Last November I tuned in to the latest episode of the newsmagazine 60 Minutes with great interest. I’ve been watching since I was a child—back then it was our weekly family tradition, a crucial part of my immigrant parents’ project to educate my siblings and me in the customs, ambitions, and foibles of our fellow American citizens. I conveyed this practice into adulthood, and also my habit of reading about future episodes before they air, at first in the battered T.V. Guides my father used to bring home from the offices he cleaned, and later on the internet. This is how I learned that the November 24, 2024 episode would feature “a report on how training AI takes a toll on Kenyan workers.” I was intrigued, because this story seemingly merged two longstanding fascinations of mine: technology and African affairs. I had some ideas about how the story would unfold, based on a handful of reports I’d recently read about the impact of the incipient AI revolution on workers in Africa, and my suspicion—developed after decades of watching 60 Minutes—that this story about Africa would actually be a story about America.
The story progressed more or less as I expected. Lesley Stahl, the longtime 60 Minutes correspondent, reported from Kenya about how a “growing global army of millions toiling to make AI run smoothly,” known as “humans in the loop,” have been deputized to sort, label, and sift “reams of data to train and improve AI for companies like Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.” To put it another way: though ChatGPT and other chatbots seem to effortlessly perform a range of increasingly difficult magic tricks, an escalating sequence of pulling larger rabbits from ever smaller hats, working furiously and unacknowledged behind the scenes are everyday human beings, executing the essential tasks that make the illusion possible, while we remain distracted by the rhetoric and flair of Silicon Valley confidence men.
From this premise unfurled an all-too-familiar tale: the tech companies had engaged outsourcing firms, which themselves hired educated and ambitious Kenyans for pennies on the dollar. The Kenyans, who had initially been promised the opportunity to do enriching, life-affirming (and life-sustaining) work, were instead given unrealistic deadlines to complete challenging tasks. Many of the Kenyans were forced to watch the most depraved content online—rapes, murders, beheadings. Those who complained were promptly fired. Those who asked for higher wages were fired. Those who remained were not provided with adequate counseling services to help them process what they had seen. In one instance an outsourcing firm simply stopped operating in Kenya, stranding a group of employees without paychecks and the opportunity to seek recourse.
The report was persuasive and effective—by the end I was sufficiently enraged. Yet, ironically enough, I also felt that the report approximated AI copy in certain ways. It resembled the recaps that those overbearing chatbots produce when, after ignoring their entreaties to summarize every email that enters your inbox, you finally assent, and instantly the bot supplies a few curt sentences that seem adequate. What a trick! But then you go back and read the email, and you realize how much the bot missed. Stahl provides the barest sketch of life in Kenya today: she informs us that “it’s a country desperate for jobs because of an unemployment rate as high as 67 percent among young people” and that Silicon Valley is also looking to hire more “humans in the loop” in countries with large, well-educated and underemployed populations like India, the Philippines, and Venezuela. She tells us that Kenya is known as the “Silicon Savannah,” but she doesn’t say what this means exactly or how Kenya acquired this reputation. We also learn that President Ruto of Kenya (we never hear his first name) “has been offering financial incentives on top of already lax labor laws.” As Stahl concluded her story, it became clear that she wasn’t actually interested in Kenya per se; she was far more interested in examining how major American firms are mistreating workers abroad.
A more comprehensive and nuanced story would have investigated why the unemployment rate in Kenya is so high, why countries like Kenya feature large, well-educated and underemployed populations, why labor laws in Kenya are so lax, and why “President Ruto” feels such acute pressure to provide jobs for his constituents. Such a story would encompass the current political climate in Kenya, of course, but would also stretch to the past, to America’s role in ensuring that labor laws in Kenya and other countries in the Global South would not benefit workers. Such a story might even venture all the way back to the nineteenth century, when representatives from various European countries met in Berlin to carve up Africa according to their imperial desires. Such a story, in other words, would implicate not just the rapacious Silicon Valley companies looking to make a quick buck on the backs of defenseless workers in Kenya, but would implicate America and Europe as well, and a global economic system that has enabled America and Europe to control of the fates of young, ambitious people in faraway countries.
