In 2025, three young black women from Rochester, N.Y. visited Chicago and, after a birthday celebration at Soul Vibez restaurant, they pulled a “dine and dash” on a $262 bill. Amateurs at the game, they made reservations with their own names and phone numbers, allowed a 4K-resolution camera to capture their faces, and they went on social media to thank a black-owned business for their free meals and drinks—an act so brazen that it helped the story go viral.
Fox 32 in Chicago, giving its audience what it wants, reported this incident, which is hardly a major crime in that city. Social media soon picked up on the story. A perceptive black YouTube personality with 1.2 million followers, known as “BlackySpeakz,” also weighed in with comments on how the incident, and the reasons it spread so fast online, were related to a phenomenon that's come to be known, in some quarters, as “Black Fatigue ”—the collective exhaustion that black people are allegedly causing with their unacceptable public behavior.
In her 2020 book, Black Fatigue: How Racism Erodes the Mind Body Spirit, DEI expert Mary-Francis Winters coined the term “Black Fatigue” to fit with her anecdotal narrative of the cumulative emotional, physical, and psychological weariness that black people experience from systemic racism and daily microaggressions.
But just like “woke,” a term black activists coined to describe those awake to racial injustice and systemic discrimination—especially against black Americans—got redefined as a pejorative, Black Fatigue has undergone a semantic co-option. Black Fatigue 2.0 can refer to either the loss of patience over the media viewing too much through the lens of race, or a critical stance towards the public behavior of black people.
BlackySpeakz used the video and the universal disgust expressed over the Rochester women’s behavior, as an example of the new iteration of Black Fatigue, the popularity of which is driven by users on platforms like TikTok, Twitter/X, and fringe message boards. Conservative content creators love the redefinition, which is hardly a surprise, but what's interesting is that prominent black commenters have started embracing the concept as well. BlackySpeakz, unhappy and embarrassed with some of his black brothers and sisters, doesn't embrace it, but he does acknowledge that what he says is a small segment of the black population is making black people in general look bad.
Specifically, he's referring to behavior known as “rachet”—a word with origins in black Southern slang that refers to loud, messy, unrefined, or socially reckless public conduct—especially when it’s self-sabotaging. At the same time, BlackySpeakz bemoans the fact that the damning videos circulated are being interpreted as representational of blacks in general.
He elaborates on his stance in his YouTube video, “Black Fatigue: Why We’re Tired of Ghetto Culture.” Chagrined by the stereotyping “ghetto culture” produces, he blames a subset of the black community that's never learned how to behave. Others dispense with the nuanced approach. The Hodge Twins, two black siblings who run a YouTube account with 3.5 million followers, are more heavy-handed. They show video clips that negatively portray blacks. “We have stereotypes for a reason” is one of their phrases. Another is, “This is why I don't date black women.” One of their staples (and a favorite among Black Fatigue 2.0 specialists) is black people being disruptive, and often violent, in fast food restaurants, mostly for trivial reasons like they didn't get their ketchup in the bag. One of their videos shows an upset black woman throwing an entire cup of hot coffee on a white McDonald's employee. The giggling brothers found extra “humor” in the incident when they tracked down her Facebook page, on which she describes herself as “Queen by any means necessary.”
I don't frequent fast food places, so I have no idea what goes on there. But if I were to go by just what I see on YouTube, I'd be convinced that blacks are responsible for about 90 percent of these incidents.
Obviously, that's not the case. The same goes for dining and dashing, a practice as old as restaurants themselves. Whites do it too. The way these incidents are presented online can be misleading. For example, the Hodge twins don't feature videos of whites, Asians, or Hispanics misbehaving. When they include those groups in their videos, they're the victims. Social media’s powerful enough to lead its viewers to misleading conclusions like the conflation of class and race. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter/X are designed to keep users on their apps by promoting content that triggers outrage, disgust, and schadenfreude. Social media’s powerful enough, with its algorithmically amplified repetition, to make up the minds of users, and not just the most impressionable ones.
The only allegation regarding black people in restaurants that I know to be true is that they—just like school teachers of all races—are poor tippers, and it's not only my extensive experience in the restaurant business that tells me this. Multiple studies in the U.S. hospitality industry (e.g. Michael Lynn at Cornell) have found this to be true, even after controlling for things like the size of the bill or type of restaurant.
Some restaurant workers use the code word “Canadians” for black people as a warning technique. Some servers, expecting lower tips from blacks, give them poorer service, thus creating a feedback loop exacerbating the problem. It's fair to say many restaurant workers are suffering from Black Fatigue 2.0, but unfair to say all black people are poor tippers. Moreover, there's evidence that lower-middle-class white diners tip at a rate not approved by restaurant servers, so it's not all about race.
Authorial intent isn’t inviolate. When concepts leave controlled intellectual spaces, as Winters’ book did, they can take on their own definitions. The author was “devastated” to learn that the morally charged term she coined to fight racism was co-opted for another purpose, but history has shown that that's a risk of inventing new, “catchy” language to support one’s political views. It's also catchy, and twistable, to those not committed to DEI initiatives. In fact, the ambiguity of the phrase Black Fatigue—it could be interpreted to mean either fatigue experienced by or caused by black people—made it inevitable that the term would get co-opted. Was anyone surprised when Black Lives Matter led to the opposition promoting White Lives Matter? Changing just one word flips the meaning. Many whined that White Lives Matter is a racist phrase, but there's nothing racist about the wording. Perhaps calling a movement BLM was a poor strategic choice.
The most interesting outgrowth of the Black Fatigue controversy is that it's birthed a movement suggesting there are voices within the black community willing to go public with their dissatisfaction with the behavior of some black people. BlackySpeakz emphasizes the “some” part of the equation. The entertainment-oriented Hodge Twins, who treat blacks as an embarrassing monolith, ignore it.
Just as certain racial attitudes and behaviors that white people have exhibited have been examined and condemned for years, still hold onto, the black community would benefit from similar scrutiny of its faults. And the importance of it coming from within means that blacks and progressive whites can't write off all criticism as white racism.
There are more pressing issues than restaurants. About 75 percent of white children live with their father, compared to 38 percent in black homes. This is an urgent problem that engenders many other problems. Neither the government nor society in general can fix it. As long as black men don't feel it's taboo within their own community to abandon the home, the situation will remain unchanged. Mary-Frances Winters can blame the problem on her Black Fatigue, but Black Fatigue 2.0 within the black community—not among white conservatives and white supremacists—might open up conversations that need to be had.
Winters is right that racism exacts a real toll, although she probably overstates it. But the term she coined now sits at the fault line between grievance and accountability. Whether Black Fatigue 2.0 hardens into a weapon or evolves into a catalyst is closely linked with algorithmic distortion on social media. For it to be seen as an honest critique, it has to distinguish between individuals and groups, behavior and identity, exhaustion and excuse.