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Networked misogynoir: a critical technocultural discourse analysis of gendered anti-Blackness in the Black digital public sphere

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Networked Misogynoir:
A Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis of Gendered Anti-Blackness in the Black Digital
Public Sphere
by
Brooklyne Jewel Gipson

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
COMMUNICATION

August 2020

Copyright 2020 Brooklyne Jewel Gipson
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
At this moment, I am sitting in a cabin in Arizona at the South Rim of The Grand
Canyon. Due to the Covid-19 health crisis, I did not feel comfortable boarding an over-crowded
flight to Champaign-Urbana from Los Angeles. My husband and I decided to take a road trip
instead. This is the first stop on our new adventure. I am not capable of describing how mixed
my feelings are about this season of my life.
On the one hand, I am concerned for my family, myself, and my community. On the
other hand, I am so excited to embark on this career, this new way of life. As I look toward the
future, I want to acknowledge a handful of people who have helped me reach this point.
Mom, I know that we are frequently at odds. Still, I love and appreciate you so much for
shaping me into the woman I have become-- diligent, vigilant, and focused. We rarely agree on
the first go-around, but you provide me with a much-needed perspective that manifests itself in
the way I move through the world. Thank you for your support, love, and patience.
Dad, you sparked my love of learning and affinity for being a lifelong student. Your
adages and admonitions shaped my childhood but also carry me through adulthood. I wish you
could have been here physically with me through my academic and personal triumphs. I wish
that you could be here on earth to see how much you “got it right” with me. I hope I have made
you proud.
James, you have always been everything that I never knew I needed. We met about two
and a half months before I began this Ph.D. journey. You have been there for every triumph,
failure, tear of sadness, and cry of joy. You supported me when I was at my worst and reminded
me of who I was. My dad always said that ‘people who don’t have it, can’t fake it and people
who do have it, can’t hide it.” One of the reasons I fell in love with you is because I see God in
iii
you. I see the grace in how you move, the curiosity and openness with which you approach the
world, the sensitivity, and care with which you interact with others. You truly make me a better
person. Thank you for all of the love and support during one of the toughest periods of my life.
You lifted me up, pushed me forward, backed me up, and held me down. I could not be more
thankful.
To the rest of my family: I dare not attempt to mention all of your names for fear that I
will omit one. However, I do want to spotlight the matriarch of our family, my granny, Ms. Eva
Mae Colquitt. Often, I sit in awe, thinking about the places you have been and things you have
seen. Thank you for the many summers in Mississippi, where you kept me grounded in our
ancestors’ history and culture.
Thank you also to Yolandia Webb, “Auntie Yogie”-- my second mom. As a child, I spent
just about as many waking hours with you as I did with my mom. I would be remiss if I did not
especially thank you for all of the love, support, and care you have given me over the years.
Auntie Clarice, thank you for attending every single one of my many, many graduations!
You were in attendance at my kindergarten graduation and everything in between up through this
final virtual one. I remember when I was around five-years-old, and you would marvel at how
well I read. I remember you grabbing a Bible once and asking me to read it to people, like a
parlor trick. I don’t think I had the language before, but this helped me to know that I was unique
in some way. These were impactful, formative moments in my intellectual development. Thank
you.
Also, I want to make sure that I acknowledge my bonus mom, Ms. Charlene Sutton.
Thank you for loving me, praying over me, and supporting me. I love you.
iv
I am also especially grateful for the community I have cultivated at USC: Thank you to
“The Squad” Dr. Courtney Cox, Dr. Philana Payton, Dr. Marissiko Wheaton, and Dr. Jasmin
Young. I could not have possibly asked for a stronger community of sisters and friends. I
appreciate being on this journey with you. Thank you to the “Terraza Squad” as well-- Dr.
Matthew N. Bui, Frances Corey, Dr. Courtney Cox, Caitlin Dobson, Simogne Hudson, and
Sulafa Zidani-- you made me feel like I knew what I was doing when it came to this Ph.D. thing.
Special thanks to Dr. Safiya Noble, who guided our group and Dr. Sarah Roberts for coming in
and popping on us from here and there. You have taught me not only how to survive academia,
but also to thrive.
Thank you to my “line brother,” Dr. Antar Tichavakunda. We always joked about how
we felt like the experience of getting these Ph.D.’s was similar to pledging. Welp, we crossed!
And as they say to neos, “Now the real work begins”! I appreciate your friendship and feel
fortunate to have you in my life.
I know I have already mentioned you once but thank you to Matthew N. Bui, for being
one of my closest friends in the department. You have pushed me academically, and I have
appreciated every moment of working with you. Many other Annenbergers have been friends,
tutors, and/or mentors to me: Kate Miltner, Perry Johnson, Nathan Walter, Rebecca Johnson, and
of course Courtney Cox (Again! I’m just going to mention you 1,000 times in my
acknowledgments, it’s fine) whether you know it or not you have helped me along the way in
this journey (Nathan seriously, I would not have made it through Quantitative Methods without
you!). I have called on each of you for advice at different times throughout this program. Thank
you for being open with me. I have learned so much from you all.
v
To my closest friends and one cousin, Jewel Reed, L’Aurelle Deogratias, Ryan Woodson,
Tiffani Cortez, Kanysha Burton, Briana Jones, Kenyada McLean, and Porscha Madu-Carter.
Thank you so much for always being there for me. I rest easy knowing you all have my back.
Lastly, to the Sorors of the Alpha Gamma Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.
Thank you. As I referenced earlier, navigating this experience is similar to pledging. For that
reason, I must say thank you for the Alpha Gamma chapter for teaching me the true meaning of
grit. You taught me resilience, to never retreat at no, and for that, I am forever indebted to you. I
do not see a Dr. Brooklyne Gipson with a Ph.D. from USC Annenberg without the experiences
acquired not only in my process of pursuing membership but also in the decades of sisterhood
that have followed.
Before I end, I must also thank my dissertation committee members Dr. Josh Kun, Dr.
Safiya Noble, and Dr. Henry Jenkins. You have been an integral part of my entire academic
experience. Thank you so much for your leadership and guidance. Additionally, numerous other
professors contributed to my intellectual and personal growth– Dr. Ben Carrington, Dr. Taj
Frazier, Dr. Ange-Marie Hancock-Alfaro, and Dr. Cristina Visperas… thank you!
It’s virtually impossible to get anywhere in life worth being without enduring some
tragedy or struggle. My struggles toward acquiring this degree are too numerous to name, but
also pale in comparison to the gravity of the tragic losses along the way. Last year, my little
cousin Camron Jewel Fair, passed away in his sleep at the very young age of 21. He always
dreamed of being an educator, and before his death was allowed to pursue this dream. He served
as a teacher for half a semester in Attala County, Mississippi. I miss you so much Camron. Your
joy, your humor, your practicality, your smart mouth will never be forgotten. I hope that I can
reach some of these students/young minds that you intended to. I love you.
vi
In the spring of my third year, I dealt with two subsequent tragedies– the shooting deaths
of two Black men who significantly impacted my life. Victor McElhaney, was a senior at USC
when he was shot and killed at a strip mall near campus. I was devastated when I learned of
your passing. I was even more devastated to learn the circumstances of your death, beyond what
was reported in the news. You inspired me because you were fearless in challenging homophobia
and heteronormativity. You spoke of wanting to get a Ph.D. one day so that you could be a
professor and work toward dismantling systems of oppression. I hope to continue on this journey
in your honor.
Ermias “Nipsey Hu$$le” Asghedom was more than a rapper. He was an intellectual, a
businessman, an artist, a father, an inspiration. He was so many things to so many people. About
a week after Victor passed away, I was sitting in the library at Cal State Northridge when I heard
that you had been shot. I was and still am completely devastated. I am thankful that I got to meet
you during my time working at XXL magazine. You left such an enduring legacy on the Los
Angeles community. For me, upholding your memory equates to staying grounded in the work
that you were doing– cultivating and maintaining firm roots in community.
The marathon continues.
vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ..................................................................................................vii
LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................ix
ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................x
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................ 1
BACKGROUND ................................................................................................................... 4
RESEARCH OBJECTIVES ................................................................................................... 20
RESEARCH QUESTIONS .................................................................................................... 21
DIGITAL CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING GROUPS .................................................................. 25
NETWORKED MISOGYNOIR .............................................................................................. 28
ORGANIZATION ............................................................................................................... 29
POSITIONALITY STATEMENT ............................................................................................ 29
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................................... 32
ANTI-BLACKNESS AND AFRO-PESSIMISM ........................................................................ 32
BLACK OR AFRICAN-AMERICAN? ................................................................................... 34
BLACK WITH A CAPITAL “B” ........................................................................................... 35
BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT ........................................................................................... 36
INTERSECTIONALITY ....................................................................................................... 37
BLACK WOMEN AND INTERSECTIONALITY ....................................................................... 40
MISOGYNOIR .................................................................................................................... 44
CONTROLLING IMAGES OF BLACK WOMANHOOD ............................................................ 48
CRITICAL RACE AND DIGITAL STUDIES ............................................................................. 56
THE BLACK DIGITAL PUBLIC SPHERE .............................................................................. 58
BLACK FEMINIST SUBALTERN COUNTERPUBLICS ............................................................. 61
“INTERNET AFROCENTRICS,” “THE ANKH-RIGHT” “FAUXTEPS” OR “HOTEPS” ............... 67
CONTEXT COLLAPSE ........................................................................................................ 71
ONLINE HARASSMENT ...................................................................................................... 72
MEME AS UNIT OF CULTURAL TRANSMISSION .................................................................. 74
MEME AS INTERNET ARTIFACT ......................................................................................... 76
WHY STUDY MEMES? ...................................................................................................... 79
CRITICAL THEORIES OF RACE AND TECHNOLOGY ............................................................ 85
CHAPTER 3: METHODS ................................................................................................ 88
MAKING MEANING OF CONTENT SHARED BY INTERNET AFROCENTRICS .......................... 88
CRITICAL TECHNOCULTURAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS (CTDA) .......................................... 90
CTDA IN PRACTICE ........................................................................................................... 94
BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT AND PRAXIS .......................................................................... 97
GLITCH RACISM: CRITICAL THEORIES OF RACE AND TECHNOLOGY ................................... 99
ASSUMPTIONS ............................................................................................................... 104
Centering Blackness and Intersectionality ................................................................ 104
PROCESS ........................................................................................................................ 108
Context ...................................................................................................................... 108
viii
Data Collection and Preparation of Materials ........................................................... 109
Instruments ................................................................................................................ 111
Statement of Confidentiality ..................................................................................... 111
Coding the Data ........................................................................................................ 112
SCOPE OF STUDY ............................................................................................................ 112
LIMITATIONS ................................................................................................................. 113
Sample Size ............................................................................................................... 113
Methods .................................................................................................................... 114
Equipment ................................................................................................................. 114
CHAPTER 4: ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION ............................................................ 116
ON GENRE: ANATOMY OF THE INTERNET AFROCENTRIC MEME ...................................... 119
BLACK WOMEN AS PROPERTY ........................................................................................ 122
AFROCENTRIC ESSENTIALISM ......................................................................................... 128
HOMOPHOBIA AND TRANSPHOBIA .................................................................................. 134
CONTROLLING IMAGES 2.0 ............................................................................................. 140
MAMMY ......................................................................................................................... 141
MATRIARCH ................................................................................................................... 144
JEZEBEL ......................................................................................................................... 146
WELFARE QUEEN ........................................................................................................... 147
CO-OPTATION OF FEMINIST DISCOURSE .......................................................................... 153
CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION .......................................................................................... 163
IMPLICATIONS ............................................................................................................... 174
Racial Essentialism and Internet Afrocentric Memes ............................................... 174
Interpreting Memes as Anti-Black Woman .............................................................. 176
Networked Misogynoir ............................................................................................. 179
FUTURE RESEARCH ........................................................................................................ 181
Parallels Between White Supremacist Ideology and Black Patriarchy .................... 182
Co-optation of Feminist Language ........................................................................... 183
Material Harm ........................................................................................................... 183
Practitioners .............................................................................................................. 184
Final Words ............................................................................................................... 184
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 185