After watching the report, I spent some time considering the moral implications of telling such an important story in such an impoverished manner. Was it still a useful story? Surely it was—I had been moved by it. Was it the right story to tell? I believed there was a good chance it would have a positive impact; perhaps it would even compel certain Silicon Valley firms to reform their practices. And even if the piece was missing critical context, millions of people who knew little about artificial intelligence, and even less about Kenya, were a bit smarter about both topics after watching. Surely, that alone justified the piece?
I decided it did not.
I was thinking in these terms about the 60 Minutes report because I had just finished reading a book called Black Meme by the curator and writer Legacy Russell. I’d picked it up because I thought it would provide a primer on the proliferation of Black memetic forms of expression on the internet (the countless GIFs and short-form videos featuring Black people that are so widely used on social media platforms, message boards, and the like), why these memes had caught on, and why the communication methods and strategies employed by Black people had transcended Blackness altogether. I was hoping to learn why Black cultural expressions have become a kind of lingua franca for our internet era. In retrospect, perhaps I was expecting something akin to the 60 Minutes report, a survey of Black memes that was resolutely focused on the present tense.
Russell does address these themes, but she is far more interested in the history of viral Black imagery—a history, it turns out, that is nearly coterminous with the advent of the technological advances that made these images possible. Her thesis is audacious and profound: She asserts that Black imagery has always gone viral, and broad swathes of the American public have always consulted Black images to learn how to develop and process their hopes, dreams, and fears. Russell also shows how these images serve simultaneously as a mirror and projection screen for Black Americans—they have provided Black Americans with vivid, expansive views of their triumphs and pain, and have also shown Americans and the wider world intimate and detailed views of Black life. In Black Meme, Russell presents a persuasive argument that Black memes are a foundational aspect of American cultural history. She also demonstrates how one of the enduring cultural battles over the course of American history has been for control of the creation and dissemination of Black images, and how Black freedom movements often sought to wrest control of Black images from white supremacists in order to assert their liberty. Finally, Russell proves through the structure of her book that stories about the plight and achievements of marginalized people require context. She shows us why telling such stories without sufficient framing is an invitation to preserve the unequal balance of power within the status quo; in short, to ensure that those with unmerited power retain it.
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Russell initiates her study of Black memes and viral imagery by tracing the trajectory of a film that did not become popular until a century after its creation. Originally filmed in 1913 and “now widely reputed to be the oldest surviving film featuring Black actors,” Lime Kiln Field Day starred the Bahamian American entertainer Bert Williams, then known for his vaudeville act and his status as the first Black man to have a lead role in a Broadway production. The film, produced by the Biograph Company, one of the leading motion picture companies of the day, was abandoned during production and locked away in the Biograph vaults. In 1938, Biograph donated the contents of its vaults to the Museum of Modern Art, and a year later Iris Barry, MoMA’s first film curator, discovered the rushes of the film. Russell continues the tale here:
In the 1970s the rushes were transferred to safety film stock, and in the 1980s MoMA began the process of their restoration, but it was not until 2004 that MoMA film curator Ron Magliozzi began putting together the various components of the restored material. Years later, Magliozzi spoke about Lime Kiln Field Day, saying “I would like it to go viral.”
The first screening of the restored footage took place at MoMA in 2014; that screening is now available on YouTube. The film’s path to its eventual premiere—after one of the longest preproduction periods in film history—in many ways mirrors the trajectory of Black artistic expression in America. At each step various white gatekeepers determined whether the film would get made, whether it would be seen, if and how it would be preserved, when it would finally be presented to the public, and whether the film should have a chance to “go viral.” Such gatekeepers even determined how the actors in the film presented themselves—Bert Williams donned blackface as a concession to “the convention of the time requiring that, on screen and stage alike, Black characters be performed by actors wearing the minstrel makeup—even if the actors themselves were Black.”
This tale, in which one group curtails the freedom—creative and otherwise—of another, is as old as the American republic, much older in fact, but Russell illustrates throughout Black Meme how Black Americans have assiduously cultivated images of themselves that authentically render their beliefs and experiences despite these constraints. In the case of Lime Kiln Field Day, the performers expressed their humanity with an act of love—at the end of the film, Bert Williams and his costar Odessa Warren Grey performed a kiss, which was, as Russell notes, “a rare moment of intimacy between two actors, deeply unusual for this period.”
