In yet another example of racism in the NFT space, the NFT project Meta Slave is rebranding itself after backlash. The project emerged in late January and has posted some concerning tweets along with the NFT collection. Due to uproar and outrage within the NFT community, it appears to be rebranding itself as Meta Humans.
Bizarrely, several tweets by the project claim that it is all some big misunderstanding. In one tweet, they stated, “In creating our project, we wanted to show that everyone is a slave to something. A slave to desires, to work, to money, etc.”
The explanation hides that the project is outrageously racist and has obvious racial connotations. Any person with an ounce of humanity would know that this is not a good idea, and it raises serious questions about the project’s intentions.
Meta Slave NFT collection points to a more significant issue in NFT space
Firstly, every image in the 1865 piece algorithmically generated NFT collection is of a Black person. It seems very unlikely that the person who created it didn’t do this on purpose to make fun of the brutal and barbaric system that killed and impacted millions of people.
In fact, the repercussions of slavery still echo through society today; it wasn’t that long ago. Meanwhile, the amount of NFTs (1865) is also the year that slavery was abolished in the USA (although many oppressive laws and rules remained in place for a long time after, and the impact can be still be seen today).
The project has also listed one NFT as “Hard Work” with a smiling face and an emoji of a plant. There is no way that all of this is some odd coincidence.
As members of the NFT space, we must do better to call out racist projects like Meta Slave. They are simply not welcome. Rightly so, OpenSea quickly removed the project, and thankfully, the NFT community is not buying the NFTS. They have only sold two so far. Thankfully, most of the NFT community is disgusted by racist NFT collections.
If you want to help raise awareness of racism, many charities focus on these issues primarily and support black people worldwide.
