Don's Reviews > Black Meme: A History of The Images That Make Us

The viewpoint which places the experience of Black Americans at the heart of culture in the US is very familiar, with the rise of jazz and its derivative musical forms being the iconic example. Russell extends that argument by making the case for the representation of Black people in visual culture, ranging across Blackface minstrelsy in the 19th century and the early years of epic cinema, represented in The Birth of a Nation, notorious images of lynching, the 'I can't breathe' killings of recent times, and Black memes showing up across social media.

Russell sees this as an increased scope for the exploitation of African Americans and she points to some convincing examples of how that came about. But it seems to me that she downplays the tensions generated by placing images of exploitation through to torture and murder at the centre of a popular discourse. What was stirred up, for example, by the postcards which featured White people partying around the bodies of lynched victims? Did it add to the numbers celebrating, or the volume of people being added to supporters of the civil rights cause?

The conclusion of her argument is that Black people should assert ownership of their images as they go into mass circulation, much in the way African American music producers established their own record labels and management structures in the 50s and 60s to escape the gross exploitation that short-changed, or downright impoverished, a generation of musicians. My thought at this point was that it would be easier to join visual exploitation to the all-pervading forms of exploitation that characterise capitalism, and work to do away with the whole shebang.