ix
FIGURES
Figure 1 “Women come and go” meme .................................................................... 122
Figure 2 “Working to be queens” meme .................................................................. 123
Figure 3 Ancient Egypt, meme ................................................................................. 130
Figure 4 Meme, alleged pyramid discovered in Antarctica ...................................... 130
Figure 5 Meme urging people “Stop promoting homosexuality to our children!” ... 136
Figure 6 Instagram user imposes his face on homophobic meme ............................ 136
Figure 7 Meme, What is “female?” .......................................................................... 139
Figure 8 Homecoming queen .................................................................................... 139
Figure 9 Panafrikanism or perish .............................................................................. 141
Figure 10 Hospitality club? ....................................................................................... 143
Figure 11 Comic strip style meme depicting an overbearing Black woman ............ 145
Figure 12 Comic strip style meme depicting a reversal of traditional gender roles . 145
Figure 13 Clarity or contradiction ............................................................................ 147
Figure 14 User .......................................................................................................... 148
Figure 15 Toxic masculinity ..................................................................................... 154
Figure 16 “Masculinity isn’t toxic” .......................................................................... 154
Figure 17 International Women’s Day ..................................................................... 156
Figure 18 Intersectionality Twitter .......................................................................... 158
x
ABSTRACT
The subject of misogynoir— the contempt for Black women as expressed through
popular media representations (Bailey, 2013; Bailey and Trudy, 2018)— is a focal point of Black
feminist scholarship within the field of media studies. However, the intersection of misogynoir
and internet studies is understudied, with the exception of a handful of Black feminist scholars
within the critical internet studies community including Safiya Noble, Catherine Knight-Steele,
Kishonna Gray and a few more. The nascent fields of Black feminist technology studies (Noble,
2016), Black Feminist Digital Studies (Knight-Steele, forthcoming), or Black cyberfeminist
thought (Gray, 2017) are testaments to a commitment to expanding this work. Outside of the
scholars within the realm of critical internet studies few have taken an extensive look at how
social media platforms and other networked technologies play a role in the dissemination, co-
construction and reification of anti-Black patriarchal stereotypes and tropes online.
In this study, I use the qualitative method of critical technocultural discourse analysis to
examine how white supremacist ideology presents itself in discursive exchanges within the Black
digital public sphere, especially in regards to gender. I chose to focus on the representation of
Black women and how they are discussed within memes in Black social media spaces as a way
to nuance the conversation about who the “bad actors” are online. White supremacist ideology is
not the sole domain of white men. This research forms a baseline for understanding how white
patriarchal discourses present themselves in discussions of Black women online and within the
Black digital public sphere and how these platforms may facilitate the spread of gendered anti-
Blackness.
To this end, I established an emergent coding scheme from a sample of 400 memes from
a set of meme aggregator pages popular within the Black digital public sphere to categorize how
xi
these groups discuss Black women. I then analyzed these memes using CTDA as the analytical
approach. The study reveals that not only are Black women vilified in intragroup discussions, but
themes within this discourse are also consistent with the ‘controlling images of Black
womanhood’ framework articulated by feminist scholar Patricia Hill-Collins, which describes
the stereotypes and tropes of Black women created during slavery by slaveowners to justify their
subjugation and consequently propagated through mainstream American popular media. I
contend that these discourses are not only present in the Black digital public sphere, they are
pervasive.
Additionally, this study found that many of the technical affordances of social media
platforms, such as Instagram, facilitate these harmful discourses. The subjects of this study tend
to circulate misinformation and disinformation and invert feminist philosophies and concepts to
suit their needs. For example, within these groups, there is an apparent trend of mimicry and co-
optation of feminist concepts such as toxic masculinity and misogyny. Many studies address how
feminists become the target of patriarchal attacks online; However, these studies tend to focus on
white men as the aggressors and white women as the victims.
This dissertation introduces the concept of networked misogynoir, a term I coined to
describe how the technical affordances of social media platforms support the social connection
of individuals who are opposed to Black women (and oftentimes Black feminists) and also
facilitate the reactionary online backlash to Black women and Black feminists in particular.

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Black men are the white men of the Black community is a common refrain within Black
feminist spaces online. While this quip is a gross over-generalization, it bears true to the fact that
there is a subset of Black people, mostly men, who appear to uphold specific white patriarchal
standards of propriety that work in service of centering straight cis-gender masculinity as the
pinnacle of society. As counterintuitive as it may seem, these Black men (and some Black
women) also tend to be individuals who are very vocal when it comes to speaking out against
racism, anti-Blackness, and the continued inequity that Black people in America face. How could
it be that individuals who purport to be pro-Black, would also reinscribe the opposing ideologies
of white supremacy?
This dissertation intends to critically examine the claim that there is a particular group of
mostly Black men who gather on the internet under the guise of pro-Blackness and
Afrocentricity, only to reify white supremacist patriarchal ideologies. I explore the veracity of
these claims by analyzing their attitudes toward Black women as expressed through meme
production and circulation via social media platforms. I start with analysis of attitudes toward
women as they are a primary indicator of patriarchal discourses.
I use critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) as an analytical approach to
1
reading memes shared within these specific communities. CTDA draws from interdisciplinary
scholarship to “decenter the Western deficit perspective on minority technology use to instead
prioritize the epistemological standpoint of underrepresented groups of technology users”
(Brock, 2020, p. 2). To this end, this dissertation opens a nuanced conversation that foregrounds
1
Brock, André. “Critical technocultural discourse analysis.” New Media & Society 20, no. 3 (2018): 1012-1030.

1

the complexity of white supremacist patriarchal ideology and underscores the idea that one does
not need to be a white person or benefit from white supremacist ideology in the traditional sense,
to espouse white supremacy, especially online.
This project draws heavily from intersectionality as an analytical framework.
Intersectionality is often misinterpreted as a divisive theory that perpetuates identity politics ,
which is both a true and false claim. It is true in the sense that the phrase identity politics has two
competing definitions– its original definition, which is positive and consistent with the
intellectual project of intersectionality; and another that is ascribed by opposing forces. The term
identity politics was originally coined by the Combahee River Collective in 1977 via their
infamous manifesto “The Statement,” to describe the interconnectedness of oppressive forces
such as sexism, racism, homophobia, and classism. In this context identity is a tool for
coalition-building between and across seemingly disparate communities and is constituted by the
common shared experience of contending with oppression. However, during the 1980s the term
was taken up by conservatives who opposed this type of coalition-building. They affixed
negative connotations to the term, including the false notion that identity politics are divisive.
Therefore under it’s original conceptualization identity politics brought forth a new
pathway for coalition-building that moved away from traditional political affiliations based on
shared values or the presumption of sameness to provide a more nuanced affront to oppressive
forces. However, in opposing circles, the term was taken up and weaponized against individuals
who chose to use lived experiences and embodied perspective as a way to align with groups
politically.
2

As I will explain in detail in the literature review section of this dissertation, the
intellectual project of intersectionality advocates that individuals use the complexity of identity
to bring forth the nuance of how power operates. This dissertation focuses on Black women and
the Black community, not merely as an addendum to extant research but to enrich the scholarly
conversations about white supremacist patriarchal ideology online. If Black people, positioned at
the polar opposite spectrum of whiteness, can internalize and espouse white supremacist
patriarchal ideology, then there are undoubtedly numerous implications for the scholarship that
has yet to consider them as a part of the white supremacy problem. This is especially true when it
comes to thinking about the recent presidential elections in the United States (2016 and 2020)
and how white patriarchal supremacist ideologies were leveraged to sow discord between groups
along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality online.
Background
In late December of 2018 and early January of 2019, two research reports (one of which
2
was commissioned by the United States Senate) revealed that Black people were targeted by a
coordinated disinformation campaign ahead of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Both studies
3
came to the same conclusion—that not only had Russian operatives worked to sow political and
social discord along the lines of social justice political divides, another one of their explicit goals
was to suppress the so-called Black vote . The opening to the U.S. Senate report read:
2
DiResta, R., K. Shaffer, B. Ruppel, and D. Sullivan. “The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,
New Knowledge Report prepared for the United States Senate Select Committee on Russian Interference in the 2016
Election.” (2018).; Howard, Philip N., Bharath Ganesh, Dimitra Liotsiou, John Kelly, and Camille François. “The
IRA, social media and political polarization in the United States, 2012-2018.” (2019).
3
Misinformation describes the unintentional spread of false information, whereas disinformation describes the
intentional spread of information that the spreader knows is false. See: Jack, Caroline. “Lexicon of lies: Terms for
problematic information.” Data & Society 3 (2017).
3

In 2016, Russian operatives associated with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research
Agency (IRA) used social media to conduct an information warfare campaign designed to
spread disinformation and societal division in the United States…. Masquerading as
Americans, these operatives used targeted advertisements, intentionally falsified news
articles, self-generated content, and social media platform tools to interact with and
attempt to deceive millions of social media users in the United States. This campaign
sought to polarize Americans on the basis of societal, ideological, and racial differences,
provoked real world events, and was part of a foreign government’s covert support of
Russia’s favored candidate in the U.S. presidential election. (Senate report, p. 3)
The revelation was not as striking as the news media’s coverage of the findings. News
reporters framed the infiltration of Black social media spaces as surprising or curious. This focal
point seemed out of step with the current political moment, as the findings of these reports were
released just after the midterm elections (November 6, 2018). At that time, Black women
received praise for their loyalty to the Democratic Party and their ability to increase voter
4
turnout. Reports showed that they voted in line with the party at the highest rates of any
demographic, which suggests that any infiltration efforts against them were extremely
5
unsuccessful. Polls revealed that they had just helped the Democratic Party win dozens of
political offices around the country. This contradictory information was a bit difficult for me to
4
Chira, Susan. “Driven By South’s Past, Black Women Seek Votes and a New Future.” The New
York Times , October 4, 2018. Accessed April 25, 2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/us/politics/black-women-voters-south.html
5
Tyson, Alec. “The 2018 Midterm Vote: Divisions By Race, Gender, Education” Pew Research
Center, Washington, D.C. (November 8, 2018)
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/11/08/the-2018-midterm-vote-divisions-by-race-ge
nder-education/
4

reconcile. On the one hand, Black people were overwhelmingly targeted and presumably
manipulated by an effectively polarizing weapons-grade information campaign yet, on the other
hand, Black women were the recipients of praise for their Democratic Party loyalty.
I became curious about this perceived contradiction and began to look into the content
from the sock puppet accounts discovered in the study. I immediately recognized the content as
6
hotep posts. Presently, hotep is a pejorative term describing a person who subscribes to a strictly
patriarchal form of Afrocentricity or Black Nationalism. Hoteps get characterized as overly
enthusiastic Afrocentrists who are also extremely self-righteous about their political philosophies
regarding race and racism. They also get characterized as being indignant with anyone who
disagrees with their political views.
As a direct consequence of their visibility within the Black digital public sphere, many
Black internet users who encounter the group in the digital space for the first time mistakenly
assume that they are a strictly social media phenomenon. However, the hotep stereotype
precedes social media by decades. This fact is evidenced by the numerous depictions (many of
which are parodies) of hoteps in popular Black film and television shows as early as the 1980s.
Without explicitly being named hotep the following widely recognized characters from popular
Black media productions are representative of the extreme Afrocentrist trope: Kalinga ( I’m
Gonna Git You Sucka , 1988), Dap ( School Daze , 1988), Buggin Out ( Do the Right Thing , 1989),
Oswald Bates (“In Living Color,” 1990-1994), Shaza Zulu ( A Different World , 1991),
Euripedes/Dead Mike ( CB4 , 1993), Shareef ( Menace II Society , 1993), Fudge ( Higher Learning ,
1995), Taheim (on the “Snow White” episode of the popular television series Martin , 1996),
6
Sock puppets are accounts that pretend to be a member of a group that they are either
attempting to infiltrate or deride.
5

