American YouTuber Armon Wiggins went viral on X after referring to Tyla as an “uppity African,” an insult with which the broadcaster and rapper Joe Budden concurred. Wiggins writes: “Hey I don’t think I like TYLA’s personality I think someone needs to check her cus she doesn’t understand American Culture AT ALL…she almost gives off entitled or uppity African idk how to explain it but it’s very off putting and it’s almost like she expects people to just fall to her feet.” Both are African American men, who are in the camp that denounces Tyla’s pride in her South African Coloured identity. In the final part of my three-part series, “Tyla, Coloureds, Color, and Culture,” I consider the insult “uppity” as a symptom of bad faith, a particular kind of willful hermeneutical ignorance.

In 2008, Georgia Republican Representative Lynn Westmoreland referred to Senator Barack and Michelle Obama as “uppity.” The word “uppity” means arrogant, haughty, presumptuous, or snobbish. It is an old-fashioned criticism directed towards someone whose perceived self-importance is annoying. Westmoreland defends this understanding of the word, claiming that where he grew up it is not a racially derogatory term.

The term “uppity negro” takes on a more sinister, disparaging, and pejorative meaning. Politically, it was levelled against civil rights activists and Black people who engaged in civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws. Socially, it was hurled as a racial insult against proactive or upwardly-mobile Black Americans. It insinuates that a Black person is aspiring to a rank, status, or class beyond their place in society. The intention of the racial pejorative was to break morale, taint reputation, or sabotage opportunities.

“Uppity African,” a new addition to the lexicon, has become a signature insult in the bickering between African Americans and their African counterparts. It is usually deployed to describe African migrants or immigrants who allegedly don’t respect the culture, boundaries, and hospitality of Black Americans.

However, the historical connotations of the insult expose its intention to marginalize, dominate, dishearten or injure the target. At its most extreme, it conveys a hatred of people who are different or foreign. This attitude is driven by fear that foreigners will threaten their society’s integrity, identity, and way of life, or take opportunities away from natives. The term “uppity African” is a kind of xenophobia, both a hatred and fear of African foreigners.

How the word “uppity” is used intra-racially by African Americans is not without confounding irony. How can a group detest a word so much when it is directed to them, yet allow it to ooze so smoothly from their lips against those with a common history of white supremacy oppression? How is there uproar and common injury when the African American Obama is insulted this way, but approval when an African 22-year old woman is described the same way?

The complainants claim that they are safeguarding (African) American culture. But despite this deflection, they seem to be displaying cognitive bias or dissonance. They appear to be hypersensitive to Tyla’s meteoric rise, which they resent. To justify their resentment, they hold her to their American standard of epistemic understanding of history, race, culture, and nuance. I find that the philosophical concept of “bad faith” explains the source of this attitude.

Tyla’s situation is paradoxical. On the one hand, she enjoys support from millions of people in Africa, the U.S., and globally. On the other, she is targeted by a subset of African Americans that is potentially small, but very vocal (the complainants). The likes of Wiggins are mobilizing for her to be “checked” because “she doesn’t understand American Culture AT ALL.” African American culture is certainly not the entirety of American culture. So Wiggins seems to be implying that Tyla’s outcomes as a migrant in multiracial and multicultural America are at the mercy of African Americans. Her understanding of this culture is at issue. This is a form of epistemic injustice through credibility excess, which means that the dominant party in the culture or society expects to be believed and understood more than the party on the margins.

According to Africana philosopher Lewis R. Gordon, bad faith is when the deceiver and the one being deceived are the same person. Bad faith is a phenomenon that plagues all human existence and causes false consciousness. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote extensively about the concept in his book Being and Nothingness (1956). For purposes of my analysis, Gordon’s articulation takes Sartre’s conception further by applying it to the experiences of Black people, in his book Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995).

There are various contextual ways to define bad faith and in Gordon’s book chapter titled “Bad Faith” (2020), he lists them as follows: “an attempt to hide from responsibility;” “an evasion of displeasing truths through investing in pleasing falsehoods;” “an effort to be seen without seeing;” “an effort to flee responsibility for values;” and “an effort to become a god or Absolute,” among others. What they all have in common is deflection from the real issue.

One paradoxical consequence of bad faith is that Black people also become complicit in their psychological, economic, and physical oppression. This results in a state of alienation, and feeling powerless to challenge it, they resort to intra-racial disrespect and violence. The kind of xenophobia I mention above is another paradoxical consequence of bad faith.

While many would agree that white supremacists and racists exhibit bad faith as a group, Steve Biko, leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, also accused Black people of bad faith during apartheid South Africa. Biko found that Black people demonstrated bad faith by making themselves judges of other Blacks; by attempting to be superior; by venting their frustrations with antiblack racism in the direction of their fellows; and by committing black-on-black violence.

Biko saw this as displaced anger toward Whites, or Black people’s attempts to hide their own desire for white recognition, or even an unbearable sense of humiliation for not receiving recognition from other Black people. According to Mabogo Percy More, all these manifestations of bad faith cause Black people to inevitably participate in their own oppression.

I am not blind or insensitive to the complaints’ side of the argument. I encountered a column on Substack called “Taking it there”, where Ariana, the author, wrote what I found to be a transparent and vulnerable article on what truly bothers the complainants about Tyla and other African immigrants. She discloses the Black American sensitivity to the stigmatization and gaslighting they experience in comparison to African immigrants.

She declares that Tyla’s “Coloured” cultural baggage feeds into color and racial ambiguity privilege. Her concern is that the likes of Tyla are weaponized and conferred “model minority” and “respectable immigrant” status meant to demean the majority of the Black American population. Together with her reservations about what she claims is an orchestrated rise in the music industry, she finds that Tyla’s attempts to connect with Black American audiences feel disingenuous.

Ariana draws on the history of Black America, starting from the middle passage to explain how white supremacy pits people of African descent against one another. Her post is an apt contrast to the bad faith displayed by most of the complainants I have read and heard. Whether she is right or not, she is not lying to herself and others regarding her qualms about Tyla.

In contrast to the attitude of the complainants, Gordon explains how some people avoid or overcome bad faith: “[H]uman beings are aware, no matter how fugitive that awareness may be, of their freedom in their various situations, that they are free choosers of various aspects of their situations, that they are consequently responsible for their condition on some level, that they have the power to change at least themselves through coming to grips with their situations.”

The African Americans who, in concert with millions worldwide, celebrate and support Tyla have come to grips with their situation and positionality. In turn, they respect Tyla’s Coloured identity and the context of her situation. They have learned and understand that there are numerous situations and identities across the spectrum of blackness, within and beyond the borders of the US.

They don’t expect her to ingratiate herself to them because they don’t claim a monopoly on American culture. Instead, they embrace an interdependence that facilitates mutual recognition and reciprocity, and the opportunity to cultivate new knowledge, about various identities and cultures of African descent.

They do not have a scarcity mentality that makes them fear or resent her success in their country. Neither do they demand credibility excess by imposing a hegemonic interpretation of African or African American lived experience, nor do they hide behind bad faith in attempts to evade their willful hermeneutical ignorance.

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