Black Meme: A History of The Images That Make Us

by Legacy Russell

A history of Black imagery that rewrites the history of visual culture and technology now

Representations of Blackness have always been integral to our understanding of of the modern world. In Black Meme , Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the construct, culture, and material of the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to present day. Mining both archival and contemporary media Russell explores the impact of Blackness, Black life, and death on contemporary conceptions of viral culture, borne in the age of the internet.

These meditations the circulation of Lynching postcards; Jet Magazine’s publication of a picture of Emmett Till in his open casket; how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma enters the nation’s living room and changed the debate on civil rights; how a citizen-recorded video of the Rodney King beating at the hands of the LAPD became known as the “first viral video”; what the Anita Hill hearings tell us about the media’s creation of the Black icon; Tamara Lanier’s fight to reclaim the photos of her enslaved ancestors, Renty and Delia, from Harvard’s archive; the Facebook Live recording by Lavish “Diamond” Reynolds of the murder of her partner Philando Castile by the police after being stopped for a broken tail light; and more.

Legacy Russell explores the power of these tokens and argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, Race, Audiobook, Theory

192 pages, Hardcover

Published May 7, 2024

About the author

Legacy Russell is an American curator and writer. She is associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Previous to this role Russell worked as an independent curator alongside her work at online platform Artsy expanding the company's gallery relations across Europe.

Reviews

[Teo · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book left me heavily confused because something about it was just not clicking. It might've not helped that I went into this expecting it to be a lot more about internet meme culture, and for example, how Black people are often used for reaction gifs and just memes in general, but it really wasn't about that.

The bits talking about Black media in general and how it can be exploited made sense, but the way Russell tried connecting it to, I suppose, digital culture wasn't working for me. The emphasis on knowing context and the person behind the image is of course important for situations like police shootings and any racist acts, but I don't understand how that could be translated to reaction GIFs for example. Its two entirely different situations. One that is most definitely harmful and one that is typically not, as I see people use GIFs as a way to convey their emotions rather than in a mocking way (though of course my experience doesn't mean all).
The chapter talking about the first viral GIF video called "Dancing Baby" or "Baby Cha-Cha" makes clear my complete confusion with the points Russell is trying to make. Russell at first calls the dancing baby GIF 'raced material', the origin point of cyberspace 'minstrelsy', and how it is a representation of "the relationship between Blackness and Black childhood as engineered for entertainment and, stripped of its agency, made property to whomever is on the sending or receiving end of the file," but then also calls it a "fetishized White imagination of fictive Black movement" due to the dance its doing that is drawn from Afro-Latinx tradition (the cha-cha). Is the dancing baby a representative of Black people and supposed to boost the quote in the chapter by Kandis William saying, "This is American entertainment, and it's always been laughing, dancing, dying slaves," or is it supposed to show cultural appropiation? Now I am white, so my opinion on this is probably worthless, but I feel equating a GIF of a dancing WHITE baby to the lynching post-cards used as death mementos is a huge stretch that makes no sense to me at all. I left that chapter feeling like I had no idea what I just read, and that was the one I was looking forward to most because I thought it would educate me on the frequent use of Black people in GIFs and memes, which I went into this book wanting.

Besides that, it generally felt like there was a lot of room left for thought, which left me unsatisfied. I would've liked if we'd gotten more from the chapters, as this felt rushed and not very engaging. I took my issues with it as primarily a reader (me) problem, but I do think something with the writing is not as concise as it could be.

[Phyllis | Mocha Drop · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well Done! This is a well-researched, engrossing compilation of selected ‘essays’ on Blackness - culture, sexuality, etc and its depiction in different eras in various forms of media. Iconic work is examined within its original context and also with modern eyes which makes for great conversation fodder. As a fan of history, I appreciated the chronological layout featuring popular personalities, unforgettable events or viral memes. Unfortunately, many of the depictions made me cringe, some moved me to anger, and others evoked sadness.

Overall, I enjoyed the author’s analysis and observations from differing angles, points of view, and the explanation of how Blackness is reduced, distorted, and maligned via the White lens.