Speech ( Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood , 1996),
Conspiracy Brother ( Undercover Brother , 2002), Dewey
“Obabaoomamasaymamasaymamakusa” Jenkins, ( The Boondocks season 1, episode 13
“Wingman”, 2006), and Pops ( black-ish , 2014-present). Although not comprehensive, this list of
examples signifies the hoteps’ position as a recognized group within the Black popular culture
zeitgeist for at least the last four decades, but especially in the twenty years following the Black
Power Movement (the 1960s-1970s).
Although Black Nationalism existed in various forms since Martin Delany publicly
advocated for repatriation to Africa in the late 19th century , the 1960s and 1970s bore witness to
7
particularly massive growth in popularity of various Black Nationalist movements.
In 1973, Ra Un Nefer Amen founded the Ausar Auset Society-- a Pan-African religious
organization in Brooklyn, New York. Followers of this Pan-African spirituality became known
as hoteps because that was the salutation they used to greet one another. By the 1980s, the Black
Egyptian hypothesis became popular amongst many Afrocentrics. The Black Egyptian
hypothesis is the highly contested notion that ancient Egypt was a Black society. While scholars
sucg as Cheikh Anta Diop and Segun Magbagbeola are very invested in this premise others
(Lefkowitz, 1996) argue that it is not only outlandish but dangerously anachronistic to apply
modern conceptions of race to ancient civilizations. This theory is buttressed by the controversial
scholarship of Professor Martin Bernal who, beginning in 1987, wrote three volumes arguing
8
7
Delany, Martin Robison. Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People
of the United States . Project Gutenberg, 2005.
8
Bernal, Martin. Black Athena : The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New Brunswick,
N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1987.; Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Archaeological and
Documentary Evidence. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991; Bernal, Martin.
Black Athena : The Linguistic Evidence . New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2006.
6

that ancient Greek civilization is Egyptian in origin. As Jacques Berlinerblau argues in their book
on Bernal’s work “ Black Athena has become inextricably bound with Afrocentrism”
(Berlinerblau, 1999, p. 11-12) The socio-political climate of the college campus in the wake of
the Black Power movement and at the onset of the rise in Black Studies and other ethnic studies
academic programs, was at least one context that gave rise to radical Afrocentricity. However, it
was the public spaces outside of the academy that birthed the hotep as the nickname was applied
to any and all groups of afrocentrics who seemed deeply invested in pro-Blackness.
Unfortunately, there was not enough distinction made on the basis of politics, as there is a
spectrum of afrocentrics, from completely radical to completely conservative.
I provide a more in-depth explanation of this group later in this dissertation. However,
suffice it to say that although hoteps, or as I will refer to them, internet Afrocentrics are a
recognized subset of the Black digital public sphere, they are also often derided for their
ahistoricism, affinity for wild conspiracy theories, and a failure to divorce their alleged
pro-Black, Afrocentric rhetoric from their allegiance to patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, and
xenophobia, among other oppressive and harmful ideologies. I say alleged because not all radical
Black-Afrocentricists are wedded to these ideas of patriarchy. There are a number of Black
feminist Pan-African scholars, for instance, who work to differentiate the groups that I address
here, from the more authentic and progressive forms of Afrocentrism. This is important because I
do not intend to conflate all forms of Black Nationalism, Afrocentricity, and Black Conservatism
as they are numerous, and quite complex.
Returning to the findings of the Senate report that found evidence of third party
interference of Black socila media ecosystems, I initially assumed that the contradiction in
7

coverage of the findings was the typical conflation of dominant group identity needs with the
needs of every subgroup within the community. All of the headlines read “Black people” when it
would have been more apt to highlight the fact that these third party entities have specifically
sought out Black men and masculinist spaces online.
As political scientist Jane Mansbridge astutely points out, there is a tendency for
dominant groups to subsume intragroup heterogeneity and enact exclusion by implication . In the
9
public sphere, this would equate to using a label for the dominant subsection of a group to
signify all others. For example:
“The use of ‘men’ to mean ‘human beings’ theoretically includes women, except that the
word ‘men’ has connotations and establishes expectations that exclude women. Similarly,
the word ‘women’ theoretically includes African-American women, except that because
white women comprise in the United States the great majority of women, the word in that
context has connotations taht exclude experiences characterizing the majority of African
American women. In the same way, the phrase “African-American women” implies
heterosexual African-American women” and the phrse “hetereosexual African American
women” implies “able-bodied heterosexual African American women. Each category,
conjuring up its dominant of majority referent, implicitly excludes those whose
experiences differ from that majority.” (Mansbridge, 1993, p. 367)
In a patriarchal society, there is a tendency for members of groups of every racial
background to generalize the thoughts, opinions, and norms of heterosexual, patriarchal culture
to everyone else in the group including women, or LGBTQ+ people who have distinct needs,
9
Mansbridge, Jane. “Feminism and democratic community.” Nomos 35 (1993): 339-395.
8

thoughts, and opinions. Many already erroneously view Black people as a monolithic group, so it
made sense that the social media spaces of primarily Black men would be conflated with that of
all Black people. However, what I found was more insidious. It appeared to me that whoever was
responsible for creating these authentic-seeming sock puppet accounts had intentionally tapped
the online spaces frequented by internet Afrocentrics to suppress their votes but did so by
invoking anger around American racism. It was also clear that whoever was behind these
accounts had a keen understanding of Black political discourse, enough to not only mimic it but
also to manipulate it.
A few weeks later, on January 21, 2019, California Senator Kamala Harris announced her
bid for the office of the President of the United States. As a California resident and long term
follower of the former San Francisco District Attorney, I was not surprised to see such a massive
crowd at her announcement rally on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in her hometown of Oakland,
CA. I knew her to be a Progressive Prosecutor, as she branded herself. However, I was surprised
to witness the almost immediate backlash to Harris’ announcement in social media spaces.
Questions about her ethnicity arose. There were accusations that she was not, in fact,
African-American and that she did not grow up in Oakland, CA, the storied Black community
and hotbed of Black political activism in Northern California’s Bay Area. There were
accusations that she enrolled at the HBCU (Historically Black College or University) Howard
University and became a member of a prestigious Black sorority there (Alpha Kappa Alpha
Sorority, Inc.) because she was trying to pass , or pretend to be Black. There were nasty
allegations that she ascended the social and economic ladder by having sex with powerful men,
as people within the Black digital public sphere brought up her past relationship with the noted
9

politician and former Mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown. A multitude of memes
misrepresented her political track record. For example, one meme claimed that Harris had put
more Black men in prison than any other prosecutor in California’s history when the exact
opposite was true…. Additionally, many memes included photos of Senator Harris in police
garb (a bulletproof vest and an officer’s badge) and presented her as an adversary to the Black
community.
As I watched the bashing unfold on Twitter and Instagram, I was overcome by that same
feeling I had when I watched people in MAGA hats physically assault protestors at Trump rallies
during the presidential campaign. I had that feeling that came with the realization that I occupy a
vastly different America than many other people, feelings further complicated by Senator Harris’
tepid response to the misinformation/disinformation campaign launched against. In several
interviews, she dismissed the agitators as trolls or Russian bots . This dismissive attitude
backfired and caused at least one contingent of internet afrocentrics ( ADOS– American
Descendants of Slavery ) to create memes refuting this claim.
10
ADOS is a nascent political interest group within the Black community that seeks to
bring specialized political attention to the distinct needs of Black American people who are
descendants of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. They argue that this distinction is necessary
because of their relatively marginal status in comparison to other Black people who do not share
the same history of intergenerational structural inequality as a result of ongoing racial oppression
in the United States. ADOS then, is the name of the political group, but also their preferred
marker of identity, as they advocate for the disaggregation of race and ethnic categories such as
10
Moore, Antonio. Twitter Post. November 12, 2019, 10:59AM
https://twitter.com/tonetalks/status/1194328948408086528
10

Black or African American, which, they argue, obscure the compounded oppression that long
time Black American descendants of U.S. slavery face. At surface level, the goals of ADOS are
legitimate. However, their means for articulating their message are often problematic in that they
are heavily dependent on antagonistic, xenophobic rhetoric that parrots the same time of racial
essentialism they claim to want to disrupt.
Harris and her team failed to make the connection that although bots were responsible for
creating these astroturfing campaigns against her, they were legitimated by actual people, like
the members of ADOS for instance, who took up the incendiary messages within these memes
and began to circulate them on their own. Astroturfing describes a form of propaganda in which
the creators of media content obscure their identity or pose as neutral parties in order to create
the illusion that the message is coming from ordinary citizens. The term plays on the concept of
astroturf, synthetic grass that is constructed to look real, and is intended to indicate fake
grassroots agitation. In effect, the Harris campaign categorically dismissed the legitimacy of the
ADOS community’s argument, and they responded by re-circulating xenophobic, anti-Black,
sexist content produced by whomever was behind the astroturfing campaign.
This ultimately did not not bode well for Senator Harris. This blunder, however, signals a
disconnect between what is happening online and how many understand the problem of targeted
harassment in digital spaces. Americans are not being deceived by information so much as they
are inundated with content that mirrors pre-existing content that reinforce fear and bias.
As I grappled to make sense of the vitriol directed at Senator Harris, I could not help but
think about the findings from that Senate report. The committee found that, “No single group of
11

Americans was targeted by IRA information operatives more than African-Americans…” The
study also found that:
1. over 66 percent of the IRA’s Facebook advertising content contained a term
related to race
2. the IRA used locational targeting, specifically aimed at African Americans in key
metropolitan areas
3. the IRA also created many authentic-seeming Facebook pages including the
widely recognized “Blacktivist” page which generated 11.2 million engagements
with Facebook users
4. at its peak, Blacktivist was more popular than the authentic Black Lives Matter
page
5. the IRA also created fake Instagram pages and 5 out of its 10 fake pages were
focused on African-American issues and audience
6. on Twitter, the IRA’s content heavily focused on hot-button issues with racial
undertones, such as the NFL kneeling protests (6) on YouTube, more than 96
percent of the IRA’s content centered on racial issues and police brutality.
Although it is a bit startling to find that there was such a concerted effort to infiltrate
Black American information systems, this type of behavior is not without precedence. During the
Cold War, the Russian government spent millions of dollars on foreign propaganda campaigns,
including a number of which intended to incite dissatisfaction amongst Black American
12

communities with the U.S. government for its treatment of Black citizens . For instance,
11
Russian operatives highlighted the contradictory nature of America’s ethos of freedom for all
alongside the existence of Jim Crow segregation. They were also responsible for propagating
rumors that the American government coordinated the assassination of civil rights leader Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. The U.S. historical memory tends to forget how the Russians targeted the
Black American community because racism and anti-Blackness is and has always been
America’s Achilles heel. However, the influence over Black American political discussions had
far-reaching implications. In essence, American school systems desegregated during this time
partially because of the pressure on politicians to avoid looking like hypocrites in the eyes of the
global community because of their discriminatory stance on race while espousing freedom for
all.
More importantly, astroturfing campaigns that circulate disinformation are not always
successful. They are dependent upon the interest and imitation of other internet users within the
targeted community to take up their message, copy it, and circulate it in the fashion of a meme.
This is an important distinction because it implies that there is something happening at the
discursive level that needs to be explored— these memes do not take hold in a culture unless
they already reflect the values and hegemonic beliefs of the dominant group. Though they may
be created by outsiders seeking to stir the pot, they strike a chord with networks of people for
some underlying reason.
11
Ioffe, Julia. “The History of Russian Involvement in America’s Race Wars,” October 21, 2017.
April 25, 2020.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/russia-facebook-race/542796/
13