Russell includes a picture of this kiss in her book. It’s an arresting image, a portrait of rebellion and affection: Williams is in blackface; his eyes are open and gazing at something beyond the frame. Williams bears a mark of oppression on his face and lips, yet he resists and transcends his subjugation with a simple maneuver. Grey’s face is upturned, her eyes closed, and her mouth is touching Williams’s painted mouth, their lips locked in perpetuity. One hundred and six years after that kiss, Garrett Bradley, another Black artist working at a fraught political and cultural moment, featured that kiss and other scenes from Lime Kiln Field Day in her 2019 film America. In so doing, she transformed that moment into a meme, a compelling image denuded of context, in service of expanding the definition of another meme, the idea of “America” itself, to assert that the idea of America can also mean two Black people kissing in 1913.
With her analysis of Lime Kiln Field Day, Russell establishes a shrewd framework for her book—she shows how Black people initially had little control over how they were depicted and how images of their bodies were disseminated, and then, over time, how they used such images to shape public opinion and assert their humanity.
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Among Russell’s most compelling arguments in Black Meme is her contention that racism has been a contributing factor to the development, spread and acceptance of new technologies throughout American history. Her most potent example in this regard is the film The Birth of a Nation, which was released just two years after Lime Kiln Field Day was abandoned. She describes The Birth of a Nation as “the original sin of American cinema, both in form and meaning.” In terms of “meaning,” as Russell notes, “the work itself advances a virulently racist agenda at the birth of American cinema, while constructing a visual national story.” In terms of form, Russell quotes producer Steven Jay Schneider, who argues that the “film introduced the use of dramatic close ups, tracking shots, and other expressive camera movements; parallel action sequences, crosscutting and other editing techniques.”
These techniques serve as the basis for the visual language of contemporary cinema, and the media that draws from this language, such as GIFs and short-form videos. In other words, the visual architecture of the contemporary internet—the way the various images we encounter when we’re doomscrolling are framed, cut, staged, and presented—is largely derived from the innovations of a brilliant and pioneering filmmaker who developed a new cinematic grammar to tell a racist story.
D. W. Griffith effectively combined form and meaning to create a film that went fantastically viral. The Birth of a Nation was the first movie to be screened in the White House—Russell quotes film critic Richard Corliss, who, writing on the film’s hundredth anniversary, noted that “Griffith’s film is estimated to have earned $18 million in its first few years—the astounding equivalent of $1.8 billion today.” The movie, though controversial even in its own day (the NAACP protested its premiere), found an audience that was receptive to its reprehensible message and sold enough tickets to become “the fledgling film industry’s first blockbuster,” as critic Allyson Hobbs described it in The New Yorker one hundred years after its release.
Russell’s invocation of “meaning and form” doubles as a useful approach for examining the phenomenon of online virality. The popularity of The Birth of a Nation demonstrates how intertwined these concepts are; Griffith developed an entirely new cinematic language for his film not only because he hoped to spread his hateful message far and wide, but also because he hoped to convert non-believers to his cause. This, in effect, is the hope of all artists—to spread their messages beyond even the audiences that would ordinarily be receptive to them. Griffith’s technical innovations undoubtedly drew people who weren’t entirely in agreement with his appalling views about Black Americans but were intrigued by the spectacle of his film—the notion they would see something they had not seen before. To paraphrase Mary Poppins, the “sugar” of Griffith’s crisp and energizing presentation helped the harsh “medicine” of his message go down.
That said, The Birth of a Nation would not have gone viral if there wasn’t an audience that believed wholeheartedly in its message. Griffith knew that millions of Americans—including the president of the United States—held racist views of Black Americans and would be excited about viewing a movie that reflected their hatreds back at them. Simply put, Griffith was giving his audience what they wanted, and they rewarded him handsomely for it. This is the interplay that contemporary creators must manage as they strive to create viral art and content—to both give consumers what they desire while pitching their work to broader communities that are vaguely interested in or entirely ignorant of their messaging. Russell’s analysis shows that if you desire to create viral imagery, it is often easiest to meet people where they are. This inevitably means that your work will echo prevailing prejudices and untruths, and if it is engaging enough, these messages will spread much farther and more quickly than they would otherwise.
Russell also illustrates how technology changed the way many white Americans perceived Black bodies and valued Black life. She persuasively argues that photography played a crucial role in shaping racial perceptions; as she writes, “the Black meme could not have been possible without the devastating American history of lynching photography—the practice of producing and circulating postcards as souvenirs of the lynching of Black people.”
