https://www.theguardian.com/culture...es-of-black-people-reacting-so-popular-online
There's a ton more at the link, it's a long article, check it out!
I'm a white dude but I see this a fair bit on facebook from other white people that I know that maybe raises an eyebrow a bit, just one of those things like "hm, it's odd they chose that gif from a movie they'll never see or of an actor they will never know the name of".
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?
It's significant that digital blackface's first boom period, around the turn of the decade, coincided with the Obamas moving into the White House. "They'll deny it now," says Hudson, "but seeing accomplished, attractive, stylish, and intelligent Michelle Obama on the global stage shook a lot of folks who didn't consider themselves racist to their cores. There was this desperate scramble to squeeze her into some semi-relevant stereotype of a black woman.
The average internet user, on the other hand, seems far more prone to react defensively to any discussion of digital blackface. Typical responses include scornful scepticism regarding the very concept, accusing those who raise the issue of trivialising "real" racism, and railing against the injustice of "meme segregation" – this, despite the fact that Jackson and others have repeatedly said they're proposing nothing of the sort.
Of all the responses, though, there is one that Jackson finds particularly bemusing: "White people who have now sworn off gifs for ever more and [are] telling me all about it, when I never asked for that. It seems like people with that response are more interested in brownie points for being a Good White Person than doing the more rigorous ongoing work of checking their behaviour online."
There's a ton more at the link, it's a long article, check it out!
I'm a white dude but I see this a fair bit on facebook from other white people that I know that maybe raises an eyebrow a bit, just one of those things like "hm, it's odd they chose that gif from a movie they'll never see or of an actor they will never know the name of".