According to Caroline Jack the terms propaganda , advertising , public relations , public
diplomacy (or public affairs ), and information operations all refer to the same thing: “deliberate,
systematic information campaigns usually conducted through mass media forms-- the press,
broadcast media, digital media, public events and exhibitions, and so on” (Jack, 2017 p. 4).
However, propaganda is distinct because of its negative connotation– it is typically understood as
either manipulative or deceitful in contemporary American society (Jack, 2017 p. 7). However,
this was not always the case. Groundbreaking publicist, Edward Bernays who essentially created
the profession of public relations (PR) originally used the term propaganda neutrally to describe
his foundational techniques. As early as 1947, Bernays unabashedly described the task of
engineering consent, that is, manipulating the thoughts, beliefs and values of constituents, as a
democratic necessity. In his words:
“The average American adult has only six years of schooling behind him. With pressing
crises and decisions to be faced, a leader frequently cannot wait for the people to arrive at
even general understanding. In certain cases, democratic leaders must play their part in
leading the public through the engineering of content to socially constructive goals
democratic leaders could manipulate public opinion as the process of engineering consent
or, “the use of an engineering approach–that is, action based on thorough knowledge of
the situation and on the application of scientific principles and tried practices to the task
of getting people to support ideas and programs” (Bernays, 1947, p. 114).
In this light, it is clear that propaganda
Bernays was aware of the potential for propaganda to potentially interfere with
democratic systems. He wrote explicitly about the potential for mass communications to affect
14

democracy, either positively or negatively (Bernays, 1947, p. 113). It is my belief that Kamala
Harris’ campaign fell victim to a sophistcated propaganda campign that capitalized on the
growing phenomenon of networked misogynoir.
As a participant in the Black Twitter and other Black social media communities, I am
12
well aware of the long-running jokes about so-called hoteps and their conservative political
beliefs. Now it seems, this group and their distorted, fact-deficient ideologies have a material
effect over both Black political discourse and the broader American political arena. As this
fringe group moves toward the center, it seems that no one— not the researchers who conducted
the study, the politicians who were clearly targeted, politicos, or analysts who follow politics so
closely— has a full grasp on the implications of phenomena because no one engaged the
nuanced forms of far-right conservative ideology within the Black community. It is my hope that
this study contributes to a greater understanding of how networked popular misogyny and
networked misogynoir has proven to have material effect on our democracy.
The term networked misogynoir is closely related to the concepts of networked
individualism and networked popular misogyny. Networked individualism was first coined by
Barry Wellman and published in research conducted alongside renown internet studies theorist
Manuel Castells (Wellman, Castells, 2001) However, the term was fully fleshed out in
Networked: The New Social Operating System by Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman (2012). Here,
Rainie and Wellman make the argument that the hyperconnectivity of modern social life creates
opportunities for new patterns of networking and connection, namely movement away from
12
Black Twitter is a community of people who use the Twitter platform to discuss Black political
and cultural topics. They have become known for their grassroots political mobilization and
scathing critiques. (See: Brock, 2012; Clark, 2014)
15

traditional tightly knit groups (such as families, towns, etc.) and toward less-structured socially
networked groups that traverse spatial and temporal limitations (among its many other effects).
This theory builds on previous scholarship advanced by researchers examining the new patterns
of social communication ushered in during the pre-social media society such as Joshua
Meyrowitz who wrote No Sense of Place (1985), an examination of the effects that the advent of
television had on the social experiences, behaviors, and identity of individuals; or “Bowling
Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital” an essay written in 1995 by Robert Putnam, who
argues that decreased civic engagement is connected to a decline in membership of traditional
American social groups and clubs. Across all theories is the idea that individuals are
less-connected in real-time or the real-world. However, networked individualism underscores the
changes that are specific to the advent of the social internet including the explosion of grassroots
creators and niche media content, as well as the blurring of boundaries between powerful media
entities and the new media intermediaries described in scholarship on participatory culture
online.
The term networked popular misogyny was advanced by the scholarship of Sarah
Banet-Weiser who uses it to describe the ways in which misogyny interacts with the
hyperconnectivity of the social media society. As Banet-Weiser explains, “Misogyny, once a
social formation that was expressed primarily in enclosures (home, locker room, board room,
etc.) now increases via the connection, circulation, publicness, networks, and communication
across and through those enclosures” (Banet-Weiser, 2018, p. 5) Networked popular misogyny
manifests itself in a variety of asocial activities on the internet, that are geared toward policing
the bodies and autonomy of women, ranging from the asocial to outright hateful– including
16

revenge porn , swatting , doxxing , as well as many other coordinated attacks organized in
13 14 15
digital spaces.
A common thread between networked individualism and networked misogyny is that
many of the new social formations provide constant succor for individuals who are in search of
specific communities that are perhaps marginal. This has both negative and positive
repercussions in that some people seek out positive spaces of community, while others connect
around asocial interests. For instance, the individuals who gather and connect over their shared
hatred of racial identity groups. These individuals may experience social isolation in the
real-world, however, on the web, someone who thinks and feels like them is always online and
ready to commiserate.
Networked misogynoir, then, builds on both of these concepts to describe how people
connect and build entire online communities around their shared hatred of Black women,
whether implicitly or explicitly stated. Misogynoir is the term used to describe the contempt for
Black women as expressed through popular media representations (Bailey, 2013; Bailey and
Trudy, 2018). Networked misogynoir acknowledges racism as an organizing factor in offline
social worlds and hones in on the specific ways that anti-Black misogyny fosters community
online through the circuation of online media content that is both anti-Black and sexist.
13
Revenge porn is the act of posting sexually explicit images of a person without their consent,
in order to embarrass or harass them
14
Swatting is the act of calling emergency responders with a false report of an egregious crime in
the hopes that they will dispatch militarized police units such as the SWAT team
15
Doxxing is the act of publishing sensitive or identifying information such as home or work
address, telephone number, etc. to the internet
17

Research Objectives
One can not wholly see a problem upon which they are standing. This dissertation takes
an intersectional approach to illuminating how white patriarchal discourses present in the
conversations of groups who, on the surface at least, claim to be opposed to white supremacy.
Additionally, this study has implications for contemporary approaches to studies of material and
ideological harm against women online as they have tended to center white
narratives—positioning individual bad actors as solely responsible for manipulating
value-neutral technology to launch coordinated attacks against women.
I highlight here the practical and theoretical contributions of this study. The power of
hegemonic ideologies lies in their ability to go unnamed, unrecognized, and therefore
unaddressed. As Antonio Gramsci theorizes, harmful discourses maintain power through
universal acceptance as “common sense” (Gramsci, 1971), or information that is widely accepted
and internalized on the individual level without critical reflection. This dissertation disrupts the
common sense, anti-Black notion that Black women are all welfare queens, jezebels, sapphires,
or mammies. It also disrupts the notion that “bad actors” online all look a certain way and attack
the same groups of people. Patriarchal discourse is harmful in all of its iterations, and to get a full
scope of the issue, we have to understand how it operates in non-white communities.
This dissertation decenters whiteness and focuses on Black patriarchal discourse. I take
an intersectional approach to this study because I want to move away from categorical thinking
about identity. This approach also nuances the conversation by highlighting the distinct forms of
ideological harm that are enacted against Black women. Black women are the targets of harmful
discourse online just as much as white women are, and they have not been quiet about it. For
18

instance, #YourSlipisShowing was a hashtag campaign that exposed anonymous attackers for
16
using “sock puppets,” in this case, anonymous individuals posing as “angry Black feminists,”
which predated #Gamergate by years. However, this brand of targeted harassment did not
become a topic of serious scholarly inquiry in the way that Gamergate (which primarily
victimized white, Asian and Asian-American women) did. The role that Black women and
especially Black feminists play in social media social justice efforts is not typically foregrounded
in conversations about the Black public sphere either. Therefore, one of the goals of this study is
to heighten the visibility of concerns that plague that Black feminist subaltern counterpublics
online. The reification of white supremacist discourses about Black women is central to these
concerns.
Research Questions
This dissertation foregrounds the growing problem of misogynoir in social media spaces
by identifying these discourses and illustrating how they reify patriarchal anti-Blackness and
misogynoir. In pursuit of these goals, three central questions guide this dissertation:
RQ1. What are the “internet Afrocentrics” saying about Black women and girls?
RQ2. To what extent does this discourse reify patriarchal anti-Blackness and misogynoir?
RQ3. How do the technical affordances of the relevant social media platforms contribute to
‘networked misogynoir’?
In this examination of how anti-Black feminist groups reinforce stereotypical tropes via
political discourse online, I have found that these groups not only mischaracterize Black women,
16
Hampton, Rachelle. “The Black Feminists Who Saw the Alt-Right Threat Coming.” Slate ,
April 23, 2019. Accessed on August 1, 2019.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/black-feminists-alt-right-twitter-gamergate.html
19

but they use the rhetoric of racial uplift to do so. This distortion creates an atmosphere where
Black women are always responsible for the failures and shortcomings of the Black community
as a whole. While this is not a new phenomenon, I find that the networked brand of misogynoir is
particularly threatening because of its enhanced capacity for grassroots organization and
circulation and relative obscurity.
In the early years of social network adoption and diffusion, it was common for ICT
17
researchers to assume techno-determinist narratives of the so-called “free and open internet.”
Early internet scholars praised message boards, blogs, and proto-social media platforms for
18
their potential to not only connect individuals but also to circumvent offline biases. These
scholars erroneously presumed that these technologies would be wholly liberating because they
provided access and visibility to groups typically marginalized within the public sphere. They
19
thought online “anonymity” would protect individuals from bias or discrimination. However, the
exact opposite turned out to be true.
Undoubtedly, the threat of white supremacist attacks and other forms of digital
harassment on the web are more pronounced in recent years. As a result, this issue has been
taken up as a point of interest by many academics. However, many approach the problem as a
technological glitch, as an error that needs fixing, as opposed to being a mirror of offline bias
20
and discrimination. As sociologist Amber Hamilton outlines in her genealogy of Critical Race
17
ICT: Information and Communication Technologies
18
such as Black Planet and Friendster.
19
Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing race: Visual cultures of the Internet . Vol. 23. U of Minnesota
Press, 2008.
20
Nakamura, Lisa. “Glitch racism: Networks as actors within vernacular internet theory.”
Culture Digitally 10 (2013).
20

and Digital Studies, the “critical body of scholarship emerged to critique the inherent whiteness
21
in the early scholarship about the internet and its obfuscation of the role of race in the structure
and culture of the internet.” This emergent field of study continues to develop as scholars from
various disciplines such as information studies, media studies, sociology, and communication
contribute their expertise and critical lens to analyzing the structure and function of the internet
as it pertains to race (Amrute, 2016; Benjamin, 2019; Brock, 2020; Clark, 2015; Daniels, 2012;
Florini, 2019; McIlwain, 2019; Noble 2018). It is in this tradition that this study is situated.
As a traditionally subjugated discourse, the increased visibility of Black Feminism in
digital spaces has noteworthy reverberations. One consequence, in particular, may be paralleled
to a phenomenon recently identified as networked popular misogyny . The concept of networked
22
misogyny describes how anti-Feminists leverage social media platforms to respond negatively to
the popularity of commodified feminism. As Sarah Banet-Weiser explains, the network in
networked popular misogyny refers to the interconnected nature of media and everyday practice.
She argues that “Misogyny, once a social formation that was expressed primarily in enclosures
(home, locker room, board room, etc.) now increases via the connection, circulation, publicness,
networks, and communication across and through those enclosures” (Banet-Weiser, 2018, p. 5).
Banet-Weiser argues that this capacity for hyper connection has caused misogyny to become just
as popular as feminism has become recently--and for the same reasons--digital networks have
accelerated and facilitated the growth and circulation of these discourses.
21
Hamilton, Amber M. “A Genealogy of Critical Race and Digital Studies: Past, Present, and
Future.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (2020): 2332649220922577.
22
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Empowered: Popular feminism and popular misogyny . Duke University
Press, 2018.
21

I propose the concept of networked misogynoir to describe the unique ways that Black
women experience discrimination online based on gender and also by race. Central to this claim
is the assertion that gender and race are not and should not be separate variables--as the presence
of one compounds the experience of the other. I use the term misogynoir as opposed to misogyny
to foreground the unique ways in which anti-Blackness is enacted, and compounded by sexism,
in these networked spaces. Misogynoir, a term coined by Moya Bailey, describes the pervasive
23
negative stereotypes of Black women that permeate popular culture, as well as the tendency for
these negative representations to go unaddressed and to be categorically accepted as truth, even
though false. Therefore, “networked misogynoir” is an intersectional framework I theorize to
understand the similarities and differences between the way that Black women versus all other
women are harassed, policed, or otherwise vilified in digital public spheres.
This dissertation uses image-based memes culled from Black digital publics as a
technological artifact and entry point for the exploration of patriarchal discourses that police
Black women’s presence in Black digital spaces. The analysis includes an account of the
socio-historical connection between white supremacist patriarchal discourses and familiar tropes
in Black meme culture today. The reification of these tropes within Black communities is
significant because, as many Black feminist scholars have noted (Davis, 2011 [1981];
Hill-Collins, 2002 [1990]), they originated during American slavery as justifications for the
vilification and victimization of Black women.
23
Bailey, Moya. “Misogynoir.” (2013).
22

Digital Consciousness-Raising Groups
In decades past, most women gained exposure to feminism via their proximity to
academia, no matter their identity. Feminism is and has historically been an ideology that mainly
circulates via academia and academic circles (hooks, 2000, p. 8). However, the feminist
consciousness-rasing group is the mother of modern-day feminist academic spaces and continues
to work in tandem with them. As an iterative, ever-evolving embodied ideology, one that is
continually changing, feminism is shaped by the shared lived experiences and social connection
of women. In the popular mythos, these women first came together to identify what notable
feminist Betty Friedan first called “the problem with no name.” Black women, on the other
24
hand, developed their unique brand of feminism in more enclaved social spaces, outside of the
purview of the white gaze. This social separation became necessary when Black women, who
historically have had limited access to the academy and their exclusive circles, realized quickly
that white feminist spaces were not going to address their needs. “The Statement,” a letter
25
written by a collective of Black feminists who called themselves the Combahee River Collective,
is a notable example of knowledge produced out of the Black feminist consciousness-raising
group. The statement outlines their general politics and beliefs around issues of race, gender,
sexuality, and class. At the beginning of the statement, these women mention that they have been
meeting regularly for years to define and clarify their “politics, while at the same time doing
political work within [their] own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and
movements” (Combahee River Collective, 1983).
24
Friedan, Betty. The feminine mystique . WW Norton & Company, 2010 [1963].
25
Collective, Combahee River. “The Combahee river collective statement.” Home girls: A Black
feminist anthology (1983): 264-74.
23