Thanks to the publisher, Verso, and NetGalley for an opportunity to review.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded up. After the brilliant Glitch Feminism, I was eager to pick this book up. It did not disappoint. Russell draws on a rich and diverse theoretical genealogy to trace the exploitation of the Black image, of Black life transformed into sociocultural commodity in the long wake of chattel slavery. Their case studies are compelling and rich, and I appreciate their inclusion of myriad sources both “scholarly” and “non-“.

What I wish was that Russell had lingered linger with their cotheorizers, with Black mimesis conceptually. Turns to specific case studies at times seemed rushed and summary-heavy. That doesn’t detract from the theoretical heft nor the importance of Russell’s intervention, just that I wish there were more book here!

[Sena · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read, I really like how approachable Russel’s writing makes theory. I definitely will comeback to revisit certain chapters and quotes cause the text is hitting at exactly the questions of body at the intersection of visual culture and archive/data critique that are lingering in my head. The last chapter also perfectly hit at the topic of the haptic which I’ve been stumbling into as of late in my writing/listening/reading. Definitely recommend!

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Review copy from netgalley for review consideration)
“Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us” by Legacy Russell starts off with an exploration of the context behind specific images. The first one, for instance, is of Bert Williams, a Black performer who lived and worked around the late 1800s to early 1900s. He also performed in blackface minstrel shows, with burnt cork or other darkening agents like shoe polish, applied over his already Black skin, to amplify his Blackness and take it to an exaggerated effect for the fact that white audiences would laugh at him, for that was his role—a buffoon. When Williams began to express an interest in working in the entertainment industry, he was told by the predominantly white showrunners, directors, and so on that he had to blackface, or nothing else.

Further, he could only play derogatory roles such as enslaved person, servant, butler, or anything that cast him in a negative light. He was also expected to speak in an exaggerated imitation of what white audiences believed Black people to sound like, something popularized by the father of blackface minstrel shows, T.D. Rice, who thrived in the 1830s. It deeply conflicted Williams to go into this line of work, knowing that he was contributing actively to the increase in stereotypical and horrible depictions of Black people that were intended to make white audiences laugh, and yet, he had to put food on the table for his family.

In any case, “Black Meme” starts with an image of him in blackface, the nuances of which the author explains very well. The discussion then turns to blackface on white actors in “The Birth of a Nation,” possibly the most racist film ever made in American cinema. Nonetheless, it is a crucial text that requires the further scrutiny and contextualization that scholars have applied to it over the years, and in this book as well.

This then creates the bridge to the prolific use of gifs on social media. One of these gif moving images has resulted in memes. Some of them are moving images or clips while others are still images with text on the bottom to make the point across. One of the most prevalent memes of the past decade has been the “Karen,” usually a wealthy white woman, but not always wealthy, in which she weaponizes her whiteness, usually to attack other people of color, usually Black people, as in the famous example of the Amy Cooper, the white Karen, who in 2020, was walking her dog without a leash in a New York park in 2020. She called the police on the Black birdwatcher also there, Chris Cooper (no relation). As the author asserts, Amy Cooper knew exactly which phrases to use to make herself sound like the damsel in distress who needed police to ‘rescue’ her from ‘Big Black Brute’ who was ‘attacking’ her and making her feel ‘unsafe.’

One of the other offshoots that “Black Meme” points to is the famous case of Emma Hallberg, a white woman, who engaged in what’s called blackfishing. That is to say, she deliberately manipulated her appearance to make herself look like a Black woman and to try to pass herself off as Black. One piece for Paper Magazine had writer Wanna Thompson rightfully calling this “[W]hite girls cosplaying as [B]lack women on Instagram.”

