By Any Other Nerd

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 de...