About

#HiddenFences is a hashtag that was spread through Black Twitter during and after the 2017 Golden Globe Awards which finds people combining the names of two popular African American films after Jenna Bush and Michael Keaton both mistakenly conflated the films Fences and Hidden Figures, calling it "Hidden Fences."

Origin

On January 8th, 2017, Jenna Bush, daughter of George W. Bush, was speaking to recording artist Pharrell Williams on the red carpet of the 2017 Golden Globe Awards. Meaning to ask him a question about his role making the music for the film Hidden Figures, she mistakenly called the film Hidden Fences, apparently combining Hidden Figures with the Denzel Washington movie Fences that also came out in 2016 (shown below).

Spread

The flub immediately drew criticism from Twitter users who saw the mistake as inadvertently racist. Soon, black people on Twitter began making jokes where they combined the movie titles of films that tell black and African American stories. The first was posted by Loki_013^[1] in a tweet that read, "@KendraJames_ Hidden Fences was great. Almost as good as 12 years of Selma and Straight outta Katwe" (shown below).

The jokes continued when Michael Keaton repeated the mistake during the program while presenting the award for Best Supporting Actress (shown below).

Keaton's flub drew high profile criticism from prominent black actors such as Gabrielle Union, who sarcastically tweeted,^[2] "You know who stars in #HiddenFences… Garcelle Ashanti Brandy Sanaa Bring It On Union _". Many news outlets covering the event wrote articles about the #HiddenFences hashtag, including Huffington Post,^[3] Hollywood Reporter,^[4] and more. That evening, a Novelty Twitter Account tweeted a movie poster for "Hidden Fences" to Hidden Figures star Octavia Spencer, who had mistakenly tweeted calling the film "Hidden Fences" three days earlier.^[5]

Various Examples

Search Interest

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External References