The rise of the white male influencer marks a decisive reorganisation of political authority in the digital public sphere. This reorganisation does not grow out of collective struggle, sustained organising, or exposure to material risk. It emerges from an architecture that elevates certain bodies as interpreters of crisis while displacing others from the centre of political meaning. The question concerns who is positioned as moral authority and how that positioning steadily removes Black voices from political centrality.
In colonial and postcolonial societies, white men remain the most structurally privileged demographic. That privilege now expresses itself more through interpretive dominance than through overt command. White male influencers increasingly occupy the role of moral narrator at moments of social crisis, even when the subject matter concerns Black dispossession, African poverty, and imperial violence. Platforms, donors, and institutions repeatedly select them as guides through instability because their presence reassures power while producing the appearance of Black-friendly critique. The relevance of this lies in how dissent is channelled rather than confronted.
Black voices do not recede by accident. Systems actively push them aside.
This displacement operates through substitution. Platforms foreground white male figures who speak about the Black condition and Black politics in ways that remain legible and reassuring to liberal, Western, and donor-aligned audiences. Fluency, tonal restraint, and rhetorical polish function as signals of seriousness. Structural injustice becomes something to be explained rather than confronted, while dispossession becomes something to be narrated rather than organised against. Over time, authority becomes associated with whiteness, while Black authority is recoded as disruptive, excessive, or unreliable.
This pattern follows a long-established soft-power logic. Power curates dissent instead of suppressing it.
Within this structure, the prominence of very young white male influencers demands particular attention. These figures can emerge in their early twenties, sometimes even younger, presenting themselves with the cadence, vocabulary, and confidence of someone with decades of political experience. They mimic the voices, analyses, and moral positioning of thinkers and organisers who carried real historical cost, borrowing language forged in struggle without having lived its consequences. They have only ever experienced white privilege. Yet within a remarkably short period, they become leading influencers, treated as serious political voices and positioned as moral reference points.
A further indicator exposes the hand of white capital in this rapid ascent. At precisely the moment when such a young figure is still forming their public voice, a calculated critique of the one Black political formation that poses a direct threat to white capital, namely the uMkhonto weSizwe Party, slips easily from their lips, particularly in interviews on Black youth platforms.
It is so obvious one can practically hear the voice of an Oppenheimer- or Hershov-type instructing the influencer to do just this during carefully organised interviews with depoliticised young Black influencers. It is this subtle manufacturing of consent that carries the unmistakable signature of a well-resourced campaign on behalf of corporate white South Africa. It does not arise from long engagement with African nationalist politics or from lived participation in mass organising. It appears as a rehearsed position, inserted early to signal ideological safety. That signal reassures funders, platforms, and institutional gatekeepers that this voice, however fluent or oppositional it may sound, will not cross the red lines that protect white economic power. It also signals a monetised campaign directed against a Black political party that potentially has the capacity to displace white dominance.
For those of us trained to watchdog imperial campaigns, this is a dead giveaway.
White capital plays an active role in producing the ascent of these decoy voices. Capital identifies such figures, accelerates their visibility, and converts attention into income, access, and status.
These young white male influencers earn substantial money through platforms, sponsorships, invitations, and monetised attention. Their success unfolds alongside mass Black youth unemployment. While Black youth with lived experience of dispossession struggle to escape poverty, a narrow group of white male influencers secure financial stability by narrating the Black condition from a position of safety.
This produces material displacement.
When a white male youth influencer occupies the space of political narration, they also occupy economic space. They draw not only income streams but also opportunities and institutional invitations that remain largely inaccessible to Black youth whose political clarity, organisational labour, and lived experience do not translate into monetisable visibility. The political economy of influence mirrors older colonial patterns. Whiteness does not only interpret the Black condition. Whiteness extracts value from that interpretation.
No matter how radical their language sounds, curation governs visibility and mimicry shapes voice. Much of this language circulates as modular sound bites, easily accessed and reproduced, including through generative AI tools such as ChatGPT. These tools compress analysis into recognisable rhetorical forms without the user doing the deep research that generates real political understanding. Borrowed knowledge, rather than theoretical grounding or praxis, defines the limits of this empty performance. The emphasis shifts toward clickbait rather than political education. The end result strategically dulls revolutionary fervour by converting political urgency into spectacle without consequence.
