hooks, 366). This theoretical lens elucidates how advertisers aestheticize Blackness as a consumable product, distilling complex cultural practices into seemingly innocuous marketing tropes. Moreover, Hooks observes that “encounters with Otherness are clearly marked as more exciting, more intense, and more threatening. The lure is the combination of pleasure and danger” (Hooks, 368). Corporate deployments of AAVE exploit this duality, promising audiences vicarious access to perceived authenticity while simultaneously neutralizing any potential threat to hegemonic power structures.

The figure of the Black celebrity occupies a paradoxical role within contemporary circuits of cultural commodification. On one hand, the celebrity endorsement lends perceived authenticity and cultural legitimacy to corporate appropriations of Black vernacular traditions. Their association imbues brands with the symbolic capital of “coolness,” innovation, and “street” credibility,  qualities otherwise inaccessible to corporate entities typically perceived as detached from subcultural lifeworlds. On another note, however, Black celebrities themselves are often subsumed into the corporate logic of commodification, operating less as autonomous cultural agents and more as carefully curated intermediaries who render Blackness palatable to wider consumer markets. Kamins, Brand, and Hoeke’s empirical research on two-sided endorsements provides critical insight into the functionality of celebrity mediation. They argue that endorsements that subtly acknowledge both the positive features and potential criticisms of a brand engender greater audience trust and perceived authenticity. In the context of AAVE appropriation, this suggests that Black celebrities, by virtue of their communal credibility, can act as shields against accusations of cultural exploitation, whether or not their participation meaningfully challenges underlying structures of extraction. Thus, the celebrity not only enhances advertising effectiveness but also diffuses possible oppositional readings by reconfiguring corporate intentions as culturally symbiotic rather than predatory.

 Moreover, Stuart Hall’s concept of articulation proves useful in theorizing the provisional alliances between Black celebrities and corporate advertisers. Hall reminds us that such linkages are contingent rather than natural, formed not by shared ideological commitments but by converging strategic interests. The celebrity’s image is articulated onto the brand’s narrative, temporarily suturing the brand to cultural authenticity without necessarily aligning with the deeper sociopolitical histories of the vernacular forms being commodified. This process underscores the precariousness of celebrity mediation: while Black celebrities may attain personal wealth and visibility, the broader structures that facilitate the extraction and commercialization of Black culture remain intact, unchallenged, and frequently obscured beneath the veneer of celebratory inclusion. 

Concrete examples further illuminate the mechanics of this mediation. Having established the theoretical frameworks underpinning the commodification of Black vernacular culture and the mediating role of Black celebrity endorsers, it becomes essential to examine how these dynamics materialize within specific advertising campaigns. The case studies that follow not only illuminate the strategic articulation between celebrity personae and corporate branding but also reveal the tensions, contradictions, and resistances that surface when commodified expressions of Blackness enter mass consumer markets. Through these examples, it becomes possible to trace the complex negotiations between cultural authenticity, commercial imperatives, and audience reception that characterize the contemporary marketing of Black vernacular practices.

Cardi B’s partnership with Pepsi exemplifies how a celebrity’s distinctive vernacular stylings can be transposed into mass-market branding. Cardi B’s exuberant persona, rooted in Bronx street culture and Afro-Caribbean inflections, lent Pepsi a fleeting proximity to contemporary Black youth cultures. Yet the sanitized, decontextualized invocation of “Okurr” in a Super Bowl ad stripped the expression of its subcultural specificity, repackaging it as a commodified signifier of youthful exuberance devoid of political or communal anchoring. Save in this context functions as a sourcer of humor for the surrounding people in the diner, where the scene takes place. The entire restaurant erupts with “okurr” like a flock of birds and it becomes a parody. In just forty seconds, a phrase sacred to a community, integral to Ballroom culture, is made into a White man’s entertainment

In Pepsi’s 2019 Super Bowl commercial, Cardi B enters a retro-themed diner decked out in a glittering red, white, and blue outfit, styled to align with Pepsi’s brand identity. A server asks the customer if “Pepsi is okay,”. Before the server can answer, Cardi bursts onto the scene and responds with her now-iconic “Okurrr!”, effectively rebranding “okay” as exciting and on-trend. The entire restaurant begins to mimic her voice, repeating “Okurrr!” in exaggerated unison; men, women, children, and even the elderly. To understand the cultural weight of “Okurrr,” it’s important to trace its origins: the phrase comes from Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ Ballroom culture, where it functioned as an affirmation of confidence, attitude, and identity. It was popularized in part by drag performers like RuPaul and Ts Madison before Cardi B brought it to mass audiences via social media. In these subcultural settings, “Okurrr” had layered meanings, but in the Pepsi ad, the expression is flattened into a one-dimensional punchline. The moment is surreal and parodic, reducing the expression to a spectacle for mass entertainment. Though “Okurrr” originates from marginalized communities, the advertisement strips it of this context. Instead, it becomes a sanitized, humorized chant. 

