Symbols Black Friend Ziwe

The wikiFeet Rating as a Symbol of Objectification and Erasure in Black Friend

What Is the wikiFeet Rating in Black Friend?

In Chapter 3 of Black Friend, Ziwe introduces the website wikiFeet—a photo-sharing foot fetish site that ranks celebrities’ feet on a five‑star scale. She discovers that a photo of her feet, taken without consent, has been uploaded along with a rating of two stars (“okay feet”). The symbol becomes a lens through which she examines the dehumanization of women, especially Black women, in a culture that reduces them to ranked body parts.

Literal Description and Origins

wikiFeet is described as “a photo-sharing foot fetish site dedicated to photos of celebrities’ feet.” Ziwe first learns of her presence on the site in 2019, when a friend forwards her rating. The photo originates from a college beach shot in which she deliberately hid her toes in the sand, yet the image was still captured and posted. Her rating of two stars is based on five votes: one “beautiful,” one “nice,” two “okay,” and one “ugly.” The site’s practice of collecting and scoring women’s images without their permission mirrors larger patterns of invasive surveillance.

Recurrence and Changing Meaning

The wikiFeet rating recurs only within Chapter 3, but its implications echo across the book. Initially, Ziwe treats the rating as a humorous personal insecurity—she hates her feet and feels self‑conscious about strangers judging them. However, the meaning deepens when she compares her own page to those of Britney Spears (four stars, “nice feet”) and Victoria Justice (five stars, “gorgeous feet”). The comparison shifts from individual vanity to a critique of how society objectifies all women, and especially how it polices Black women’s bodies. Ziwe observes that Britney Spears’s wikiFeet comments focus on a chair blocking a “creep shot” of her feet, revealing a community that values invasive images over the person’s autonomy.

The symbol then expands into a metaphor for patriarchal control. Ziwe links Britney Spears’s wikiFeet page to her conservatorship, noting that the same system that ranks her body parts also held her captive. The rating becomes an “insidious tax on womanhood”—a price women pay for fame, where their bodies are publicly scored and their privacy is violated.

Character Connections

  • Ziwe: Her own experience on wikiFeet ties directly to her lifelong struggles with body image. As a child, she was insecure about her chemically relaxed hair, eczema, body odor, and dark skin. The wikiFeet rating adds a digital layer to that shame, forcing her to confront a public ranking of a body part she already dislikes.
  • Mia Khalifa: In the chapter’s opening interview, Mia Khalifa calls Ziwe’s low wikiFeet rating “racism at its finest.” Khalifa, a former adult performer who also faces body ranking, validates Ziwe’s feeling that the rating is not just about feet but about how Black women are judged differently.
  • Britney Spears: Ziwe uses Spears’s four‑star wikiFeet rating to illustrate the trap of fame. Spears’s page is inundated with comments that ignore her humanity—users lament a chair blocking a foot shot, not her suffering under a conservatorship. Spears becomes a symbol of how society objectifies women until they are “held captive in plain sight.”
  • Victoria Justice: Justice’s perfect five‑star rating represents the unattainable standard against which Ziwe’s feet are judged. The comparison underscores the arbitrary nature of beauty hierarchies and the way they are deployed to make women feel inadequate.

Theme Connections

The wikiFeet rating weaves together several core themes of Black Friend:

  • Body Image and Objectification: The site reduces women to a single body part and assigns a numerical value. Ziwe’s own childhood insecurities about her appearance—her hair, skin, and clothes—foreshadow this adult experience of being publicly ranked. She concludes, “I am more than ten toes.”
  • Racial Microaggressions and Erasure: Just as strangers mispronounce her name or mistake her for other Black women (as in Chapter 1’s WNBA game), the wikiFeet rating flattens her identity into a score. Mia Khalifa names the racial bias: Ziwe’s “okay” rating is a product of a system that devalues Black femininity.
  • Imposter Syndrome and Self‑Doubt: Despite her success, Ziwe admits she still cares about strangers’ opinions of her feet. This lingering self‑doubt tracks with the imposter syndrome she explores elsewhere—the fear that she does not belong or is not good enough, even when she has achieved recognition.
  • Code‑Switching and Authenticity: Ziwe’s response to the wikiFeet rating is a mix of satire and genuine vulnerability. She half‑jokingly asks readers to vote for her feet, while also committing to self‑acceptance. This tension mirrors her broader struggle between performing for others and being her authentic self.

How the Symbol’s Meaning Evolves Through the Chapter

The wikiFeet rating begins as an absurd, personal indignity. Ziwe calls it a “racist hate crime” in jest, but the humor gives way to serious analysis. By examining Britney Spears’s page, Ziwe exposes the connection between foot‑ranking and systemic control over women’s bodies. The symbol ultimately becomes a call to action: she demands that readers vote for her on wikiFeet, but this request is ironic—it highlights the absurdity of asking for validation from a system she has just condemned. The chapter ends with a note of resilience: “no one will love me, or my feet, like I love myself.”

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does Ziwe use the wikiFeet rating to critique systemic racism in beauty standards?

Ziwe argues that her two‑star rating reflects a racial bias. Mia Khalifa explicitly calls the low score “racism,” and Ziwe connects it to her history of being judged for her dark skin. By contrasting her rating with Victoria Justice’s perfect five stars, she shows that whiteness is often the unspoken standard on such platforms. The ranking system, she implies, is not objective but embedded in cultural hierarchies that devalue Black women’s bodies.

2. What role does Britney Spears’s wikiFeet page play in the chapter, and how does it connect to the theme of patriarchal control?

Spears’s page has over 3,600 votes and a four‑star average, yet the comments focus on trivial details like a chair blocking a foot shot. Ziwe juxtaposes this with Spears’s conservatorship, under which she was allegedly forced to perform and medicated against her will. The wikiFeet rating, Ziwe suggests, is a small part of a larger system that treats women’s bodies as public property, subject to scrutiny and control. The “insidious tax on womanhood” is both the rating and the loss of autonomy.

3. How does Ziwe’s childhood body shame inform her reaction to her wikiFeet rating?

Throughout the chapter, Ziwe recounts insecurities about her hair, eczema, body odor, and skin color. These experiences taught her to see herself as ugly long before the wikiFeet rating existed. The rating thus feels like an official confirmation of those childhood fears. However, it also pushes her toward self‑acceptance: after analyzing the system that produced the rating, she decides to enjoy her body regardless, calling her feet “imperfectly perfect.”

4. Why does Ziwe both mock the wikiFeet community and ask readers to vote for her? What does this contradiction reveal?

Ziwe mocks the site’s dehumanizing nature—she points out that users get “dizzy with lust” over Victoria Justice’s feet—yet she ends the chapter with a direct plea: “Please go to wikifeet.com … and vote for me.” This contradiction reveals her vulnerability: even as she critiques the system, she still craves external validation. It also underscores the inescapability of such evaluation for women in the public eye. By making the request with self‑aware humor, she exposes the absurdity of needing strangers’ approval while simultaneously refusing to be defined by their scores.

Conclusion

The wikiFeet rating in Black Friend is far more than a curiosity about foot fetish culture. Ziwe transforms it into a multilayered symbol of objectification, racial bias, and patriarchal surveillance. Through personal narrative, pop‑culture analysis, and sharp humor, she shows how even a seemingly trivial ranking can reflect the dehumanization of Black women. The symbol ultimately becomes a site of resistance, where Ziwe reclaims her body on her own terms.