The Rewhitenisation Project
This mechanism sits at the centre of the rewhitenisation project, a project that runs parallel and in opposition to the call for ReAfricanisation.
Rewhitenisation does not deny injustice. Rewhitenisation recentres whiteness as the site of interpretation and closure. While the matter appears handled through authoritative white male charisma, the structure remains untouched. AI-generated explanation substitutes for transformation, and narration replaces structural confrontation.
This arrangement suits capital because it redirects anger without dismantling its source.
Dispossessed Black youth experience unemployment, landlessness, and the accumulated violence of broken promises. Their anger carries the potential to develop into structural critique, collective organisation, and revolutionary movement. White male influencers intercept that trajectory. They acknowledge rage, articulate it fluently, and package it into commentary that circulates safely within platform economies. They manage anger rather than organise it, and in doing so they drain it of revolutionary direction.
This project becomes especially visible at moments when African revolutionary thought regains momentum. The renewed attention on figures such as Ibrahim Traoré has re-energised Black youth across the continent, offering a language of sovereignty, dignity, and material transformation that directly threatens Western and white-capital interests. At such moments, the elevation of the “expert white voice” performs a stabilising function. It reassures anxious audiences that whiteness remains morally central even as African revolutionary consciousness sharpens.
Mimicry enables this manoeuvre. It allows the speaker to adopt the language of struggle without being shaped by struggle. It allows movement across ideological spaces without accountability. It reassures power while attracting those excluded by power. White male influencers rely on this capacity because it restores authority while presenting itself as critical.
The genealogy of this strategy extends beyond youth influencers. Figures such as Gareth Cliff and Ernst Roets prepared audiences for the renewed authority of white men who speak in the register of grievance while remaining insulated from consequence. They also demonstrate how mimicry functions as political currency and how fragments of radical language, whether left or right, can be absorbed, reshaped, and redeployed without threatening, but instead elevating, capital and empire. Put together with a youth influencer such as Pieter Kriel, who presents as divergent from their conservatism, they all push their “disparate” ideologies with confidence. Yet they all, oddly, have one thing in common: their derision for the MKP.
This analysis does not claim that all white commentators operate in this manner. There are mature white commentators, both male and female, whose work emerges from decades of intellectual labour, political engagement, and theoretical rigour. These figures speak from writing, research, and sustained commitment rather than from platform performance. They do not seek influencer status. Their voices do not compete for metrics. They remain marginal within algorithmic economies precisely because they do not offer capital the safety of managed outrage.
There are also white youth who reject the protections of white privilege and commit themselves to ground-level struggle within Black political parties, labour formations, and grassroots movements. These individuals do not rise quickly. Institutions do not celebrate them. The system treats them as dangerous because they abandon interpretive safety and place themselves within collective struggle where revolution becomes a material question rather than a rhetorical posture.
The same architecture that elevates white male influencers also produces white women who follow an almost identical trajectory. Their gender difference does not alter the underlying mechanism. Claims of radicalism and confused ideological positioning often characterise their work, with borrowed revolutionary language stitched together from traditions and thinkers who carried real political cost. They reproduce analysis without grounding, adopt voices forged in struggle without having done the work, and benefit from algorithmic elevation that places them far ahead of Black women who built those intellectual traditions under far harsher conditions.
The colonial trope remains intact.
The figure of “the great white hunter” has not disappeared. It has been updated. In the postmodern neocolonial era, they return as “the great white influencer”, sometimes accompanied by a female counterpart, travelling across landscapes of the Black condition, narrating them with confidence, gaining access, income, and authority, and departing with status intact. The terrain remains unchanged. The people who live within it continue to be pushed aside.
Revolution does not emerge from curated narration. Revolution emerges from organisation, sustained confrontation with structure, and refusal to allow suffering to be converted into content. The whitewashing of the Black condition through influencer culture blocks that path while presenting itself as illumination.
* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, poet, and uncompromising social justice activist. Founder of Media for Justice and co-owner of handHeld Films, she is recognised for hard-hitting documentaries and incisive opinion pieces that dismantle whiteness, neoliberal capitalism, and imperial power.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of or Independent Media.
