A popular influencer apologized this week for her past racist posts on social media, prompting outrage from some Black creators who say they are tired of white creators constantly having their previous racist behavior unearthed without significant repercussions.
Brooke Schofield, who has built a following of 2.2 million on TikTok with her lifestyle videos, posted two apologies — one on Sunday and another on Tuesday — addressing backlash that stemmed from people discovering several of her X posts uploaded between 2012 and 2015. In her posts, which she wrote as a teenager, she defended George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin, shared that she had said racist profanities in public and insulted Black people’s hair.
“I’m sorry, very very sorry, to anybody who is hurt by the tweets because obviously they’re very hurtful,” Schofield said in her first video. “This is not how I think, that is not what I believe and I’m 27 years old now. I’ve had so much time to learn and grow and formulate my own opinions.”
Representatives for Schofield did not respond to requests for further comment.
Schofield’s resurfaced posts and subsequent apologies have frustrated Black creators online, who said they feel this type of social media scandal has turned into a recurring cycle.
“We have the same discourse every single year, so who is learning? Who is changing if this same thing happens like clockwork?” said creator Cameron Kira in a TikTok video, which stitched footage from her own 2023 video in which she addressed a different creator’s racist tweets. “Certainly not the creators themselves, that’s obvious.”
In her TikTok videos, Kira — who did not respond to a request for comment — suggests that creators who have experienced scandals involving insensitive remarks have not grown from their past comments.
Zari Taylor, a faculty fellow at New York University who researches race and digital culture, said that it would take time for Schofield or other white creators who have done similar harm to prove that they are supportive of marginalized communities.
She said there needs to be a “sense of commitment where you live your life to remedy or to not maintain your bubble of privilege.”
“I think a lot of white influencers and white people in general tend to stay within their bubble and say, ‘Oh, I know that racism is wrong, but what can I do about it?’” Taylor said. “Especially when you have a platform as big as Brooke does, or as big as a lot of these very famous viral creators have, how can you use your platform to put your money where your mouth is?”
Other Black creators have expressed exhaustion at the frequency at which white creators are exposed for racist comments, and how quickly those creators are forgiven by non-Black fans. Some Black creators also said that they feel white creators who previously posted racist remarks emphasize that they have changed with little evidence to suggest they have. Some shared they believe white influencers often don’t understand how harmful their old comments are.
It becomes part of their persona, and they can apologize, but they’ll still have millions of views on social media, or people still tune in to hear their side of the story on their podcast or on their Patreon, or however they decide to monetize that attention.
-Zari Taylor, a faculty fellow at New York University who researches race and digital culture
Taylor said that white creators who are publicly shamed for bad behavior are often able to make that experience part of their brands.
“It becomes part of their persona, and they can apologize, but they’ll still have millions of views on social media, or people still tune in to hear their side of the story on their podcast or on their Patreon, or however they decide to monetize that attention,” Taylor said.
Schofield, who is co-host of the podcast “Cancelled” with YouTuber Tana Mongeau, has seen some professional repercussions since the social media blowback. The clothing brand Boys Lie issued a statement on its Instagram story saying it’s “working on a solution” to their collaboration with the creator following the backlash. Representatives for Boys Lie did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But Schofield’s “Cancelled” tour with Mongeau is still scheduled to go on as planned this fall. Her following has remained the same, according to data from SocialBlade.
The podcast, which launched in 2021, got its namesake because of Mongeau’s status as a controversial influencer who had been “canceled,” meaning she received widespread backlash from various scandals. These include allegations of racism made by creators and ex-Mongeau collaborators Kahlen Barry and Vanessa Martinez, amid the reckoning Americans were having with systemic racism following the killing of George Floyd by then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
Representatives for Mongeau declined to comment.
Seeing the Schofield posts, Barry, who previously called out Mongeau in 2020, said “we’re having pretty much an identical conversation four years later, so nothing’s changed.”
“I think a lot of people are just getting a little tired,” he said.
Mongeau apologized to Barry and her followers in a string of posts on X in June 2020, saying she’s “forever sorry for things i’ve said in the past- but know i am not that person now.” She also addressed her behavior in a YouTube video posted in September 2020. Barry said he never received a private apology from Mongeau.
Through her podcast with Mongeau, Schofield has aligned herself with this cycle of cancellation and redemption, according to Taylor, the NYU expert.
Schofield was criticized for her first apology, in which she said she grew up in a conservative household and would often repeat prejudiced talking points she heard from her environment. She said it wasn’t until after college that she began to “shift her way of thinking.”
In a follow-up video, Schofield said she “missed the mark” in her first attempt and directed her second apology to Black viewers.
“Sorry is not enough, in my opinion, for things that I was tweeting and things that I was saying online,” she said in a video. “There’s no apology beyond reparations that can mend that wound. I don’t care if I was a teenager, I was old enough to know better and not only did I choose to say those things, but I chose to say those things on a public platform.”
She also apologized to people she “affected in real time,” including her “friends and family who were following me at that time who would’ve been hurt by those tweets.” She said she had all the “educational resources” to learn about racism but she “chose not to.” The death of George Floyd in 2020 caused her to shift her mindset and learn about anti-racism, she said, later adding in a different video that she donated to the Trayvon Martin Foundation.
Barry said he believes white creators often point to their age as an excuse for their behavior and are afforded more leniency for offensive things they do as teenagers.
“Where’s that grace extended for people of color?” Barry said. “Because if we are even just looking at Trayvon Martin, he was 17 years old and he was murdered. She [Schofield] was 16 years old while she was saying these things that are very reckless … she can do that at 16 years old, and we deal with the harm at 17. We get treated like adults.”
People online have become desensitized to racism from white creators, according to Barry. It has become so commonplace that it has been reduced to influencer “drama” in the eyes of many consumers, who often view racism allegations as a form of entertainment.
“It’s important that we don’t normalize this because there are so many people, non-people of color, that don’t think like this, that were not raised with this type of deep-rooted racism,” said Barry. “And for this to be something that is becoming a narrative is harmful for many reasons … people expect it so there’s less accountability.”
Accountability can be hard to get from big creators because there aren’t many systems in place to keep them in check for bad behavior. That’s why audiences play a big role in whether creators will face consequences, Taylor said.
“Engage with people who you actually trust or have similar morals or values as you so that you can avoid this kind of situation,” Taylor said. “Why do we give her attention to be canceled in the first place? Instead of, you know, moving that attention to other people that have podcasts or are online with your similar values.”
