BLACK MEME -RECAP
“Each figure as an icon is pulled between the symbolism of Blackness, pitted in opposition to the humanity of Blackness, in addition to Blackness-as-signifier.” (113)
In reading Black Meme we asked questions like: What is a meme? What is a Black Meme? What happens when Blackness is trafficked by Whiteness and White spectatorship? What are ways of “healing” and reframing our relationships to these digital proliferations and repetitions?
WHAT IS A MEME?
Legacy Russell does not spend a lot of time defining meme in this text because it wasn’t necessary. But we decided to look at this as a starting point to reflect on Black memetics.
A meme is a digital cultural artifact that rips an image from its place of origin to create a new image-caption dialogue. For example, if one shares a photo of a cat with their friend and says “Opie is so cute” - this is an image with text but not a meme because there is a knowing and a personal attachment to the original imaged subject. We personally know the connection of this cat to the sender and therefore to ourselves, and see it as itself. HOWEVER, if one were to take a picture of their cat “going crazy,” and caption it “me on a good day,” the image no longer speaks of their cat Opie, but rather of the relatable experience expressed by the gesture of the cat. This image and caption can therefore carry this same information and meaning to many regardless of the knowing the cat or the sender personally. Brandon Foushee stated “Knowing the origin isnt what makes it memeable” (or memorable). This dialogue - a memes’ statement - often resonates and creates a sense of “sameness” between those who share it. It can, because of this, also create “out” groups in relatability - those with differing inferred references points.
A point that Legacy Russell convincingly emphasizes is the foundation of digital meme in AFK (away from keyboard - IE flesh/skin space) materialities. These memetics form from gestures, textures, vernaculars that are repeated and proliferated - she names Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Harlem’s ball performances, and lynching postcards as reflective of this point. These symbolisms and bodies were distributed virally via the same mechanisms as what we traditionally know as a meme, though not always digitally.
A personal claim: I think that though memetics has its origin in AFK bodies/materiality, a digital meme is consistenly communicated, and has to be communicated, in the form of a rectangle. It’s physical shape is determined by the specific spaces in which it is proliferated. It would not read the same in a different physical shape (and would be hard to achieve).
What is a Black Meme?
Russell looks at how the meme is created and re-created and then lived (the digital/AFK loop - both create each other), is useful in examining how we embody imagery, and images and their spread impacts our AFK bodies and creates, not just mimics, their gestures.
Legacy Russell does not spend much time defining the meme generally, but specifically looks at the Black Meme. Russell defines the Black Meme as “Blackness-as-memetic-material” that is copied and re-circulated, and later clarifies it as the “copying, and carrying, of Blackness itself as the viral agent.” The portrayal of the Black body within a viral context. She does not emphasize its digitality, and rather focuses on the “online/AFK loop” (p.8) of viral power structures that did not originate with the internet. A consistent factor of the meme is its representation of body (but not always), and its use as a tool to communicate something in a shared visual gestural language - most often funny.
What happens when Blackness is trafficked by White people?
When Black bodies are trafficked in this form, and virally, by a primarily White spectatorship, it continues Black subjugation and their lack of bodily agency. It continues stereotypes. It mimics Blacknesses as something the be commodified or used for comedic, ornamental affect. It creates aesthetics that affirms its “lesser”ness, it extends the digital blackface. It is flattened, disembodied, fragmented. This fragmentation is very different than the fragmentation mentioned by Kimberly Juanita Brown in Repeating Bodies in describing Toni Morrison’s ghostly character Beloved and Octavia Butler’s missing limb of Dana in Kindred - fragmentations that usefully and viscerally communicate the ways in which bodies archives pasts and futures (the Trans-Atlantic Black subject in her work).
What are ways of “healing” and reframing our relationships to these digital proliferations and repetitions?
Legacy Russell lists a few important examples.
Garrett Bradley’s “America” - a film that reclaims an early (perhaps the earliest?) Black film production and is then redistributed by her - a black individual who is not held captive by a White gatekeeper in her sharing of it. She named it “America” hoping to re-populate algorithmic searches of “America.”
LINK HERE
THIS IS Garrett Bradley - give her a follow
Another is through the work of Neema Githere with the concept of “data healing.”
FIND NEEMA ONLINE HERE
and YAA for further writing on Data Healing
Ways in which I personally wanted to examine my complacency and the ways in which I’ve participated: Using Breonna Taylor’s face as an icon for "BLM” protests - in doing so I was so so easily and mindlessly taking away her right to choose and using her face, her personhood, to “stand in” for an idea (rather than her personhood itself). I also felt the need to go through and examine my own use of memes: where have I participated in forms digital black-face or AFK appropriation? Where can I identitfy these coming across my feeds and stop, at least my, own participation in “liking” or spreading them? What are examples of ones that show a black individual in some capacity and do Not traffic Blackness, does this exist (I would say yes, I use an example in my thesis, more to come!)?