On September 25, 2019, Jalaiah Harmon, a 14-year-old dancer from Fayetteville, Georgia, came home from school and asked her Instagram friend Kaliyah Davis, 12, to collaborate on a new dance3. Harmon studied at Sky Dance Academy and trained in hip-hop, ballet, lyrical, jazz, tumbling, and tap4. She listened to the beats in K Camp's "Lottery" and choreographed a difficult sequence to the chorus, weaving in existing viral moves like the Wave and the Woah5.

Harmon filmed herself performing the routine and posted it first to Funimate, then to her 20,000+ Instagram followers, with a side-by-side shot of her and Davis performing it together3. The Instagram post racked up about 13,000 views, and people started replicating it immediately5.

The Renegade's biggest impact wasn't the dance itself but the conversation it sparked about creator credit on social media. The New York Times profile of Jalaiah Harmon brought mainstream attention to the pattern of Black creators having their work appropriated without credit on platforms like TikTok5.

Following the controversy, Harmon was invited to perform at the 2020 NBA All-Star Game in Chicago4. The case also pushed TikTok to think more seriously about attribution tools and how dances spread on the platform.

K Camp's "Lottery" got a massive streaming boost from the trend. The Renegade was part of a wave of TikTok dances in 2019-2020 that demonstrated the app's power to push songs onto charts, alongside trends like the "Say So" dance for Doja Cat and the "Old Town Road" craze for Lil Nas X1.

The story also fed into wider debates about how social media platforms benefit from user-generated content while the original creators, particularly young Black artists, often see none of the financial upside4.

The Renegade's origin story traces back to an online dance community that most TikTok users didn't even know existed. Harmon identified as a "Dubsmasher," part of a network of young dancers who used apps like Dubsmash, Funimate, Likee, and Triller to create choreography and cross-post it to Instagram3. This community, made up largely of young Black creators, was a creative engine that TikTok's mainstream audience regularly drew from without acknowledgment.

As YouTube star Kayla Nicole Jones put it: "TikTok is like a mainstream Dubsmash. They take from Dubsmash and they run off with the sauce"3. Producer Polow da Don was even more blunt, saying Dubsmash catches things "at the roots when they're culturally relevant" while TikTok is "the suburban kids that take things on when it's already the style"3.

The Renegade followed this exact pipeline. It moved from Funimate to Instagram to TikTok, gaining polish and losing attribution at each step. The platform design made things worse: TikTok had no built-in system for tracing a dance back to its creator, unlike the Dubsmash community where tagging creators was standard etiquette3. As Dubsmasher Raemoni Johnson, 15, said: "On TikTok they don't give people credit. They just do the video and they don't tag us"3.

Tensions hit a breaking point on January 17, 2020, when Barrie Segal, the head of content at Dubsmash, posted a series of videos calling on Charli D'Amelio to credit Harmon3. The New York Times published a major profile of Harmon in February 2020, written by Taylor Lorenz, titled "The Original Renegade"5. The piece laid out how Black teens were shaping internet culture without getting proper credit, using Harmon's story as the central case study.

The Times article changed things. Harmon started getting recognition. She was invited to perform at the NBA All-Star Game in Chicago in February 20204. The media coverage forced a larger conversation about how viral content gets attributed, especially when the creators are young Black kids on smaller platforms.

Meanwhile, Charli D'Amelio's career skyrocketed partly on the back of the Renegade. By early 2020, she had 35.5 million TikTok followers, landed a Super Bowl commercial, danced with Jennifer Lopez, and appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon4. The contrast between D'Amelio's opportunities and Harmon's initial invisibility became a defining example of how platform dynamics can strip credit from original creators.

The controversy also raised legal questions. As writer Rebecca Jennings noted in Vox, "Dances are virtually impossible to legally claim as one's own"3. Without legal ownership, credit and attention were the main currencies available to creators like Harmon. "I think I could have gotten money for it, promos for it, I could have gotten famous off it," Harmon said. "I don't think any of that stuff has happened for me because no one knows I made the dance"3.

The Renegade case became a touchstone in broader debates about cultural appropriation on social media. Multiple articles framed the situation as a pattern: popular dances like Holy Moly Donut Shop, the Mmmxneil, and Cookie Shop had also come from young Black creators on smaller apps, only to blow up uncredited on TikTok3. The Renegade just happened to become the most visible example.