Over the past year, as the NFT space has begun to explode we've begun to see a
growing number of racist collections—most notably NFTs depicting George Floyd called "Floydies." This week we saw another project that surely won't be the last racist NFT project, astoundingly called the "Meta Slave" NFT collection, which featured images of Black people. After predictable and justified backlash, the project has not shut down, it has merely rebranded to also feature "white, Asian, etc." NFTs.
The collection,
since removed on OpenSea, contained 1,865 NFTs―a reference to the year the Constitution was amended to abolish slavery. Every NFT was of a Black face, priced around 0.01 ETH, and simply named "META SLAVE" and an assigned number. The faces had the hallmarks of being algorithmically-generated, such as surrealy malformed accessories and teeth. All of this felt like a digital slave auction, reinforced by a tweet from the project (
captured via the WayBack Machine) claiming that, "In creating our project, we wanted to show that everyone is a slave to something. A slave to desires, to work, to money, etc." That tweet added that "There will be other collections in the future: white, Asian, etc."
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