Here, it is important to note how Russell defines the term “Black meme”:
This book defines “Black meme” through the notion of transmission, quite literally the mediation, copying, and carrying of Blackness itself as a viral agent. This is buoyed forth by modern media, such as (but not solely) the internet, and the wider engine of visual culture.
Perhaps the most crucial aspect of this definition is Russell’s idea about “Blackness itself as a viral agent.” It is an especially expansive notion because it positions Blackness—she does not define this term, but it’s safe to assume she means the cultural norms and experiences that are produced and transmitted by Black people—as the “agent” that is spread between humans and across generations, and not necessarily individual Black memories, ideas, desires, or fears. This is an important distinction, because it enables her to argue that “Blackness itself” is a multimodal phenomenon, and most crucially, that the horrific treatment Black bodies endured when they were brought to this country and enslaved can be replicated in other realms.
This is especially the case with lynching photography. From the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, photographers captured crowds of white people as they gawked at lynched Black bodies. These photographs—produced at a moment when photography was becoming a more accessible medium—were printed onto postcards that were circulated throughout the United States and perhaps abroad as well (“there is plenty of evidence of their international circulation,” Russell notes). For Russell, “this type of circulated media—souvenirs of hate crimes—is imprinted on our cultural consciousness and is fundamental to the idea of the Black meme. Indeed, these images shaped the notion of memetic or viral imagery.”
These postcards were quite popular—Russell describes one such photo, captured by the photographer Lawrence Henry Beitler:
. . . once processed and put on sale for fifty cents, orders for the photo poured in. To meet the demand for the prints, Beitler worked around the clock for ten days straight. In 1988, Beitler’s daughter Betty told the Marion Chronicle-Tribune “It wasn’t unusual for one person to order a thousand at a time.”
These photographs primed the public to dismiss the humanity of the featured Black, maimed bodies and taught consumers to regard these images as mere articles of commerce, to be purchased, traded, sold, or gifted in a passive manner, just another item to acquire and discard at will. Of course, Black bodies had been treated similarly in America for decades, and Russell’s essential insight throughout her book is to posit—by implication and occasionally more boldly—that white consumers simply transferred their feelings about and treatment of Black bodies to the media that depicted Black bodies.
These insights prompt a broader question about our media consumption habits that Russell mentions briefly but is important to contend with nonetheless: to what extent did this transition from mistreating bodies to mistreating the depiction of those bodies influence the way that we engage with media today? Our standard mode of engagement with abused bodies in a variety of media is to passively consume the abuse and move on—nearly all of us are perfectly capable of watching a movie in which a serial killer commits a series of horrific crimes and then, after the film is done, tenderly putting our children to bed. This kind of disassociation is important and perhaps even harmless when we’re watching movies—we’re aware that an actor is playing the serial killer, and that his “victims” are also playing make believe. But we often thoughtlessly transfer these practices to our consumption of similar imagery on the internet, images that spotlight real people who are abusing others or being abused themselves. Occasionally these images prompt action—as in the case of the video of George Floyd—but as we become ever more locked in our respective algorithmic bubbles, it is growing more likely that we will miss certain videos altogether, and that even when we do see a video of someone being abused, or worse, we will consider the video as merely one more data point among countless others, something to swipe away or dismiss so we can watch something else.
All that said, Russell’s analysis stands: these combined upheavals—in the visual grammar of film and the passive consumption of Black imagery—presaged the creation of viral Black imagery on the internet, and the manner such images are appraised today. With these examples, Russell also performs the essential work of restoring the Black people depicted in the horrific imagery she describes to their proper context as fellow human beings.
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Over time, Black Americans began to use technology to broadcast their maltreatment and to galvanize Americans of all colors to their cause. Perhaps the most startling example of this are the images of the murdered Emmett Till that were published in Jet Magazine in September 1955. Russell informs us of two photographs that were taken of Till after he was killed—the first by C. A. Strickland, a white “identification officer for the Collision Department.” On the reverse side of these photographs was additional information about the crime scene that was “cited as irrelevant and struck from the record” during the trial of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, who were accused of killing Till (they were acquitted after an all-white jury deliberated for sixty-seven minutes). These photos, in other words, performed a similar function as lynching photographs and the Black characters in The Birth of a Nation—in each of these contexts the Black subject’s supposed inferiority and lack of humanity was confirmed by their ravaged and compromised appearance.