Prominent Black feminist thinker bell hooks describes the feminist consciousness-raising
group as “the place where seasoned feminist thinkers and activists could recruit new converts”
(hooks, 2000, p. 8). However, she also argues that in order to reach the masses, both feminism
and Black Feminist Thought must be accessible to individuals outside of the academy because
“sharing feminist thought and practice sustains feminist movement” (hooks, 2000, p. 24). In our
present moment, social media spaces appear to provide that opportunity to bring a traditionally
subjugated discourse into the mainstream. Many Black feminists agree.
In 2016, Patricia Hill-Collins shared her prediction that the fourth wave of feminism
26
will be digital. She asserts that “Digital media, especially social media platforms such as
Facebook and Twitter that create web-based communities, have changed the face and the average
age of feminism” (Collins and Bilge, 2016, p. 105). In her view, the internet has made these
27
ideologies more accessible to those without academic institutional affiliation.
In “Black Feminism Goes Viral ,” an article written for Ebony magazine, Black feminist
28
author Joan Morgan tells journalist and self-identified Black Feminist Jamilah Lemieux that,
29
“[Social media] allows women to get access to women [such as] bell hooks and even me, without
a classroom. It enables feminism to meet them where they are and where they live, which is
actually where I think they should be getting it.” Joan Morgan’s book, When Chickenheads
Come Home to Roost: A Hip Hop Feminist Breaks it Down (1999), is a Black feminist text that
26
Cochrane, Kira. “The Fourth Wave of Feminism: Meet the Revel Women.” The Guardian ,
December 10, 2013. January 15, 2020.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/fourth-wave-feminism-rebel-women
27
Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality . John Wiley & Sons, 2016.
28
Lemieux, Jamilah. “Black Feminism Goes Viral.” Ebony, March 3, 2014. Accessed: January
20, 2020. https://www.ebony.com/news/black-feminism-goes-viral-045/
29
Morgan, Joan. When chickenheads come home to roost: A hip-hop feminist breaks it down .
Simon and Schuster, 2017 [1999].
24

did the critical bridgework of reclaiming and re-defining feminist concepts and terminology in
language that was accessible to all Black women. This work resonated deeply with the post-Civil
Rights, hip-hop generation (Generation X) of Black women who were coming of age in a time
where misogynistic lyrics in the hip-hop music that they loved did not coalesce with how it made
them feel. Lemieux writes that the digital realm has allowed for much more of this bridgework to
happen.
Networked misogynoir
Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that alongside the growth of commodified or popular
feminism, there is also a rise in popular misogyny. Banet-Weiser writes that “misogyny is
30
popular in the contemporary moment for the same reasons feminism has become popular: it is
expressed and practiced on multiple media platforms, it attracts other like-minded groups and
individuals, and manifests in a terrain of struggle, with competing demands for power”
(Banet-Weiser, 2018, p. 2). More importantly, popular misogyny is networked--meaning that it
defies traditional spatial and temporal limitations of previous iterations of misogyny. Popular
misogyny is highly visible, it is highly contagious, and it is entirely unregulated. The groups that
Banet-Weiser highlights: Incels, Men’ s Rights Organizations, and pickup artists resemble the
31
rhetorical styles and assemblages of the internet afrocentric groups. As previously mentioned, it
is impossible to limit harmful discourses if we do not first identify them. If the nuances of bad
behavior online are not interrogated, there will be no possible way to uproot the entire system.
30
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Empowered: Popular feminism and popular misogyny . Duke University
Press, 2018.
31
Samotin, Pierre and Lilly Dancyger. “What is an Incel? Breaking Down the Disturbing Online
Community of Celibate Men.” Glamour . April 26, 2018. Accessed on August 15, 2019, From:
https://www.glamour.com/story/what-is-incel-breaking-down-online-community-celibate-men
25

As previously stated, the first step to stopping these harmful discourses is first to have the ability
to recognize them. This dissertation explores a community of seemingly pro-Black Americans
who ironically espouse white patriarchal ideology.
Organization
In this first chapter, I have introduced the problem of networked misogynoir in Black
social media spaces. In the second chapter, I provide a review of the literature on the Black
digital sphere. This chapter includes a review of the numerous key terms, concepts and theories
that I draw from in my methodological approach. In chapter 3, I outline my research design.
Here I describe how the datasets were collected, coded, and analyzed. I also describe how I use
critical frameworks such as intersectionality as a part of my analytical approach. A thematic
analysis, informed by CTDA (Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis), is the qualitative
method that I use to analyze the data I collected. In chapter 4, I discuss the findings of this study.
In chapter 5, I articulate my conclusions. The final chapter also includes discussion of the
implications of my findings, praxis-oriented solutions, and future research directions.
Positionality Statement
CTDA is a self-reflexive, self-critical method that requires the researcher to be critical of
their approach to the cultural artifact and its socio-historical context. Similarly, intersectional or
otherwise, feminist methodologies also expect the researcher to be aware of and forthcoming
about their own social, economic, and political motivations” (van Leeuwen 2009, p. 293).
Researchers must not only claim to be ethical; they must follow through with it and make that
process transparent in the outline and design of the methodological approach.
26

Per the mandates of CTDA and feminist methodology, I find it essential that researchers
remain cognizant of how their positionality may potentially influence, shape, or otherwise impact
the research that they conduct, i.e., the questions they choose to ask, the site they choose to focus
on, and the interpretations of the data, etc. I also believe they must make these biases and their
positionality transparent in their work. As a feminist practice, I share this statement of my
positionality. I do so in the interest of transparency. I also do this as a statement of good faith
that I am diligent about maintaining the highest ethical standards and self-reflexivity in my work.
I am a Black, heterosexual, cisgender woman and a feminist-- the primary target of
derision of the subjects that I study. I utilize Black feminist analytical approaches in my work
and have a vested interest in the preservation and perpetuity of Black Feminist Thought. As a
Black woman, I experience a combination of race-based and gender-based discrimination
regularly, which affords me a heightened sensitivity to how Black women, as well as women, in
general, are routinely marginalized. It also blinds me from understanding how dominant groups
or others who have similarly internalized misogyny can ignore or dismiss the insidious nature of
these seemingly harmless memes.
I am also a participant in the Black Twitter community, and many other areas of the
Black digital public sphere. As a participant-observer, I have unprecedented access to the
community. At the surface level, the Black digital public sphere is established via social
connection and discursive social media platforms that are technically open to all, including
outsiders. However, the nature of the Black digital public sphere is that it relies heavily on
insider cultural codes and shared experiences of Blackness. As a Black woman and early adopter
to social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter, with sustained involvement in the
27

Black digital public sphere, I have the lived experience in cultural understanding that allows for a
more in-depth analysis of the subgroup.
I also find it necessary to highlight my socio-economic status. I grew up in a
lower-middle-class family in Inglewood, California. I am the first in my family to attend college,
let alone receive a doctorate. My mother is from rural Mississippi, where I often spent summers
with my grandmother. I know what poverty looks like. I know the working-class struggle.
However, my academic experiences and intellectual pursuits have afforded me insights into the
privileged circles of academia, where I have often been wounded by the lack of understanding
and empathy for lower-class people, as well as people of color that I have encountered not only
in the classroom but in the work of peers up to senior scholars. I recognize that this experience is
a privileged one that has afforded me a keen awareness of class differences. I do not wish to
repeat the classist, elitist posturing that many career academics take on. I am always vigilant in
my work, which interrogates a community of people who do not appear to be as privileged.
28

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
This chapter is organized thematically by the key frameworks I engage with in my
analytical approach. I begin with an introduction to various approaches to addressing race,
racism, and anti-Blackness in internet studies. Then, I move into an explanation of the key
concepts I engage with in my analysis.
Anti-Blackness and Afro-Pessimism
The term anti-blackness is most often used to conceptualize the condition of being Black
in the context of modernity, racism, and racialized oppression. Anti-Blackness is a distinct form
of oppression that is not merely enacted by white people against people of color, but by all
groups of people, against Black people specifically. Around the globe, Black people occupy the
lowest rung of the social hierarchy. As a result, they experience not only racism from whites, but
also hostility and opposition from other people of color who wish to socially distance themselves
from Blackness and, in relation, increase their proximity to whiteness. Anti-Blackness is so
hegemonic that even Black people are susceptible to its internalization—that is, they may also
disassociate themselves from cultural Blackness as a way to gain respect among more dominant
groups (Fanon, 1967). The politics of respectability is an example of Black people’s investment
32
in the false idea that if they prove themselves to be respectable or good members of society, then
white people will acce pt them (Paisley, 2003; White, 2001). Black scholars as early as Booker T.
Washington were advocates of respectability politics, a perspective that remains a point of
contention within the Black political sphere today, in relation to everything from dress code
32
Higginbotham, E. B. (1993). Righteous discontent: The women’s movement in the Black
Baptist church, 1880-1920 (p. 185). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
29

policies at HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) to debates about the proper
33
way for Black people to protest or advocate for social justice . Anti-Blackness and the politics
34
of respectability are also linked to the concept of internalized oppression , wherein members of
35
an oppressed group begin to take on, internalize, or incorporate into their value systems the
prejudices that their oppressors hold against them.
Afro-pessimism conceptualizes the nature of Blackness and the Black experience as
inextricably linked to the TransAtlantic Slave Trade. In relation, anti-Blackness is a critical
theory used to describe the distinct nature of Black experiences in the wake (Sharpe, 2019), or
the afterlife of slavery (Hartman, 2007). Orlando Patterson (year) introduced the concept of
social death to articulate the idea that one of the major byproducts of the legacy of the
TransAtlantic slave trade was that Black people were not granted full humanity because of the
way they were rendered as property. For centuries, Black people were considered objects,
property to be possessed, and entities available for purchase, sale, trade, and control (Gordon,
1997; Hartman, 1997, 2007; Sexton, 2008; Wilderson, 2010). It is for this reason that many
afro-pessimists contend that Black people’s specific condition does not parallel the realities of
other groups who face ra cism or prejudice (Wilderson, 20 10).
33
Patton, Lori D. “Preserving respectability or blatant disrespect? A critical discourse analysis of
the Morehouse Appropriate Attire Policy and implications for intersectional approaches to
examining campus policies.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 27, no. 6
(2014): 724-746.
34
Obasogie, Osagie K., and Zachary Newman. “Black lives matter and respectability politics in
local news accounts of officer-involved civilian deaths: An early empirical assessment.” Wis. L.
REv. (2016): 541.
35
Pyke, Karen D. “What is internalized racial oppression and why don’t we study it?
Acknowledging racism's hidden injuries.” Sociological perspectives 53, no. 4 (2010): 551-572.
30

