no justice no peace

All the creative labor of the black collective being aside, there is a palpable blackness to much of this viral content — especially memes — that circulates independently from actual black people. This depersonalized blackness is shifty and hard to pin down — as is the blackness of any object or subject, really. It makes itself known through language, through an aggressive use of maneuvers associated with black vernacular speech, explicated in Manuel Arturo Abreu’s “Online Imagined Black English.” One finds captions littered with “bruh,” “fam,” “lit,” and, of course, “nigga.” This blackness is also signaled vaguely through the presence of black subjects. Athletes like Michael Jordan, rappers like Lil Mama and Birdman, and actresses like Skai Jackson have become vessels for affects extending beyond their own individual capabilities. It’s likely that many of us know Jackson not as a star on the Disney Channel but as the blue-dress girl, her picture used, with changeable yet ever familiar text, to signify levels of pettiness that exceed language.

On the contemporary internet, things have been turned inside out. Exchanges that have historically taken place in the underground of black social spaces are now vulnerable to exposure, if not already exposed. The call-and-response creativity of Black Twitter is overheard and echoed by White Twitter, and viral dance phenomena like the whip are seized on by the likes of Hillary and Ellen. Together these objects — and the countless others in circulation, literally countless — create widespread visibility for blackness online. Blackness once again takes up its longstanding role as the engine of American popular culture, so that we find ourselves where we were in the 1920s with jazz, in the 1950s with rock ‘n’ roll, in the ’80s with both house and hip-hop — in a time loop wherein black people innovate only to see their forms snaked away, value siphoned off by white hands.

not to be a debbie downer, but