Many, many other women have profited from this including Kim Kardashian, and her half-siblings the Jenners, both Kylie and Kendall, who have gone further by individually misappropriating Black hairstyles — including Fulani braids that belong to West African women primarily from the Sahel region. Kim and the team who styled her for this look seemed oblivious about the fact that the braids are not just a hairstyle. They have a very deep cultural significance. In many West African cultures and others across the continent, how hair is worn symbolizes status in a tribe and many other things that are unique to the African peoples from whom these styles originated. Kim has also put her hair in cornrows or box braids, as well as used tanning beds and salons to darken her skin, in addition to undergoing cosmetic procedures for fuller lips and makeup techniques in addition to magazine photoshop airbrushing to make herself look for Black on purpose.

She, and countless other white women in particular, have successfully monetized Blackness and profited from it tremendously while issuing such ridiculous calls for sympathy, telling fans that her mixed-race daughters want Kim’s hairstyles to match theirs and that she has to explain to them why that’s not possible — as if she does not profit from blackfishing and her proximity to Blackness on a daily basis. Like many women before her, Kim long ago figured out how to monetize this appropriation of Black looks and features in order to legitimize herself and to boost her popularity, and by extension, her bank book.

One of the problematic ways this manifests, as the author describes is when we get to Black reaction GIFs. They provide “a container for the holding and control of Black affect—one that performs and circulates without permission of or payment to those depicted within them.” This also disassociated the Black body from a living, breathing selfhood “and makes the Blackness within it a caricature, a cartoon.”

So yes, if you’re a non-Black person, she explains very clearly why it’s harmful to use a Black person in the reaction GIFs. And also keep in mind that you don’t have to be white for this to apply to you. Think of the example of Awkwafina, a woman of East Asian Chinese descent, who created an entire persona and used Blackness as a way of getting to the front of the queue, misusing a Blaccent and pretending that is the way she speaks.

(And yes, the special case of Rachel Dolezal is discussed here, too)

Other topics discussed include the very, very troubling issues of AI technologies whose engines behave in very racist ways toward images of Black people or what AI ‘perceives’ as images of Black people, their depictions, and the implications for law enforcement who already weaponizes so many horrendous things against Black and brown populations, and really does not need another digital tool to help them cause even more devastation and wrongful death.

Another very, very important chapter deals with the images that white photographers took during and after lynchings of countless Black Americans, predominantly in the first half of the 20th century. The photographers would then commercialize these photographs, turn them into postcards, and sell them to white families—those who were there and participated in the lynchings, as a despicable “souvenir,” as well as to white families who were not there and who nonetheless hung these postcards in their homes the same way that many now do with family portraits or with cabinets of fine dining plates and cutlery. The author’s analysis in this section is very astute and well worth engagement.

Some of the media studies/digital art frameworks that form the underlying theory that this book is grounded in may be a bit more difficult or challenging for non-academic readers to engage with, although anyone with a vested interest in the overall issues that this book covers will want it, and it has been a long time coming, particularly because the nature of digital media is that it is so evanescent, one day here and gone the next unless someone has screenshotted it or captured it somehow, and archived it, kept it, made it accessible, and so on.

As most archivists would deal with postcards and announcements of let’s say a country fair, or a ball, or something as ephemera, the author points to how digital ephemera is a new category that is even more challenging to capture and to share and to preserve for posterity of future generations.

There’s another very controversial art history show in which someone who should not be in any way shape or form defending the n-word did so. I’m not going to get into that and was very offended by that section.

The next section starts with one of the most iconic images of those, particularly taken by Jet Magazine, in the 1955 wake of the brutal lynching and murder of Emmett Till. It’s an image of his mother, Mamie Till, surrounded by grieving parishioners. And although it took the US House of Representatives until 2022 to pass a federal anti-lynching bill, one thinks of how this would have affected George Floyd’s case if it had been passed in 2020 instead. Or the countless other brutal lynchings and murders of Black people that continue in too large numbers across the United States. The author gives a brief outline of the circumstances of Till’s murder and about the double jeopardy law that shielded Till’s murderers, Bryant and Milam, from being charged twice for the same crime.

