Black Meme by Legacy Russell;

Author:Legacy Russell;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2024-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

7

REALITY, TELEVISED: ON THE RODNEY KING GENERATION

“You began to read and you were taken back to the moment the video appeared across the Atlantic, transferred by the sturdy boat of the Internet.”

—Caleb Azumah Nelson1

“[B]lackness is integral to the production of space,” writes race and gender scholar Katherine McKittrick in Demonic Grounds.2 Nothing can move without touching Blackness; nothing can move without Blackness as a force, an engine, a technology. Thus, the contemporary circulation in the media of viral material supporting the supremacy of Black social death harks back to the early virality of lynching postcards and the cross-circulation of these images via social media and other digital platforms.

This is demonstrated by such viral acts as “Trayvoning,” which came into being in 2012 in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin at the hand of George Zimmerman.3 In this performance, a person poses for a photograph face down on the ground with a bag of skittles and an Arizona iced tea. These images—often featuring young White people—were distributed via platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. While the trend appears to have been short lived, it remains a visible hashtag on these sites, serving as a key example of the ways in which “digital blackface” continues to shape-shift and perpetuate, taking on new forms within new modes of media.

The fact that Trayvoning predates the 2013 trial of Zimmerman illustrates the ways in which the public, via this disturbing performance, was invested in the forensics of Martin’s Blackness. The speculative replay of Martin’s death contests and devalues the teenager’s life, establishing a digital town square wherein Martin’s lifeless body remains left untended into perpetuity. Further, it asserts a norm for the Black form as fixed, horizontal and motionless: the deceased body stretched out across the ground is determined as a natural state, running counter to a living body that might exist upright, with the capacity to move through the world with agency. As gender studies scholar Kemi Adeyemi puts it: “Being [B]lack and horizontal [is] a spatio-racial coordinate that is threatening” to the White imagination, “as much as it could lead to one becom[ing] [B]lack and upright, which would jumpstart the cycle of killability once more.”4

In 2013 artist Devin Kenny staged Untitled/Clefa in Mexico City, a one-time reperformance of the Trayvoning meme. Kenny, who is Black and American, lay face down on the floor as an audience looked on. He remained there for the duration of the trap song “Versace” by Black American rap group Migos, running for three minutes and twenty-five seconds. The song was then looped three times, with Kenny remaining on the ground for each cycle. Kenny explains, “I wanted to take an image-creating practice that was circulating online, and a) slow it down and b) charge it differently by having it happen in real time.” By placing himself, a Black person, at the center of the meme, Kenny creates and holds space for a reflexive relationship between “mimicry and parody.”5 His performance prompts the important question: Can

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