A slim and sharp book that explores meme culture via the history of famous images of people of color. While some memes are harmless, many other play on racial stereotypes, and Russell deftly explores this and the fine line between representation and exploitation. Who does the visual story center, and whose voice does it leave out? The book moves quickly (I read it in one sitting) and while it is rare that I say this, it actually could have been longer and gone deeper in some places. Still, it's a smart and well written piece and will get you thinking about visual culture.

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 of the book.

“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. And 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 scrunity 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 Twitter (I’m not a media reporter, and this is not an official ‘for print’ review, so I’m not referring to that social media site as that ridiculous single-lettered name that isn’t even a name). In any case, gifs elsewhere on social media as well like on Facebook, on tumblr, and so on. 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 whitness, 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 darknen 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 proptions, 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.

Not quite what I expected. The book was an ok read. I thought there would be more imagery. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book. Receiving the book in this manner had no bearing on this review.

What I enjoyed was the deep dive into the reason behind the imagery. I was expecting a few more works of art and thought more could have been put in.