Even with the clear photographic evidence of the way that Strickland’s images revealed the truth of how Emmett Till’s corpse was discovered, the court overruled them and cited them as ‘irrelevant.’ The image that did get published of Till’s corpse in his casket came out in Jet magazine. The “Black Meme” author then goes on to explain more of the significance of this and of Mamie Till’s decision to show what had happened to her son to the world. The discussion next turns to an excerpt from one of Sun Ra’s works which is particularly poignant.

As the author asserts, “When we engage Blackness as mythology, it becomes open-source material, meaning that it can be hacked, circulated, gamified, memed, and reproduced.” And this leads to what social scientist Kwame Holmes has termed ‘necrocapitalism’ that makes the value of Black death a ‘fungible commodity, worth of exchange.’

Then getting into the concept of ‘Eating the other’ which comes about in the book ‘The Delectable Negro,’ the discussion expands to “Black objecthood as a material property.”

Other famous images that the author brilliantly deconstructs and adds to include those from the march at Selma, and a very interesting chapter on Michael Jackson in “Thriller.” Readers may know that it’s one of the best-selling records of all time, but also it sold millions of copies of the videon on VHS as well. This springboards into a discussion about the affordability of digital media equipment like the VCR and raises the question — affordable for whom? White middle classes for the most part. Perhaps modern-day readers forget the cultural impact that “Thriller” had in other respects, as well. The author brilliantly explains how “Thriller” tied into viral zombieism particularly because in 1982, a year before ‘Thriller’ came out, the CDC used the term ‘AIDS’ for the first time for the deadly new disease reaching epidemic proportions, and how that was weaponized against communities of color, against gay men in particular.

One of my favorite chapters was the one that discusses “Paris is Burning,” one of my all time favorite documentary films despite the issues that have since been pointed out in the decades from its early 1990s release. I am an outside to ballroom culture and state that upfront, because there are too many non-Black and non-brown white people in particular who have a very obnoxious habit of insisting that they are somehow experts in this world that they are not anywhere near a part of, because they’ve binge watched all of Rupaul’s drag race, or they watched this documentary, or they watched ‘Pose’ and somehow thinks that this confers upon them expert status on the ballroom world, which is… I find it very obnoxious. In any case, other readers who enjoyed “Paris is Burning” will enjoy the analysis in this chapter of “Black Meme” and will particularly appreciate the discussion of how the misappropriation, mostly on the part of non-Black people online, of terms like “fierce” and “yassss queen” which go to Queer African American Vernacular English, or what the author shortens to QAAVE.

The author rightly points to filmmaker Livingston’s privilege and some of her worse statements as aspects about what made “Paris is Burning” problematic as it is told through yes, a queer gaze (Livingston is a lesbian) but nonetheless a white gaze. There is also the issue of opening queer private spaces “for a White public voyeurism” which bell hooks wrote about in her essay from 1992 called “Is Paris Burning?”

Some further argued that the objectification of the performers featured in the film erased the fact that some of them passed away from AIDS-related complications or murder, such as in the case of Venus Xtravaganza, who dreamed of being able to afford surgery that would enable her to transition in a way of her choosing.

To me, there’s no question that ‘Paris is Burning’ should have been made. But as I have echoed in other book reviews where this work has come up, I think it would be quite something to have had a Black queer filmmaker make this documentary film.

There is also the very real issue of Livingston receiving the bulk of profits from the film but not paying some of the performers what they were owed.

Other chapters discuss Rodney King’s vicious beating on the part of the LAPD, Anita Hill, as well as the ‘dancing baby’ that preceded GIFs in many ways.

Overall, an excellent text that presents so many layers of analysis, “Black Meme” is so much more than its title. It makes the reader engage with different frameworks and expands on digital media studies with a focus on Blackness, which is still rare and should be more proliferating.

[Ana]

This is a great introduction to visual culture studies in the digital era from the race perspective, which is as the book argues not a perspective really, racism runs through the history of every visual representation. The structure is really similar to her previous book, Glitch feminism, and the last part of the book is very close to its argument for the existence of the digital form of the entity and inside of digital images, GIFs and memes.

