Isaac Hayes III, son of famed soul singer Isaac Hayes, Jr., lost his cool and potential fans this weekend when he went on a social media spiral aimed at internet phenom Francesca “Chescaleigh” Ramsey.
The impetus for the crashout was because she gave a fair critique of his app and some of his past actions to her large following, which prompted him to harass her for what she said was 24 hours over the weekend instead of updating his app.
After doing a thorough search, I found that a personal website for Isaac Hayes III could not be located. Still, according to his app’s website, Fanbase boasts over 835,000 users worldwide, has raised over $9.6 million and many eyebrows from his response to Chescaleigh. While using another platform, he then proceeds to make a 16-slide post about her, including attacking her Blackness by including pictures from over 10 years ago with her white ex-husband while referencing “Not Like Us,” essentially calling into question Chescaleigh’s Blackness as if her content isn’t extremely pro-Black.
This all stems from Francesca “Chescaleigh’s” response to someone asking her if she would be joining the app back in January when TikTok was on the verge of collapse. The commenter mentioned it being Black-owned as a selling point, at which point Franchesca stated that was not enough for her. Her additional critiques were about him uplifting racists, groomers and misogynists and to prove he did neither of those things, he personally attacked a Black woman for her critiques while not addressing Black men who made similar statements.
When called a misogynist, Hayes defends himself against accusations by referencing his work on the Kamala Harris campaign as evidence to the contrary. In a social media response, Chescaleigh adds that if her white ex-husband negates Chescaleigh’s Blackness, then why wouldn’t Kamala’s?
Hayes’s pinned post on someone else’s social media app, Instagram, is a collage of pictures of five men, with his face in the center. The men in the collage are Mark Zuckerberg, the owner and founder of Meta; Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter); Shou Zi Chew, the owner of TikTok; Adam Mosseri, the creator of Instagram and himself—in a post where he compares their big dreams and small beginnings to his. The problem with that is that even though Instagram and Facebook have elements stolen from other apps, they were all essentially original ideas.
Fanbase is an amalgamation of various apps, but it is mostly like TikTok.
All these sites are free to use for content creators, even though X and Meta platforms offer a ‘checkmarked’ experience for a small monthly fee, they are not as potentially expensive as Fanbase, which has subscription programs for creators that range from $2.99 to $99 a month. The reviews for Fanbase are mixed, and there is often a learning curve for new apps, but as TikTok user Janescentered points out that because there are so few users, and there are some glitches on the app, most of the content is recycled from other apps and the video is grainy.
According to some of his posts, Hayes’s vision for the app is that Black people who are culture curators should be able to benefit just as well, if not better, than so many people who have used Black culture to get rich. He is absolutely correct, but instead of attacking Black creators, he should have been doing a better job at attaching himself to Black creators. According to Chescaleigh, he did apologize and invite her to his app, and even held a discussion about her.
She obviously declined to attend.
Hayes would probably have been better off listening to her critiques about how the platform could be better. Instead, he brought more attention to his app in the worst way possible. There is no post of the apology available on his Instagram, but there are several posts up which still address the situation and justify his actions.
Here is the difference between Hayes and the other four men from his post:
Those owners (with the exception of Elon) are not on their apps arguing with people who do not like them or their business models. In fact, they have stayed ahead of the curve and been innovators instead. At this stage in the game, new social media websites come and go; while Snapshot is still popular among younger users, its popularity has waned since Instagram has offered its ‘stories.’ Periscope’s live and live reactions have been integrated into multiple platforms. Clubhouse’s interface has been integrated into X (formerly Twitter) and Fanbase.
Hayes would be better off creating a union of content creators to combat theft and muscle for more financial control instead of reinventing the wheel and using it to roll over a Black woman in the process.