By encoding Cardi B’s colloquial energy, Pepsi aimed to imbue its product with youth-driven authenticity. Yet demographic analytics evidently motivated this strategy: as Hooks asserts, “Market surveys revealed that Black people buy more Pepsi than other soft drinks and suddenly we see more Pepsi commercials with Black people in them” (Hooks, 369). Such revelations highlight the instrumental calculus underpinning ostensibly celebratory cultural engagements. Stuart Hall would suggest, the company encoded “Okurrr” as a signifier of youth, coolness, and authenticity, while suppressing its historical and subcultural meanings to ensure broad appeal.. Simultaneously, Kamins et al.’s findings illuminate how Cardi B’s endorsement of the brand functions as a credibility heuristic, reducing possible audience resistance and aiding in compliant interpretation.

Blackness is often recontextualized as a product through these celebrity partnerships. Saweetie’s campaign with McDonald’s is a prime example, not just of a Black woman speaking AAVE in an ad, but of a whole persona being sold back to consumers. The commercial doesn’t just market a meal; it markets a cultural shorthand. Saweetie isn’t just promoting fries and a Big Mac. She’s packaging herself as cool, approachable, and “one of us.” But this packaging is designed to be consumed. Her language, her style, her gestures, once rooted in a specific cultural community, are now tools for capital. What once might have been a casual, offhand phrase among friends becomes corporate currency when broadcast through a global ad campaign. The boundaries between authenticity and performance blur, and what’s left is a brand-friendly version of Blackness—stripped of context, but rich in profitability. 

In her commercial for the Saweetie Meal, the rapper opens with “What’s up y’all? It’s your girl Saweetie and we’re at McDonald’s,” and later refers to her “fry sandwich.” She uses AAVE, slang, and familiar gestures, packaging herself as relatable and “authentic” while promoting a multinational corporation. This isn’t just clever marketing, it’s a strategy that relies on the cultural fluency of a Black celebrity to lend credibility to a brand that has historically profited from Black consumers without meaningfully investing in their communities. The success of Saweetie’s collaboration with McDonald’s, which sold out in multiple locations and generated viral content across platforms, illustrates how brands profit from Black language and culture while using celebrities to mask that extraction. Her usage of phrases like “fry sandwich” and the overall casual tone of her promotion mirror everyday Black speech patterns, making it feel organic rather than corporate. This relatability is key to what Jennifer Hochschild calls a “two-sided endorsement”, where the celebrity appears to genuinely support the product, while also signaling to the consumer that the brand supports them too. But what’s being sold isn’t just fast food—it’s the illusion of cultural inclusion. Saweetie’s presence creates a sense of belonging, even though the profits and control remain firmly in corporate hands. The language makes it feel like the meal belongs to us, but it never really does.

This dynamic, as Hooks incisively notes, is characteristic of the commodification of Otherness in capitalist societies. Hooks warns that the “pleasure” derived from encounters with racialized differences in consumer culture often masks the continuing exploitation of those differences for economic gain. Black celebrity endorsers, while not necessarily complicit in intent, thus become instrumentalized within broader processes that aestheticize, depoliticize, and commercialize Black cultural practices for corporate profit. In sum, Black celebrity endorsements serve a dual function within advertising ecologies: they bolster brand credibility by enhancing perceptions of authenticity, and they facilitate the seamless incorporation of Black vernacular culture into mainstream consumer circuits. However, unless these endorsements are situated within frameworks that acknowledge and address the histories of exploitation that shadow Black cultural production, they risk perpetuating the very systems of commodification they seem to momentarily transcend. The celebrity becomes, in effect, a bridge, connecting the vibrancy of Black expressive life to the cold logics of capital, often without fundamentally altering the structural terms of that encounter.

In 2023, e.l.f. Cosmetics released a 15-second Instagram ad for its Camo Blush product, captioned with the phrase “Camo Blushin’ is Bussin’.” The ad featured fast-paced, glitchy transitions between close-up shots of models applying blush. The word “bussin’,” a term rooted in Black vernacular that connotes excellence or deliciousness, was displayed in bold text and used as the campaign’s headline without any supporting cultural context. . Despite initial virality, the campaign provoked significant criticism for its superficial appropriation of Black vernacular absent meaningful cultural accountability. As Hooks articulates, “the commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling” (Hooks,  366), underscoring how e.l.f.’s deployment of “bussin’” prioritized market appeal over cultural fidelity. For e.l.f., the term was just “social media slang”, something to draw in the youth, but the lack of an intermediary here leaves them exposed.  Drawing on Kamins, Brand, and Hoeke’s findings, the absence of two-sided endorsement, whereby the endorser acknowledges both the benefits and potential critiques of the product, left the advertisement vulnerable to oppositional decoding (Kamins, Brand & Hoeke).