Several years back on twitter someone asked why is so normal to use GIFs of black people, completely decontextualize as reaction pics. Why do we only see viral black representation as something in the margins, just humorous and even humiliating. Legacy Russell has a conference about footnotes, about how marginalized identities are footnotes on the text and we need to rethink the purpose of the footnote, and create from the footnote. I think she does exactly this, in Black Meme. Through a craniological review of viral images, from newspapers, films, music videos, etc.,starting from extremely negative and racist representations such as The Birth of a Nation and the birth of The Karen, she explores the margins of the images, and the whole book functions as a great footnote to each image.

Who are these people in the GIFs we use as reaction pics? We all know the images, but they do not exist outside the virality of utility on social media. Black Meme tries to give sense to black identity outside the temporal image, they are not pixels on a screen, they are bodies, voices, they exist as complete so they shouldn't be reduced to fragments.

«Thus, a dilemma, heartbreaking in its profundity: faced with Blackness in life, in death, and in reanimation, via re/ performance-as a viable commodity, the Black image, as well as the objects and locations that advance the social and physical death of Black people, are made fungible contingent on their perpetuation, the impact of their capital bolstered by the erotic of the violence they promise. The promise of harm gone viral is an economic strategy.»

Black Meme opens ways of understanding digital images, always looking for context, ambiguity, criticism and above all humanizing the subjects that have been, throughout the history of images, turned into objects contained in the imagination of white people.

Thanks to Verso and NetGalley for the advanced copy.

[Hind · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit too academic for me, and considering I am not an American I am unfamiliar with many of the things touched upon in this book, it is still good and worth reading, but better read if you are well versed in American history

[Christl Stringer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mandatory reading for all people on Earth with internet access

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Legacy Russell has a great eye for those moments and events that disrupt, especially systems of power. Her pervious book, Glitch Feminism , explored moments of artistic practice that unsettle and thereby expose forms of patriarchal power. Although taking a different form, there is a sense in which it does similar things to the USA’s hierarchies of race and the creation and assertion of Blackness.

Some of the images, although they may seem odd in their juxtaposition, also seem obvious as marking 20th Blackness in the USA. There is the 1963 march on Selma, Mamie Till at Emmett’s funeral, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, and Peter Normal on the 200m winner’s podium at the 1968 summer Olympics, a zombified Michael Jackson, and a poster for Paris is Burning. Others are less intuitive but fit perfectly. Aside from the first Black kiss in a movie (1913 in Lime Kiln Field Day the opening image is of groups of white people – unusual Black memes perhaps, except that they are postcards of lynchings. It’s a reminder just comprehensively that decades long campaign of terror against the USA’s Black population has been written out of the national history. It also, for me, brought to mind Matthew Andrews’ essay exploring race in sport in impressive Teaching US History Through Sports where he opens with a crowd photo taken in Paris, Texas in 1893 that too all intents looks like a sports crowd – except that they too were there for a lynching. It’s a powerful opening and a reminder of the definitional power of an image where the subject is absent.

Some of the most potent parts of the book are those absences. Exploring the other ‘lynching’, the one where Clarence Thomas proclaimed himself the subject of a ‘high tech lynching’, Russell explores two sets of images – one from the Senate hearings, one from a movie – to remind us that the image of Thomas most of us have is from the non-fiction setting, the Senate hearings, whereas the most widely known image of ‘Anita Hill’ is not from her powerful testimony at those hearings, but of Kerry Washington playing Hill in the movie Confirmation. In this case, the symbolic annihilation (of women) is potent, whereas the other especially punchy essay, for me, highlights symbolic appropriation dealing with Tamara Lanier’s efforts to recover daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestor ‘Renty’ from Harvard University. It’s a sharply crafted unpacking of ownership – of images of a man who at the time they were made was owned which Russell presents as Renty’s continuing labour for the (Harvard) corporation, and an afterlife of enslavement.

