This is a manifestation of how systemic racism works exactly how it is set up to - in a way so insidious that only those directly affected by it tend to notice its effects.įigure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 1″Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That” by NoiseBlankers is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 GIFS The issue with claiming “relatable!” by circulating memes that are made by and for Black people is that it disregards the struggles and inequities that many Black people face. That is, after all, where the French-originating term “même”, meaning “same”, comes from (Dean, 2016). Some might feel like they relate to what the image and text convey - which often derives from African American Vernacular English (Jackson, 2017). Of course, not all non-Black people share this content with the malicious intent of making fun of Black people. While you may think this is an extreme example of radical white supremacy, many scholars point out how it’s actually not much different from non-Black social media users posting memes of Black people, thus cloaking racist ideals as humour and “harmless” jokes (Sevel-Sørensen, 2019 and Matamoros-Fernandez, 2020).
While digital blackface might seem like a recent term, its practice is actually deeply rooted in 19 th century minstrel blackface (Jackson, 2017), a tradition that involved white performers covering themselves in dark makeup to portray exaggerated features of Black people (Vaughan, 2005). Who has agency over these images and why they are so popular? We must reflect on these questions and how our digital modes of expressions may be implicit or explicit displays of digital blackface. If you look at the “popular” section on WhatsApp’s GIPHY extension, you’ll find the large majority of these GIFs convey images of Black bodies and expressions. But as Jackson (2017) writes, “no digital behaviour exists in a de-racialized vacuum”. From memes to GIFS to emojis to Bitmojis, visual representations of the emotion we may want to convey online is easily done on messaging or social media apps. In today’s digital age, we have more tools at our disposal to express ourselves virtually than ever before. Checking our Online Behaviour for Digital Blackface
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