The Internet Supercharged the Exploitation of Black Culture

Russell traces a pattern from Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 to Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012. Violence inflicted on protesters marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge created a national spectacle that “advanced and cultivated empathy across the nation,” Russell writes; yet it also served as a precursor to the “voyeurism and extractive violence of mass media,” as images of state violence waft through our social media feeds and can be shorn of context, made to mean whatever the person posting wants them to mean. This vulnerability is no more apparent than in the murder of Trayvon Martin, which sparked not just national protests against police violence but a sinister viral trend called “Trayvonning.” Viral Blackness objectifies its subject, rendering them an image, an item, a concept, or a joke. “Black life in precarity, a gross commodity for sale, sells cheap but travels fast,” Russell writes.

The exploitation of Blackness also plays out in culture. Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning immortalized the “ball culture” of 1980s New York, alongside several of its central characters. Ballroom culture was a social phenomenon propagated by queer communities. The performers walked in runway-style shows that blended fashion and dance, competing to give off “realness”—ballroom parlance for embodying “an impersonation of a racial or class norm,” Judith Butler wrote in their 1993 essay “Gender Is Burning” (which was also cited in Black Meme). These communities were a place for flourishing gender and creative expression; they also served as prototypical safe spaces for gay, lesbian, and trans people to escape domestic violence, economic precarity, and houselessness stemming from the rampant homophobia of the age.

Paris Is Burning brought queer Black and brown subcultures to the mainstream: Even today, middle school kids sporting Nicki Minaj avatars on Instagram trade in the colloquialisms that sprang up from its cultural aura (“reading,” “shade,” “queen” chief among them). But the performers featured in Paris were only paid $55,000, split 13 ways, while the film itself grossed $3.8 million across the country. One of the performers, Paris Dupree—a pioneer of “voguing”—filed an unsuccessful lawsuit for $40 million. The film wouldn’t have been possible without the distinctive performances of the Black artists at its center, yet they did not share substantially in the financial rewards. “The Black person, reduced to a Black body, reduced to a Black object, is distilled into its aura,” she writes, “and it is the aura of Blackness that lends material property its value.”