The Black photographer David Jackson provided an alternate view of Till. He accompanied Till’s mother to the funeral home where Till would lie in repose and took pictures of his horrifically bruised body, dressed in a suit, in a casket. These pictures were published in Jet, “an African American print publication with a core Black readership,” which had been founded just four years before. As Russell notes, “Jet was tasked, for the first time since its founding, with reprinting an issue due to popular demand.”
Based on these factors, it is easy to see why, as Russell argues, “the publication and viewership of this image is cited as a formative moment of national consciousness-raising, marking for many the beginning of the civil rights movement in the United States.” Russell quotes James Baldwin at the beginning of the chapter, who, upon seeing Till’s mangled body at the funeral home in Chicago where his body rested, said, “It was him, but it was all of us.” Baldwin succinctly identifies why David Jackson’s images had such a profound impact on Black people across America, and Americans of all colors. The stark presentation of Till’s broken body dressed in a suit and displayed in a coffin simultaneously invoked an image familiar to many—of a deceased relative dressed and made up as when they were alive, or perhaps even more elegantly so, as an acknowledgment of their worth and testament to the impact of their life—and undercut that image by showing what had been done to him, the evidence of the actions that killed him. The image of Till’s body reminded viewers of their humanity, and the humanity of their loved ones, and also the fact that he had not been treated as a human, and that he—and many others like him—would always bear the marks of those who had decided to strip his humanity from him. It was a stunningly effective image, and its virality provided Black people with a strategy of responding to the terrible circumstances they had endured for far too long.
Russell then pivots to examples of Black people who, aware of their power and popularity, and of the expanded reach of media, performed actions that they knew would resonate with their communities and perhaps others as well. She writes at length about Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the 200-meter gold and bronze medalists in the 1968 Olympics, each of whom—upon receiving their medals—raised a single fist, each encased in a black glove. They were also dressed in black socks, and they wore no shoes on the podium. As Smith later explained to Howard Cosell, the notorious ABC sports journalist, their raised fists were intended to signify Black power and Black unity, and their black socks and lack of shoes signified their poverty. Russell also shows how Michael Jackson, a performer with an intuitive and expansive understanding of the power of images, embedded a series of ideas and visual statements—one could call them memes—in his “Thriller” video that he knew would capture the attention of the public and boost the popularity of his music. In other words, Jackson ensured that his video—and, as a result, his music—would go viral.
Russell doesn’t propose that there was a straight line from disempowered Black people who had little control over how they were depicted to acclaimed performers like Michael Jackson who exerted maximum control over their public personas; there were many stops and starts along the way, and even after Jackson’s triumphs there were performers, like the Black and Brown queer performers in the film Paris Is Burning, who felt they were exploited by those who profited from its success. What she does demonstrate, however, is how Black people gained awareness of methods to express themselves and craft images that would resonate within their communities and beyond.
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Russell isn’t necessarily concerned with describing the contemporary usage of memes or cataloguing the various images featuring Black people that have proliferated online, but in offering an extensive and nimble analysis about why Black memes are so popular, and describing how the experience of being Black in America—of growing, living, and dying as a Black American; of enduring abuse and boldly asserting personhood—is itself a foundational component of how we have come to understand and use memes on the internet today. Russell’s approach is premised on the idea that we cannot begin to understand the present—or that we will only understand it in the most superficial, problematic way—if we don’t carefully document what has come before, and if we refuse to place contemporary incidents within a web of preceding and related events. In other words, Russell venerates the importance of context, both as a necessary means of describing the present, and as a framework for inhabiting it.
For Russell, context serves many essential functions. First, she positions the use of context as a kind of rehabilitative practice. Throughout Black Meme, Russell offers considerable evidence that Black Americans have created beautiful art despite challenging circumstances; indeed, she begins her book by describing one of the first movies to feature Black performers, a movie filmed during an era when segregation was still legal. Even when she is describing circumstances in which Black artists were exploited because they lacked power relative to white gatekeepers or were not properly recognized and compensated for their artistic innovations, Russell highlights their triumphs. In her discussion of Paris Is Burning, for example, she notes that “[b]allroom culture, then, makes plain the ecstatic elasticity of Black life looking to reformat, rebuild, restructure, reenvision.” For Russell, context serves both as a necessary reminder of past success and an assertion that future success is entirely plausible, perhaps even—because of what Black people have already overcome—inevitable.
