Entry 7: What Do You Meme?
The still for this meme is taken out of the 2018 film Bird Box, a mediocre yet very popular horror movie on Netflix. The humour for all variations on this meme centres around the blindfold, which illustrates that the woman, who or whatever she is labelled to be, is deliberately ignoring a pressing issue. This meme is fairly common, and most teenagers and younger adults are quite familiar with it.
This particular variation on the Bird Box blindfold meme is targeted towards young, left wing Canadians. It calls out the common tendency of white Canadians to view Canada as a perfect utopia, no matter the evidence disproving their belief. It can also be viewed as calling out the federal government, as the woman is labelled simply as “Canada,” and memes criticizing Justin Trudeau’s poor treatment of Indigenous peoples are common among this community. The meme uses dark humour to make a political statement about Canada’s unwillingness to acknowledge the injustices, both past and present, that it has subjected Indigenous peoples to, because acknowledging our problems would mean letting go of the image we have built up, of Canada as a diverse and nondiscriminatory country.
The meme points out that Canada likes to pat itself on the back for being supposedly better than the U.S. (not much of an achievement, we must admit), and will ignore anything to continue to be able to do so. Though its message about the country’s treatment of Indigenous peoples is accurate and clever, it fails to acknowledge the extensive racism shown towards non-Indigenous people of colour in Canada. Though this may be less prevalent in our country, it still exists and must be dealt with, and the tendency to dismiss Canada’s problems simply because the US is worse is extremely problematic and must be stopped.
