White People, Meet Me at Camera Three
Welcome to the first of what will inevitably be a very long series of my white self yelling at other white people about racism! This meme is a problem: Worse, the problem is the point. The way I read it, there are two possible/simultaneous messages here. First, that George Floyd’s death was a tragedy completely independent of race. Okay, interesting. Wrong, but interesting, and I’ll get into those details later. The other message is that if “people” (generally understood to be people of color, specifically Black people, and their allies) would stop bring race into everything, racism would disappear. The first problem with that, and it’s so glaring that it can be seen from space, is that it blames African Americans for their own poor treatment. Oh, not explicitly. Never explicitly. The people who create these memes would never be so gauche [1] . But do the math: if the problem, as the meme creator sees it, is that race is being injected into