Why are memes of black people reacting so popular online?
The online popularity of images of black people – particularly women and femme gay men – is a fact of internet life and, in recent months, an increasingly controversial one. Racist caricature and impersonation are widely accepted tools of white supremacy, but it’s when minstrelsy’s 19th-century traditional tools of boot polish and a wig are replaced with 21st-century equivalents that the confusion begins. Are gifs being used to disseminate racist stereotypes in cyberspace? Was the “black marching band dances to Fleetwood Mac” meme an example of “digital blackface”, as suggested in a recent high-traffic Twitter thread? Is there something problematic about white people using brown-skinned emojis? And what about the Black Lives Matter Facebook fundraising page that was revealed to be run by two unaffiliated white men in Australia? Was this the latest iteration of digital blackface in action? Or just a run-of-the-mill money-making scam?
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