In this project, I do not use the term anti-Blackness to refer to racism generally, or even
to refer to racism against Black people. I use the term specifically to highlight forms of racism
that are animated by a strong contempt for Black people and Blackness. I use anti-Blackness to
signal variations of racism directed toward Black people that also objectify them and deny their
full humanity and personal autonomy. For the same reason, I do not use the generalized terms
people of color or women of color when referring to Black people or Black women and their
specific conditions under racialized oppression. These terms often obscure the distinct
experiences of Black people.
Black or African-American?
Presently, the terms Black and African-American are the most frequently used terms to
describe people of African descent in America. Gallup has conducted several polls between
36
1991 and 2013 to figure out which term is preferred amongst people who identify with these
groups. Throughout the years that this survey was conducted, one thing has been clear—on
average, the majority of Black people polled (61.5%) have indicated that they do not have a
preference. The most recent poll in 2013 found that for the first time in the polls’ history, an
equal number of people prefer either African-American (17%) or Black (17%). So while it is
clear that either term would be appropriate, I choose to use Black because it is the term that I, as
a Black American, personally prefer.
The term Black refers to a distinct political identity of people who identify with and
acknowledge the enduring impact of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade on descendants of enslaved
Africans in the Americas, as well as those who share their phenotypes. African-American refers
36
“Race Relations.” Gallup, Washington, D.C. (2020)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx
31

to all Americans of African descent, whether or not they identify politically with Black
Americans. Of course, how a person chooses to identify is a personal decision; So too, is the
meaning behind the moniker of choice. For the purposes of this dissertation, however, this is how
I choose to employ the terms.
Black with a Capital “B”
Throughout this dissertation, I capitalize the term Black . The capitalization of a name in a
sentence indicates its status as a proper noun, therefore the B in Black is capitalized to
underscore the subjectivity of Black people and to also acknowledge their distinct, collective
political identity. By doing this, I fall in line with influential and reputable research and reporting
entities, such as the U.S. Census Bureau and the Brookings Institute, which have made the
37
change to capitalizing the B in Black in acknowledgment of the historical subjugation of Black
people. When black is written in lowercase, it refers to a color. This is a well-established fact
38
among most Black academics and critical race scholars. The spelling is not only politically
important, but also good practice for a study that takes an intersectional approach.
39
Black Feminist Thought
Black Feminist Thought refers to the body of knowledge that Black women have
produced to articulate their unique standpoint. Historian Patricia Hill Collins published the
37
“Inclusion and Diversity.” Brookings Institute, Washington, D.C.
https://www.brookings.edu/interactives/inclusion-and-diversity/
38
“Not Just A Typographical Change: Why Brookings Is Capitalizing Black.” Brookings
Institute, Washington D.C. (September 23, 2019)
https://www.brookings.edu/research/brookingscapitalizesblack/
39
Tharps, Lori L. “The Case for Black with a Capital B.” The New York Times, November 18,
2014. Accessed: April 27, 2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/opinion/the-case-for-black-with-a-capital-b.html
32

groundbreaking synthesis of Black feminist thinking, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (1990). This text outlines the distinct
epistemology of Black women scholars—both inside and outside of the academy—as it includes
public intellectuals, popular artists, and creatives. Importantly, Hill-Collins also synthesizes the
elements of Black women’s knowledge production and validation processes that had previously
not been published in an academic setting. As she explains, Black feminist epistemologies do not
align with eurocentric, masculinist knowledge-validation criteria because these rigid
frameworks, “ask African American women to objectify themselves, devalue their emotional
life, displace their motivations for furthering knowledge about black women, and confront, in an
adversarial relationship, those who have more social economic and professional power than
they” (Collins, 1989, p. 343). On the contrary, Black feminist thought heavily relies on embodied
knowledge and lived experience. Hill-Collins (year) argues that it is necessary to engage with
this alternative epistemology, especially when studying Black women’s lives and culture. Black
feminist thought informs this work as a critical analytic for interrogating internet subcultures and
artifacts that concern Black women’s lives.
Within Black feminist thought, there are several concepts or theories that I employ in my
methodological approach, including intersectionality, misogynoir, and the controlling images of
Black womanhood. Additionally, it explores concepts related to Black male patriarchy. I draw
parallels and distinctions between Black male patriarchy and the mainstream feminist term, toxic
masculini ty (Kupers, 2005; Salter, 2019). While the term is us eful for describing how patriarchal
ideology negatively impacts men and women, this dissertation acknowledges the nuanced
implications of applying the term and its attendant negative connotations to Black men who are
33

already criminalized and demonized because of their racial category. Similar concepts exist in
Black feminist writing about Black men, and I chose to highlight those instead.
Intersectionality
Intersectionality is a theoretical and methodological tool that explicates how oppressive
social structural forces compound and how that combination impacts individuals differently. It is
a widely recognizable feminist term coined by legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw (insert year) to
identify a previously under-acknowledged body of work from Black women expressing their
distinct positionality and embodied knowledge . The theory of intersectionality is in a long
tradition of Black women articulating their distinct standpoint and theorizing their conditions.
Documented articulations of these perspectives are on record as early as the late 19th century
40
and became synthesized in the 1970s and 80s into what we now refer to as Black feminist
thought. The term intersectionality, however, did not enter the academic lexicon until the
41
1980s, after Crenshaw (enter year) published two articles that synthesized bodies of previously
42
unpublished, or unacknowledged published work. The relative obscurity of Black women’s
theory to that of mainstream feminism is a result of gatekeeping in academia and does not reflect
a lack of theorization. Black women articulated their unique standpoint through various modes of
cultural production—the arts, music, and scholarship, including speeches and the written word.
40
Stewart, Maria Miller. “Religion and the pure principles of morality, the sure foundation on
which we must build.” Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer (1995):
27-42.; Stewart, Maria W. Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart, 1832 .
Northeastern University Women Writers Project, 2014.
41
Collins, Patricia Hill. “The social construction of black feminist thought.” Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 14, no. 4 (1989): 745-773.
42
Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist
critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.” u. Chi. Legal f.
(1989): 139.; Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and
violence against women of color.” Stan. L. Rev. 43 (1990): 1241.
34

As a theoretical model, intersectionality challenges the negative misconceptions of
identity politics by using Black women’s experiences with interlocking oppressions to emphasize
the interconnectedness of patriarchal subjugation. Stated another way, intersectionality
43
advocates for coalition-building within and across social justice movements for the liberation of
all groups and it’s members. As a methodological tool, the principles of intersectionality call for
reflexive, iterative approaches to traditional research questions and measurements. For example,
Ange-Marie Hancock-Alfaro (year) outlines the critical differences between unitary , multiple ,
and intersectional approaches to variables in empirical studies. Unitary approaches examine
44
categories of identity as distinct, while multiple approaches acknowledge the fact that individuals
hold multiple identities that are equally impactful but still discrete. In Hancock-Alfaro’s (2007)
words, the truly intersectional approach “not only recognizes the political significance of one or
another category (like the unitary approach), but it also sees more than one category’s
explanatory power in examining political institutions or political actors (like the multiple
approach)” (Hancock-Alfaro, 2007). Intersectional methods can make hegemonic value systems
visible. This dissertation takes an intersectional approach to studies of the internet as it examines
how patriarchal ideologies are reified and reinscribed within Black discourse online. Therefore,
intersectionality is a central theoretical and methodological analytic in this research. I employ it
to locate power within the disparaging discourses about Black women online.
Historically, Black women’s intellectual contributions have either been obscured or
minimized. As a feminist practice, I recount the intellectual lineage of intersectioanlity to clarify
43
Collective, Combahee River. “The Combahee river collective statement.” Home girls: A Black
feminist anthology (1983): 264-74.
44
Hancock, Ange-Marie. “When multiplication doesn’t equal quick addition: Examining
intersectionality as a research paradigm.” Perspectives on politics 5, no. 1 (2007): 63-79.
35

how I interpret the terms. This act of literacy stewardship ensures perpetuity and works in
45
service of the feminist projects of visibility and preservation. What follows is my interpretation
of the intellectual lineage of intersectionality.
Black Women and Intersectionality
Black women have contemplated and spoken publicly about their condition as Black
women since the Abolitionist Movement. As Brittney Cooper (2016) argues in her definitional
article on intersectionality:
Taken together, this body of proto-intersectionality theorizing advanced the idea that
systems of oppression—namely racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism—worked
together to create a set of social conditions under which Black women and other women
of color lived and labored, always in a kind of invisible but ever-present social jeopardy
(Cooper, 2016).

Hancock-Alfaro (year) similarly identifies this proto-intersectionality and refers to it as
“intersectionality-like thought.” She traces the roots of Black feminism to Maria Stewart (year)
46
, a free Black woman living in BostonĘ—the first documented visible and vocal Black feminist
47
interlocutor (Guy-Sheftall, 1995) . While Hancock-Alfaro pinpoints Stewart’s work as the
beginning of Black feminist thinking, most scholars trace it back to Sojourner Truth’s infamous
45
Hancock, Ange-Marie. Intersectionality: An intellectual history . Oxford University Press,
2016.
46
Hancock, Ange-Marie. Intersectionality: An intellectual history . Oxford University Press,
2016.
47
Stewart, Maria Miller. “Religion and the pure principles of morality, the sure foundation on
which we must build.” Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer (1995):
27-42.; Stewart, Maria W. Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart, 1832 .
Northeastern University Women Writers Project, 2014.
36

“Ain’t I A Woman?” speech delivered in Akron, Ohio in 1851 at the women’s rights convention.
According to Guy Sheftall (1995), this tendency to center on Truth’s speech is related to the
premium that scholars of Black history place on works that center racism as the primary
inequality that Black people face.
From these women, the lineage continues. Anna Julia Cooper (year) argued that Black
48
women uniquely face both the woman question and the race problem simultaneously, yet remain
“an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both” (Cooper, 1892 [1988]). Black feminist thinker
Mary Church Terrell (year), a contemporary of Anna Julia Cooper, also wrote of the
compounded nature of racism and sexism that Black women faced, describing it as the
“double-handicap”. Civil Rights activist Pauli Murray (1965) uses the term “Jane Crow”
49 50
(Murray, 1965) to describe the gendered and racialized biases within the legal system. She
argues that these restrictions operated similarly to Jim Crow, only centering their restrictions on
Black women.
In the 1970s, Frances Beal (2008) wrote of the “double jeopardy” Black women faced
51
and described it as being like a “slave of a slave” (Beal, 2008). Beal argues that group leaders
discount Black women’s claims of racism within feminist circles and sexism within movements
for racial equality, as an example. Later in the decade, the Combahee River Collective’s
48
Cooper, Anna Julia. “A Voice from the South. 1892. Reprint.” (1988).
49
Terrell, Mary Church. A Colored Woman in a White World. Amherst: Prometheus Books,
2005.
50
Murray, Pauli, and Mary O. Eastwood. “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title
VII.” Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 34 (1965): 232.
51
Beal, Frances M. “Double jeopardy: To be Black and female.” Meridians 8, no. 2 (2008):
166-176.
37

Statement (year) would include language very similar to the language used in Crenshaw’s
52
seminal articles on intersectionality when they described the “major systems of oppression” as
“interlocking” (Crenshaw, 1989; 1990). These concepts were very similar to what Patricia Hill
Collins (year) referred to in the 80s as the “matrix of domination, ” which refers to the systems
53
of oppression, (i.e., racism, sexism, homophobia, and more) that affect individuals differently
and in varying contexts.
Still later, in the 1980s, Deborah King (year) made a vital contribution to
54
intersectionality-like thinking when she argued that Frances Beale’s double jeopardy took an
“additive approach” which “ignored the fact that racism, sexism, and classism constitute three
interdependent control systems” (King, 1988). Instead, she uses the term multiple jeopardy to
underscore the fact that the effects of discrimination are compounded, as opposed to just existing
as “added layers” (1988). She also describes the “both/or” orientation, “the act of being
simultaneously a member of a group and yet standing apart from it” (Hill-Collins, 1989). Bonnie
Thornton Dill proposes a similar concept in her commentary on the precarity of Black women’s
lives. She proposes the “dialectics of black womanhood” (Hill-Collins, 1989) as central to Black
Feminist consciousness.
In consideration of the legacy of proto- or intersectionality-like thinking, Kimberlé
Crenshaw can be understood not as the originator of the concept of intersectionality but as a
self-identified Black feminist who leveraged her position within the academy to call attention to
52
Collective, Combahee River. “The Combahee river collective statement.” Home girls: A Black
feminist anthology (1983): 264-74.
53
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of
empowerment . routledge, 2002.

54
King, Deborah K. “Multiple jeopardy, multiple consciousness: The context of a Black feminist
ideology.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14, no. 1 (1988): 42-72.

38

and synthesize decades of Black feminist thinking. In her article on intersectionality as a legal
scholar, Kimberle Crenshaw acts as a literacy steward —that is, she serves as a member of
55
intersectionality’s interpretive community who demonstrates, through action, how to pursue
intersectionality’s intellectual project. Literacy stewards are committed “to visibility or inclusion
and a reconstitution of relationships among categories of difference” (Hancock, 2016).
According to Hancock-Alfaro (2016), literacy stewardship is essential to the visibility project of
intersectionality, especially in light of the oppositional forces that pose various threats to the
integrity of this work. Hancock-Alfaro writes:
A number of scholars have identified troubling citation politics that leads to a very
narrow, positivistic understanding of intersectionality (Alexander-Floyd, 2012), an
erasure of Black women as quintessential subjects of intersectionality (Jordan-Zachery
2013), a theoretically bankrupt practice of name-checking intersectionality (Knapp 2005),
and the whitening of intersectionality (Bilge 2013). (Hancock, 2016).

