Is The Shade Room Toxic?

The Shade Room is a platform that predominantly discusses gossip regarding black celebrities throughout social media. Angelica Nwandu: is the owner; runs with her seven other staff employees. The Shade Room often writes their captions with a double entendre to stir up their fan base.

The Shade Room has many instances where they’ve featured LGBTQ+ content, with the comments being ruthless. There was a situation where they reposted a picture of Lil Nas X, and the comments were criticizing that the Shade Room was encouraging LGBTQ+. Another incident was when they reposted Zaya Wade, Dwayne Wade’s transgender daughter. The comment section was rife with deadnaming and misgendering towards a child.

It’s not just homophobia within their community but also body shaming. Chadwick Boseman, the late black panther, was uploaded on the Shade Room in April; he was visibly slimmer; despite him being extremely sick, the comment section was filled with derogatory comments about his size. After his passing in August, sometime after the Shade Room revisited that post and disabled the comment section. All those months passed, and it wasn’t until his death that they felt compelled to close the nasty remarks, which makes you wonder if it was to protect their reputation; rather than their morals.

The Shade Room is familiar with the numerous discrimination among their fans but has no intention of stopping LGBTQ+ representation, but does that also prevent you from closing the comments? Why should friends and families see how the most liked comments are all negative? Yes, it’s not their fault that their audience is toxic, but they make very little effort with preventing it from furthering, making them just as awful, if not worse, than their fans.

The Shade Room thrives on altercations and criticism because it keeps its income flowing. They don’t care about the people they hurt with their fan base, and unfortunately, many black media outlets are the same, targeting black nonconformists.