The images she grapples with allow Russell to explore the dynamics and ubiquity of the power of whiteness, and the ways the political cultures of ‘race’ in the USA are made, disputed , prolonged and disrupted by the ever-presence of at times unexpected images. There is the film of the beating of Rodney King, given shape and significance by the regularly used police expression – ‘No Humans Involved’. This then is further juxtaposed with the body camera imagery of the police killing of Breonna Taylor and phone footage of Philando Castile’s death by police.

The dynamics of power Russell unpacks in each of these cases is both obvious and concealed, where images exist by inference and implication, where the what-is-not-seen can mark the subject and power of the image. Yet she also notes that there is a complex question of truthfulness here, made more complex by the rise of large language models of AI. In these 13 short essays Russell has given us a rich exploration the USA’s 20th century Blackness, and unsettled out expectations of the coming conditions might hold. There is no ‘glitch’ here, but there is intense and ferocious disruption.

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

The viewpoint which places the experience of Black Americans at the heart of culture in the US is very familiar, with the rise of jazz and its derivative musical forms being the iconic example. Russell extends that argument by making the case for the representation of Black people in visual culture, ranging across Blackface minstrelsy in the 19th century and the early years of epic cinema, represented in The Birth of a Nation, notorious images of lynching, the 'I can't breathe' killings of recent times, and Black memes showing up across social media.

Russell sees this as an increased scope for the exploitation of African Americans and she points to some convincing examples of how that came about. But it seems to me that she downplays the tensions generated by placing images of exploitation through to torture and murder at the centre of a popular discourse. What was stirred up, for example, by the postcards which featured White people partying around the bodies of lynched victims? Did it add to the numbers celebrating, or the volume of people being added to supporters of the civil rights cause?

The conclusion of her argument is that Black people should assert ownership of their images as they go into mass circulation, much in the way African American music producers established their own record labels and management structures in the 50s and 60s to escape the gross exploitation that short-changed, or downright impoverished, a generation of musicians. My thought at this point was that it would be easier to join visual exploitation to the all-pervading forms of exploitation that characterise capitalism, and work to do away with the whole shebang.

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comprehensively researched and mostly written without going too into academic jargon (though there's definitely some of that, especially at the beginning). I appreciated the way Russell wove the usage of Black people's images in popular media and culture through American history, from lynching postcards to reaction gifs, and would definitely recommend this as a quick deep dive on the topic. Where she lost me was the dancing baby gif, which I don't recall being racially coded at all, but I am a white person who was 12 when that was a thing so who knows.

[micah · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were a lot of ideas I really liked in this book but I struggled to grasp the concept of a Black meme until the end. I think it would’ve worked better for me if it had been phrased as “Black digital ornament” but perhaps the contextualization went far over my head.

I really loved the way she brought modern and contemporary thinkers. Would definitely recommend! There are a lot of things she put a name to that felt important and resonant.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another text that will be the base for critical writing for the next few years. A chronological following of images of Black people / Black bodies and their dissemination into culture - excited to read whats sparked from this

[Zack]

I really appreciated this book and how it found a through line from lynching postcards to Emmett Till's article in JET to the Rodney King video to the dancing baby to the livestreaming of Jeronimo Yanezo killing of Philando Castile.

[Alexander · Rating 1 out of 5]

My biggest issue with this book isn’t that it’s stating overt falsehoods or challenging my own beliefs because it isn’t. It’s that Russell is smart enough to read between the lines of these issues and is intentionally blurring them to cultivate frustration, animosity, and distrust

[Allan Dunderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is well-researched and compelling examination of history of the Black meme. If you’re looking for a pop-sociology take on this subject, this isn’t it.

[Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super informative

[Stephanie Borges Folarin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in one day. It is a very interesting collection of images and histories. Although the dancing baby was a stretch, everything else was fascinating.

[Joy Anyanwu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Miss Legacy Russel you’ve done it again!!! Such a poignant exploration of the lineage of mimetic/memetic transfer of blackness. gave me soo much to think about

[cow girl · Rating 4 out of 5]

lowkey I want to give this a 5 so I might update it

[Fina · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5-4

[Fernanda Armada · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me lo recomendó (y prestó!) Mattea de PGC

[Clementine · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 🌟