 Consequently, social-media audiences read the slogan as contrived and extractive, perceiving e.l.f. ‘s use of AAVE as opportunistic rather than celebratory. The result felt contrived and disingenuous to many viewers, sparking backlash across Twitter and Instagram. Critics accused the brand of appropriating AAVE without engaging with its origins or community. Bell Hooks’ notion of “eating the Other” helps contextualize this critique: the campaign aestheticized Blackness as a trendy flavor to spice up a generic cosmetic launch, while failing to recognize or credit its cultural source. Unlike Pepsi’s campaign, which used Cardi B to lend authenticity, e.l.f.’s lack of celebrity mediation left the appropriation more exposed and easily decoded by audiences as exploitative. The absence of a two-sided endorsement, where a Black celebrity might have been able to both participate and offer a degree of cultural framing, meant that the brand was unshielded from criticism and read as engaging in overt cultural theft.

In 2022, Tory Burch launched a Spring fashion campaign that incorporated a remixed version of “Juju on That Beat,” a viral dance track originally released by teenage rappers Zay Hilfigerrr and Zayion McCall in 2016. The song’s popularity was driven by Black youth culture on platforms like Vine, Instagram, and early TikTok, where users created and shared dance videos rooted in neighborhood creativity and informal digital choreography. In its original form, the “Juju” dance was energetic, raw, and deeply embedded in the vernacular of Black social media expression.   

The Tory Burch ad, however, repackaged this grassroots cultural product for an elite fashion audience. The campaign video featured a diverse but predominantly white cast of professional models dressed in Tory Burch’s pastel and floral spring collection, performing sanitized versions of the “Juju” choreography. Rather than mimicking the original energy or context, the dancers moved stiffly and awkwardly, executing choreographed gestures that appeared more theatrical than joyful. The setting features minimalist sidewalks, upscale New York backdrops, and high-concept studios, further stripping the dance of its informal charm. The music was subtly remixed to match the aesthetic of a luxury brand: slowed down, less percussive, and divorced from its hip-hop origins. This remixing was not neutral. It marked a deliberate shift from the song’s cultural roots to a marketable commodity, what Bell Hooks might describe as the transformation of “the Other” into a consumable thrill. By transplanting a Black viral dance into the sphere of white high fashion without contextual framing or credit, the brand effectively de-racialized the product while maintaining its cool factor. Hooks’ notion of “eating the Other” is central here: the campaign devours a slice of Black creativity to invigorate a luxury product line, while offering none of the social, financial, or cultural credit to the communities that generated it.

Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model helps clarify the dissonance. Tory Burch’s campaign encoded the ad as playful, youthful, and cosmopolitan. However, many viewers decoded it as cultural theft and as aesthetic whitewashing. On TikTok and Twitter, users mocked the ad’s awkward execution and called out its appropriation. One popular video stitched the campaign footage with the original “Juju” dance, highlighting the stark contrast between the joyous, unpolished origins and the sterilized brand version. Tory Burch’s failure to acknowledge or compensate the creators of “Juju on That Beat” reflected a broader pattern in which Black creativity circulates freely for corporate profit, while Black people themselves are excluded from the value chain. Even as the campaign attempted to align with the spontaneity and “fun” of internet dance culture, it reinforced a dynamic in which whiteness remains the default face of refinement, and Black culture remains a resource to be mined rather than a community to be engaged.

The analyses of these case studies reveal a nuanced interplay between cultural expression and corporate strategy. Black celebrities function as indispensable intermediaries, legitimating the appropriation of AAVE and Black cultural practices within advertising. While their participation can enhance ad credibility and drive consumer engagement, it often occurs within frameworks that prioritize corporate gain over community benefit. As Bell Hooks warns, unchecked commodification risks reducing the Other to a mere aesthetic commodity: “The over-riding fear is that cultural, ethnic, and racial differences will be continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance the white palate, that the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten” (Hooks, 369). 

Across each of these campaigns, Black cultural production is not merely referenced; it is reengineered to serve white consumer markets. Whether mediated through the charismatic presence of a figure like Cardi B or stripped of Blackness altogether, as in the cases of e.l.f. and Tory Burch, these examples show how brands strategically manipulate AAVE and Black creative labor. Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding framework helps explain how original meanings are rewritten for commercial legibility, while Hooks’ concept of “eating the Other” reveals how pleasure and profit are extracted from Blackness without accountability. A clear pattern emerges: Black culture is lucrative, while Black communities remain expendable. Until advertising not only reflects but also materially uplifts the cultures it borrows from, commodification will remain a form of cultural theft disguised as inclusion.

Works Cited

“Controversial Tory Burch Ad Accused of Cultural Appropriation.” YouTube, YouTube, 26 Apr. 

2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=muzBFBo_3MM.

Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Culture, Media, 

         Language, edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, Routledge, 1980,       

pp. 128–138.

Hooks, Bell. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.”      

       Black Looks: Race and Representation, South End Press, 1992, pp. 21–39.

Kamins, Michael A., et al. “Two-sided versus one-sided celebrity endorsements: The impact on 

advertising effectiveness and credibility.” Journal of Advertising, vol. 18, no. 2, June 

1989, pp. 4–10, https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.1989.10673146. 

McDonalds . “Saweetie X McDonald’s .” YouTube, YouTube, 11 Aug. 2021, 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx0XbxcmEeM.

Pepsi. “Okurr Extended Cut Pepsi.” YouTube, YouTube, 7 Feb. 2019,  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZPkCntVNSo.