On June 6, 2020, Youtuber Courtney Adanna (@Courtreezy) posted a reaction video titled “RATING TIK TOKERS N WORD APOLOGY VIDEOS because im black.” Courtreezy started off the video by reacting to a mea culpa from Chase Hudson, whose pseudo-apology video featured continuous angle changes and incomprehensible whispers.
“Why you keep changing angles?” she asks in the video. “You trying to remember your lines?” A 3 out of 10, she concluded.
Posted in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, the video became her first uber-viral video with 12.4 million views. It’s her most popular video to date, expanding her audience tenfold from 30,000 subscribers to 300,000. By the time she finished her four-part series of rating N-word apology videos, she had reached half a million subscribers.
That’s when Adanna doubled down on reaction videos, which have been a central part of her account ever since, earning her more than 3.5 million subscribers. From TikTok couples with age gaps to mukbangs, Adanna has developed an audience by reacting to some of the most divisive content on TikTok. …