Intersectionality can not and should not be divorced from its historical context. As
Patricia Hill-Collins and Sirma Bilge (2016) argue in their book on intersectionality, “the
language that has been used to describe their work, namely, that Crenshaw ‘coined’ the term, fits
within academic norms of ownership and cultural capital” (Collins and Bilge, 2016). According
to Collins and Bilge, these practices of coining:
not only routinely neglect the writings and activities of many people who came before
Crenshaw, but they also misread the full extent of Crenshaw’s arguments. They also
55
Hancock, Ange-Marie. Intersectionality: An intellectual history . Oxford University Press,
2016.
39

ignore Crenshaw’s subsequent work, which was advanced intersectionality as a form of
critical inquiry and praxis” (Collins and Bilge, 2016).
This dissertation engages with intersectionality, not only as the popular scholarly term, but also
as a collected body of Black feminist thought.
Misogynoir
Misogynoir is a term used to describe a distinct form of gendered or sexist
56
anti-Blackness that targets Black women specifically. Moya Bailey coined the term, which is a
portmanteau of the words misogyny (the hatred of women) and noir (the french word for Black).
Misogynoir, therefore, quite literally translates to “the hatred of Black women,” which is distinct
from traditional conceptions of misogyny because it is influenced by both sexism and
anti-Blackness. According to Bailey (year?), the term was first created and used in conversations
in 2008 and then later via blog posts and academic writings beginning in 2010. Bailey
57 58
explains that she chose the particular etymological construction for misogynoir because of its
succinct ability to name a phenomenon that she noticed but was unable to articulate. That is the
tendency for popular art forms and visual culture to malign Black women. Bailey explains that
the noir felt especially apt because it signals film noir , a style or genre of film-making, which, in
her words, helped to ground the term in its relationship to popular media.
Although Bailey coined the term, she identifies public intellectual Trudy as one of its
progenitors. Trudy has no specific academic affiliation, but her essays on various topics
59
56
Bailey, Moya. “Misogynoir.” (2013).
57
Bailey, Moya. “On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism.” Feminist Media Studies
18, no. 4 (July 4, 2018): 762–68 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447395 .
58
Bailey, Moya. “They aren’t talking about me.” Crunk Feminist Collective 14 (2010).
59
Bailey, Moya. “On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism.” Feminist Media Studies
18, no. 4 (July 4, 2018): 762–68 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447395 .
40

concerning Black women are popular among Black feminists online. Many of her followers work
both inside and outside of the academy and are a part of a budding Black feminist subaltern
counterpublic, best described in Catherine Knight-Steele’s (2016) work on digital barbershops
60
and Black feminist enclaves online. Similar to the early days of the consciousness-raising
61
groups, Black feminist spaces online operate as spaces where Black feminists share personal
62
experiences, observations, intellectual resources, etc. and thereby mutually construct and refine
Black feminist ideology. Bailey recounts that Trudy popularized the term by using it in her blog
posts—a space that acted as a subaltern counterpublic sphere for Black feminists.
Considering the impetus of the term (and its development through cultural exchange
online) misogynoir can be considered a product of Black feminist digital praxis. As such, it is
also subject to the same brand of erasure that it intends to root out. Both Trudy and Bailey
published articles (Bailey, 2013, 2014; Trudy, 2014; Bailey and Trudy 2018) responding to
pushback against the term, which included criticisms regarding its etymology, as well as
complaints that it was too narrow or myopic in scope. Additionally, neither Bailey nor Trudy are
typically cited when the term is used in academic spaces—an issue she and Trudy took up in a
published interview in the academic journal Feminist Media Studies.
63
60
Steele, Catherine Knight. “The digital barbershop: Blogs and online oral culture within the
African American community.” Social Media+ Society 2, no. 4 (2016): 2056305116683205.
61
Steele, Catherine Knight. “Black bloggers and their varied publics: The everyday politics of
black discourse online.” Television & New Media 19, no. 2 (2018): 112-127.; Steele, Catherine
Knight. “Blogging While Black: a critical analysis of resistance discourse by black female
bloggers.” AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research 1 (2011).
62
hooks, bell. Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics. Pluto Press, 2000.
63
Bailey, Moya. “On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism.” Feminist Media Studies
18, no. 4 (July 4, 2018): 762–68 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447395 .
41

I use the term misogynoir in this dissertation to point to how Black women’s presence in
digital public space is policed (or marginalized). Similar to the progenitors of the term, I find it
to be an advantageous way to highlight the brand of gendered and racialized oppression that is
rooted explicitly in anti-Blackness and disseminated through mainstream media and popular
cultural production. More specifically, as conceived, the term refers to the disparaging
representations of Black women in popular media this dissertation addresses. Misogynoir is also
related to previous articulations of disparaging representation of Black women in popular media
in public space addressed by Patricia Hill-Collins’ (2002) controlling images of Black
womanhood (Hill-Collins, 2002 [1990]) and Melissa Harris Perry’s (2011) conception of the
crooked room (Harris-Perry, 2011), which describes the disorientation Black women face when
trying to reconcile their their negative mainstream media representation with their lived realities.
My use of the term misogynoir is an intersectional approach to identifying a specific form
of discursive violence. Though misogynoir is specific to gendered anti-Blackness, it calls
attention to overlooked and under-reported ideological and material harm done to a subset of
women who might otherwise be ignored entirely. The intention in naming this distinction is
neither to discount other forms of discursive violence against other women, nor to rank or
compare oppressions. On the contrary, misogynoir challenges hegemony by moving away from
color-blind racism and toward foregrounding the patriarchal discourses that maintain power
through their invisibility. In this light, misogynoir is an intersectional framework that seeks to
dismantle a single-axis conception of oppression.
42

Controlling Images of Black Womanhood
Another central Black Feminist concept that I draw on in this dissertation is what Patricia
Hill-Collins (2002 ) calls “the controlling images of Black womanhood” (Hill-Collins, 2002).
64
Many Black feminist scholars have articulated the existence of several stereotypical caricatures
of Black women that facilitate their subjugation of Black women. Black feminist bell hooks
(1992) describes them as the “degrading racial stereotypes” of Black women that position them
as “inferior” and
“animalistic” . In Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
65
Empowerment . Hill-Collins (2002) outlines the four common archetypes as (1) The Mammy, (2)
The Matriarch, (3) welfare recipients or Welfare Queens, and (4) The Jezebel. Each false
conception of the Black woman is based on investment in the Cult of True Womanhood as the
norm, and each articulation reflects the four main ways that Black women deviate from this
enforced norm. The Cult of True Womanhood or the Cult of Domesticity is a term used by
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historians to describe the discourses around women’s roles in society . According to this value
67
system, real women were supposed to be pious, pure, domestic, and submissive. These beliefs
were created and upheld during the 19th and 20th centuries in middle and upper-class families.
Black women’s inability to uphold these standards was purported as evidence of their innate
inferiority.
64
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of
empowerment . Routledge, 2002.
65
hooks, bell. Sisters of the yam: Black women and self-recovery . Vol. 66. South End Pr, 1993.
66
Keister, Lisa A., and Darby E. Southgate. Inequality: A contemporary approach to race, class,
and gender . Cambridge University Press, 2012.
67
Lindley, Susan Hill. You have stept out of your place: A history of women and religion in
America . Westminster John Knox Press, 1996.
43

Each of the aforementioned stereotypical images of the Black woman polices the Black
woman for not living up to the standards of white femininity in various ways. For instance, the
Mammy charicature represents the sexless, asexual Black woman. She is the “faithful, obedient
domestic servant” (Hill-Collins, 2001). From the vantage point of the dominant white gaze, the
Mammy has the closest proximity to the cult of true womanhood because her sexual desires are
understated or presumed to be non-existent. The Mammy works within the domestic sphere and
knows her place is in the home and of perpetual service to dominant groups. Of course, the
image of the Mammy is rooted in white supremacist narratives of friendly or acceptable Black
women as house slaves and wet nurses during the days of slavery, and as their doting domestic
workers in the decades after.
The second controlling image is that of the Matriarch, which appears around the time that
Black feminist movements are beginning to push back against the patriarchy. The Matriarch is a
direct offspring of the government solicited report “The Negro Family: The Case for National
Action” (1965), which has been colloquially titled as “The Moynihan Report,” named after
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the sociologist who conducted the study. The report blamed Black
women for the social issues that plague the Black community. Instead of identifying and
addressing the systemic issues that disenfranchise Black people, the researchers chose to
pathologize Black culture as inherently deficient, falsely hypothesizing that a woman-led
household was a marker of deficiency because it was not organized in the traditional White
American patriarchal familial order. Black women served as a scapegoat for white social
scientists and politicians who searched for every rationale for enduring Black poverty except for
the reality of systematic disenfranchisement enacted by the United States government.
44

Nevertheless, according to Hill-Collins (2002), the Matriarch is a bad woman and a bad
mom because she has not sufficiently fulfilled her domestic duties, as defined by white culture.
These women spent “too much time away from home... did not properly survive their children
and thus were a major contributing factor to their children’s failure at school” (Hill-Collins,
2002). Matriarchs are “aggressive, unfeminine women” who “emasculated their lovers and
husbands” (Hill-Collins, 2002). This image has persisted and is present in the contemporary
discourse that individuals within the Black community circulate about Black women via memes.
The third controlling image that Hill-Collins (2002) outlines is that of the welfare mother
or welfare queen . The welfare mother is a Black woman who is content with producing children
and living off of government benefits to support herself and her children. The welfare mother is
another deviation from the sexist, racist, and anti-Black Mammy stereotype, in that she refuses to
work or accept her subordinate role as caretaker of the white family. Similar to the Matriarch,
she too is a bad mother, not because she neglects her children, but because she spends too much
time with them. Her inherent laziness, as evidenced in her alleged unwillingness to seek out a
job, is passed down to her children. Of course, the image of the welfare queen was concretized
during the 1980s when the Reagan administration invoked the stereotype of the lazy welfare
queen (a free-loading Black woman who made thousands of dollars a month from merely living
off of welfare) as an image to rally constituents against welfare expansion and toward welfare
reform.
The fourth and final controlling image that Hill-Collins (2002) describes is that of the
Jezebel —the sexually promiscuous, deviant Black woman. The false image of the sexually
insatiable Black woman was used by white men to justify the sexual exploitation of Black
45

women. It also established the narrative that Black men are similarly hypersexual by nature—as
would be required to satisfy such sexually insatiable Black women.
These stereotypes are harmful because they dehumanize and objectify Black women and
justify their vilification and exploitation. According to Hill-Collins (2002), these controlling
images illustrate the ideological component of Black women’s oppression, which, despite having
its roots in slavery, are still perpetuated and circulated today, even within the Black community.
Hill-Collins (2002) points to how social institutions such as schools, the church, families, and
popular entertainment contribute to the circulation and widespread acceptance of these
controlling images. Many Black feminist scholars within the realm of critical race and digital
studies, as well as media studies, have written about contemporary negative representations of
Black women that stem from the stereotypes described by the controlling images framework. For
instance, Janell Hobson (2018) has written extensively about Black women’s representation in
popular culture (Hobson, 2018), including popular music (Hobson, Bartlow, 2008; Hobson,
2016), film (Hobson, 2002), and digital culture (Hobson, 2008). Safiya Noble (2018) highlights
how algorithms engineered by the search engine Google encode and reproduce vile stereotypes
about Black women, including tropes that reinforce the adultification and sexualization of Black
girls in her book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018).
Still, other scholars chronicle how social media platforms are being leveraged to subvert
these negative narratives. Catherine Knight-Steele (2011) has written extensively about how
Black women use digital platforms such as blogs to resist dominating, oppressive, or disparaging
representations of Black women in popular media (Steele, 2011). Tiera Tanksley (2016)
highlights how Black women and girls use social media platforms like Instagram to counter
46

pervasive, harmful stereotypes (Tanksley, 2016). In this same vein, Sarah Jackson, Moya
Bailey and Brooke Foucault Welles (2020) detail the powerful networks that Black women
generally, and Black feminists specifically, have constructed online via use of hashtags that
foster networked publics in their book Hashtag Activism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice
(Jackson, Bailey, & Welles, 2020). Analysis has extended so far as to address the history of
representation in comic books and other related caricatures of Black people, such in the work of
Rebecca Wanzo (2020).
The controlling images framework typifies an enduring legacy of disparaging discourses
about Black women and works as a tool to foreground how some Black people have come to
internalize anti-Black patriarchal sexism. By identifying how media producers reinscribe the
tropes of the controlling images and drawing parallels to their origin in American slavery (White,
1985), scholars have shown how mainstream media (minstrel shows, music, television, film, and
advertising) have propagated harmful discourses about Black women (Gray, 1989, 1995a, 1995b,
2005; Hobson, 2002, 2008; Hunt, 2005; Hunt, Ramon, & Price, 2014; hooks, 1992; Kun, 2005;
Scott, 2015). This dissertation examines modern-day internet meme culture as a continuation of
this insidious American cultural tradition and analyzes the technological affordances that
facilitate this process. The fact that the subcultural groups identified and analyzed in this study
that position themselves as antithetical to white supremacists also reinscribe their ideologies,
highlight the pervasive nature of these discourses, and underscore the necessity to move beyond
an identity-centered focus on classifying bad actors online.
The connection between discourses of white American slave owners and contemporary
popular culture is critical. Black feminists who have contributed to the conceptualization of the
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controlling images have all made this vital link. According to Hill-Collins (2002 [1990]),
stereotypes of “bad Black women” originate in slavery-era mythologies about the nature of
Black women that were created by white slave masters to validate their vilification, exploitation,
and abuse. Deborah Gray White (1999) writes that during the time of American slavery:
Major periodicals carried articles detailing optimal conditions under which bonded
women were known to reproduce, and the merits of a particular ‘breeder’ were often the
topic of parlor or dinner table conversations. The fact that something so personal and
private became a matter of public discussion promoted one ex-slave to declare that
‘woman wasn’t nothing but cattle.’ Once reproduction became a topic of public
conversation, so did the slave women’s sexual activities. (White, 1999).

