Review: Black Meme by Legacy Russell

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Legacy Russell’s Black Meme offers a powerful exploration of the consumption of Black bodies. Her work considers how Black bodies have been commodified for centuries, and how the “memification” of the Black body extends back long before the birth of the internet. Her argument is not simply that racist imagery existed before internet memes. Rather, she traces the reproduction and circulation of Blackness across different forms of media, from photographs and postcards through film and video and into contemporary internet culture. In doing so, she makes a compelling case that the ways memes work today draw on a much longer legacy of objectifying Black bodies and that there is a centrality of consuming Black bodies in media as an important part of (white) American culture.  

“Consumption” feels like the right word here. The Black body is not just re-presented and represented by a white audience (and often, creators). Again and again, it is the dead Black body (or violence on the Black body) that becomes the center of attention. The consuming itself contributes to the destruction of the Black body.

Russell’s discussion of lynching postcards from the late 1800s was particularly striking. These were images of real murdered people manufactured to be purchased, written on, sent along, and reshared: the original meme. There is an utter disregard for the people in these images, whose deaths become reproducible and consumable objects. Russell connects that history to later images of racial violence, including Birth of a Nation, all the way up through the filming of Rodney King and, eventually, the murder of George Floyd. Recording these later acts can bear witness to and allow for condoning the violence, but Russell asks an uncomfortable question about what happens once that image begins circulating and who gets to control the such imagery and who gets subjected to it (willingly or otherwise).

Russell sustains her framework across a wide historical span. Her writing is also clear to follow. Cultural criticism like this can sometimes become too abstract for me, particularly when moving into theoretical ideas like epistemic violence and injustice. Russell walks those lines reasonably well. The coherence of the book, and the way she continues connecting later examples back to the larger argument, helped keep me grounded.

That question of ownership continues into seemingly less violent forms of contemporary meme culture. For example, Russell shows how TikTok dances also become sites of power with who gets credit (attention, money, etc) when something becomes viral versus who that dance or cultural expression was taken from. Again and again, we see the Global North taking from the Global South or white bodies taking from Black bodies. Shared spaces become spaces of consumption and, at times, Black erasure.

Russell also made me think further about my own participation in meme culture. Ever since encountering discussions of “digital blackface,” I've tried to think not just about what an image or reaction GIF is saying, but who is saying it and who is represented in it. Black Meme reinforces that hesitation for me as Russell also invokes and builds upon Jackson's discussion of digital blackface. When I reshare something, what am I consuming and re-propagating, and whose body am I using to communicate?

I struggled with Russell's book in that I can see the critique but cannot see the solution.  There seems little possibility of reclamation within those shared spaces because of how the media landscape itself is structured. That feels more timely now than ever. We have seen the Black Lives Matter movement of the 2010s, the supposed racial reckoning following George Floyd's murder in 2020, and the white backlash in the years since. In a society that refuses to reconcile with its white supremacy, where is there room to reclaim Black bodies from circulation and virality? How can these practices be transformed into a means of empowerment or is it indicative of these media structures that they can never serve such purposes?

There aren't great answers here. Meme culture is now so embedded in how people communicate that avoiding anything depicting a culture, race, or gender other than your own creates its own strange problems.

Russell's work reminds me of Linda Williams's Playing the Race Card. Williams similarly looks at the persistence of racial discourse across different forms of American media, and the two books make a really nice pairing. Russell's book feels in some ways like an updated version of that project, giving us the additional language of the meme to think about reproduction, circulation, appropriation, ownership, and consumption in the contemporary media landscape.

Ultimately, that is what Black Meme has left me thinking about: not just what an image means, but what happens to people when their images circulate. Who is being consumed? Who gets erased? Who owns what has been reproduced? And what does it mean for all of us to participate in that circulation?

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