Russell also consistently demonstrates how Black Americans have not only withstood mistreatment and abuse but have molded difficult moments into occasions of triumph. These unexpected and even brazen acts of reversal ensured that such moments would inspire not only those who were present to witness them, but would be imitated, copied and then eventually emailed, posted, and DM-ed in the future. In some cases, Russell’s best examples of these reversals—and of the significance of context—are simply the images themselves.
For example, Russell precedes her discussion of Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings with a picture of Hill standing with her right arm raised, as she affirms her commitment to testify truthfully during the hearings. It is an iconic image in itself, but in context it gains considerable potency:
This is a picture of a Black woman who is facing down a committee of powerful White men who is [standing] up bravely to do the work that has since become the blueprint for White women such as Monica Lewinsky, Christine Blasey Ford, and even Amber Heard, all of whom launched impactful public accusations of sexual assault or misconduct by powerful men.
(Russell then adds an additional layer of context that complicates our perception of what seems to be a familiar image when she informs us that “[t]oday, when one searches for “Anita Hill” as a GIF, the only results that surface are of [Kerry] Washington,” who portrayed Hill in a made-for-tv movie.)
Second, Russell positions context as an antidote to contemporary actions by powerful actors who wish to strip Black people of hard-earned rights. Russell’s insistence on meticulously constructing arguments over the course of her book—of firmly situating contemporary phenomena within a network of examples and references that extend deep into the past—doubles as a means of redirecting her readers away from easy, expected answers (at the very least, this book is an effective rejoinder to “hot take” culture) and providing a guide for marginalized people who wish to defeat facile arguments by bad-faith actors.
Take, for example, the recent popularity of the term “woke.” Though it has achieved cultural ubiquity, hardly anyone seems able to define it (when pressed, most ardent defenders of this concept simply spout a string of incomprehensible jargon-laced sentences, or their version of Justice Potter Stewart’s infamous dictum: “I know it when I see it”). Yet this term has become a rallying cry for disaffected right-wingers who, upset with moderate—and, most importantly, necessary—changes in the cultural status quo in America following the murder of George Floyd, have insisted on a supposed “return to normal.” Discrimination has always relied upon a lack of context, on easy binaries and flimsy aphoristic statements, but in our current moment, as essential facts and figures have become more accessible, defenders of the status quo have decided to convert their ignorance into a new kind of faith. They don’t believe the facts because the facts are against their religion; instead, they devise terms that don’t mean anything but signify their desire to maintain power at all costs.
With Black Meme, Russell reminds us that providing context takes time, but also that it is essential, life-affirming work. It’s not easy, but a commitment to context widens the aperture of seemingly contemporary and instantaneous events until their place within a historical continuum becomes apparent. Russell also reminds us that marginalized people must insist on the application of context, especially at those fraught moments (such as now) when powerful actors develop erroneous and historically inaccurate arguments for their efforts to repress less powerful people. Russell is instructing us how we might refuse to play by their contrived rules, on their contrived terms.
Finally, Russell shows us that studying context provides us with a means of understanding the future before it arrives. A few days after watching the 60 Minutes piece, a period during which I was also reflecting on Russell’s book, I finally had the language and conceptual framework to describe why the piece had bothered me so; the Kenyans I had recently seen on my television screen had been depicted as mere memes. They were utterly powerless to describe their own conditions except through the narrow prism provided by Stahl and her producers; their humanity was beside the point. Examined against the narrative of the relationship between Blackness and viral imagery that Russell establishes in Black Meme, the Kenyans had been relegated to the era before Black people were able to fully express themselves.
Russell’s analysis makes clear that the mistreatment of Black bodies in our AI era is eminently predictable. As she argues time and again, technological advances have often been underwritten by the abuse and mistreatment of Black people. And if current trends continue, this will unfortunately be the case in the future. Yet, as Russell emphasizes, the act of insisting on context doubles as an act of defiance, a form of resistance against those who benefit from historical amnesia and who constantly strive to overwrite the future with doomed scripts from the past. Black Meme convincingly demonstrates that repetition is not inevitable, and history’s cycles can be broken. The future must be more than an echo of the past.
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Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us. By Legacy Russell. New York: Verso, 2024. 192 pp. $19.95.