As White explains, the sexual victimization of Black women that began during slavery was
justified by the notion that they were sexually insatiable, which carried over into the post-Slavery
Jim Crow and Civil Rights area. During this period, no white man in the South was convicted of
raping a Black woman, although this crime was prevalent. Black women were also extremely
hesitant to seek out justice within the legal system because this would likely only result in further
harassment, assault, or vilification of not only the Black woman but other people in her
community. As long as Black women were seen and understood as disposable, less than human
“breeders,” that were unvictimizable, crimes against them were illegitimate.
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Ange-Marie Hancock-Alfaro (2004) makes the connection between the construction of
the welfare queen and the false narratives of Black women’s laziness and promiscuity that
developed during slavery. She describes the phrase “politics of disgust” as:
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an emotion-laden response to long-standing beliefs about single, poor African American
mothers that has spread, epidemiologically, to all recipients of Aid to Families with
Dependent Children/Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and to recipients
of other welfare programs such as Social Security Income (SSI) and related programs for
what citizens previously considered ‘the deserving poor’ (Hancock-Alfaro, 2004).
Here Hancock-Alfaro outlines a gendered, anti-Black backlash to the welfare system in the
United States. The controlling image of the welfare queen reframed the narrative around public
assistance. Discussions of welfare went from being centered on mothers in need to focusing on
the fictionalized image of the inherently criminal, sexually promiscuous, and lazy Black woman
who exploits the government. This narrative shift bolstered support for restrictive welfare reform
measures. Emotion has proven to be a valuable resource in the attention economy of social media
platforms.
As Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christoper Wylie has explained, emotional
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triggers have proven to be a successful manipulation tool, especially on social media platforms
where engagement baits algorithms. Siva Vaidhyanathan (2018) corroborates this in Antisocial
Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy , and writes that social
media platforms such as Facebook “amplifies content that hits strong emotional registers… If
68
Hancock, Ange-Marie. The politics of disgust: The public identity of the welfare queen . NYU
Press, 2004.
69
Wylie, Christopher. Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America . Random
House Publishing Group, 2019.
49

you want to pollute Facebook with nonsense to distract or propaganda to motivate, it is far too
easy. The first step is to choose the most extreme, polarizing message and image”
(Vaidhyanathan, 2018). Although the focus of his book is on Facebook specifically,
algorithmically-driven platforms such as Instagram (which happens to be owned by Facebook)
operate similarly.
Critical Race and Digital Studies
As an area of inquiry, critical race and digital studies developed as a response to
color-blind analysis of the web. Critical internet studies scholars foreground the role that race
plays in almost every aspect of digital life, including, but not limited to, its role in online forums
(Byrne 2008, McPherson 2000), and as well as automating inequality via technological design
(Noble 2018; Benjamin 2019) etc. More recently, critical internet studies scholars call attention
to how digital tools and social networking platforms are weaponized against the most vulnerable
groups in our society, including women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community.
Critical Race and Digital Studies (CR+DS) is a subsection of the interdisciplinary field of
internet studies (Dutton, 2013; Silver 2004). CR+DS serves as a much-needed response to
internet studies’ lack of engagement with Black studies, critical race theory and intersectional
feminism. In its critical engagement with race, CR+DS pushes back against the tendency toward
color-blind studies of the internet that on the one hand, mistakenly depict the early internet as a
neutral space (Daniels, 2015), where social differences and hierarchies could be bracketed or
otherwise hidden, while on the other hand reinscribing various forms of offline racism such as
“identity tourism” (Nakamura, 1995).
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CR+DS is a direct outgrowth of scholars questioning the notion that virtual communities
and digital spaces were somehow free of racial oppression (Nelson 2002, Jessie Daniels 2009),
despite the fact that racism is a fundamental organizing principle of the offline world (Omi and
Winant, 1986). As early as 2002, Nakamura asserted that digital spaces were as deeply racialized
as their offline counterparts and formulated the concept of cybertypes to describe “the distinctive
ways that the internet propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race and racism”
(2002). However, subsequent scholars (Brock, 2005, 2011, 2012; Noble 2016, 2018, 2019)
engaged with critical race theory in their work, bringing forth for the first time the bridging of
critical race theory with internet studies.
CR+DS also developed in direct response to the narratives of deficiency that were
propagated by digital divide scholarship. Andre Brock (2005) and Neil Selwyn (2003) in
particular highlight the failure of digital divide research to engage with critical theories of race as
analytics for examining and understanding the heterogeneity of internet users and the ways they
engage with digital technology. Byrne and Everett produced scholarship that also challenged the
notion that Black people were technically deficient. Dara Byrne (2007) examined civic
engagement via the early social media platform BlackPlanet.com, a predecessor to such popular
social networking sites as Friendster and MySpace- positioning Black people as early adopters,
technologically curious, and eager to engage in digital debate. Anna Everett’s work on the digital
diaspora, or in other words “the persistence of the African diasporic consciousness in cyberspace
and the digital age” was one of the earliest engagements of Black digital studies and the internet.
Everett pinpoints 1995 as a watershed moment in the history of the internet as companies such as
Yahoo! began to offer spaces where non-white groups could congregate around cultural issues.
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Prior to 1995, Everett argues, the internet was largely a white masculnist domain (Everett, 2009,
p. 10).
As CR+DS proves, racism was indeed alive and well in virtual communities but also
embedded in the technological platforms themselves. While Les Back (2002) coined the term
cyber racism , very early to describe how digital platforms and technologies facilitate expressions
of racism, in more recent years scholars such as Safiya Noble and Ruha Benjamin detail the
specifics. Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression (2018) articulates the concept of technological
redlining to describe the ways algorithms are programed with neoliberal logics that automate and
reinforce “oppressive social relationships and enact new modes of racial profiling” (Noble,
2018, p. 1). In Race After Technology (2019) Benjamin articulates The New Jim Code to describe
the ways in which a vast range of technologies are designed to amplify offline racial hiearrchies
as well. This tendency for technology created to mitigate inequality to have the supposedly
unintended consequence of reifying inequality is also examined in the work of (Broussard 2018;
Eubanks 2018; O’Neil, 2016).
The Black Digital Public Sphere
In recent years, there has been a renewed focus on issues concerning race and racial
oppression within the American mainstream media. Black Twitter comes up repeatedly in
discussions of how or why race and racism have become so prevalent in the American
conversation. Black Twitter is the cultural phenomenon of people who use the Twitter platform
to discuss Black popular culture, engage in community activism around “Black issues,” and
deliver scathing political and cultural critique. The Black Twitter community is well known for
leveraging its prominence on the social media platform to bring awareness to issues concerning
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Black people that traditionally do not get much mainstream media coverage. For instance, in
February 2012, Florida resident George Zimmerman shot and killed an unarmed teenager named
Trayvon Martin. The shooting death of Trayvon Martin was one of the biggest news stories of
2012 and 2013. However, few remember that although Martin died on February 26, 2012,
70 71 72
George Zimmerman was not charged with his murder until April. Black Twitter users engaged
the platform to share the details of the story and raise the question of why there was not an arrest
or investigation. They also circulated a Change.org petition that called for Zimmerman’s arrest.
Police were finally pressured to act after local, and then national news outlets began to cover
73
the story. Therefore, the story of Trayvon Martin’s murder only became the biggest news story
because of Black Twitter agitation.
Black Twitter is best known for this type of involvement in social justice movements
toward racial equality. It is also known for its integral role in the political mobilization of the
Black public sphere, especially around the Black Lives Matter movement. Most Americans agree
that the Black Twitter community, as well as Black users of social media overall, have been
impactful in shaping mainstream media narratives about racism and police brutality, as well as
70
“Election, Tragedies Dominate Top Stories of 2012.” Pew Research Center . December 20,
2012. Accessed March 16, 2020 from:
https://www.people-press.org/2012/12/20/election-tragedies-dominate-top-stories-of-2012/
71
Time Staff. “ The Top U.S. New Stories.” Time. December 4, 2013. Accessed March 16,
2020. https://nation.time.com/2013/12/04/top-10-best-u-s-news-stories/
72
Gutman, Mark. “Trayvon Martin Case: Timeline of Events.” ABC News. May 8, 2012.
Accessed March 16, 2020.
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/05/trayvon-martin-case-timeline-of-events/
73
Robles, Frances. “Detective in Zimmerman Case Says He Was Pressured to File Charges.”
Miami Herald. July 12, 2012. Accessed March 16, 2020.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/trayvon-martin/article1941188.html
53

political discourse in this country in general. A 2016 Pew Research study reported that many
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Americans credited Black Twitter with “propelling racially-focused issues to greater national
attention.” More recently, a 2018 Pew Research Center study found that a majority of Americans
(69%) feel that social media platforms are useful in accomplishing political goals and getting
politicians to address particular social issues. The study also found that “roughly half of Black
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social media users say these platforms are at least somewhat personally important to them as a
venue for expressing their political views or for getting involved with issues that are important to
them.” Additionally, 64% of Americans feel that “social media help give a voice to
underrepresented groups.” However, whereas numerous researchers have explored the
76
connection between Black activists and the social media platforms that facilitate their work
(Carney, 2016), very few center on the leadership roles that Black women have held.
Black Feminist Subaltern Counterpublics
Much of the literature on the Black Public Sphere focuses on the universal, imagined
“Black” community and, within that, it privileges the concerns of men. However, Black
feminists have a long, rich tradition of enclaving as a result of a historical unwillingness of the
74
Anderson, Monica. “Social Media Conversations About Race: How Social Media Users See,
Share and Discuss Race and the Rise of Hashtags Like# BlackLivesMatter.” Pew Research
Center, August 15, 2016. Accessed July 1, 2019.
https://www.pewinternet.org/2016/08/15/social-media-conversations-about-race/
75
Anderson, Monica, Skye Toor, L. Rainie, Aaron Smith, M. Anderson, S. Toor, and A. Smith.
“2. An analysis of# BlackLivesMatter and other Twitter hashtags related to political or social
issues.” Pew Research Center, July 11, 2018. Accessed July 1, 2019.
https://www.pewinternet.org/2018/07/11/public-attitudes-toward-political-engagement-on-social
-media/
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Anderson, Monica, Skye Toor, L. Rainie, Aaron Smith, M. Anderson, S. Toor, and A. Smith.
“2. An analysis of# BlackLivesMatter and other Twitter hashtags related to political or social
issues.” Pew Research Center, July 11, 2018. Accessed on July 1, 2019.
https://www.pewinternet.org/2018/07/11/public-attitudes-toward-political-engagement-on-social
-media/
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leaders of Black resistance movements to consider addressing issues of sexism as well as the
unwillingness of white feminist women to consider the issue of racism as a feminist issue. In the
same vein as the Combahee River Collective of the 1970s, Black women have created
77
subsidiary movements to address their specific needs. As early as the 1890s Black church
women and also Black club women during the Women’s Club movement convened to
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deliberate on and plan action around issues that pertained to them. It was not until the 1960s and
70s that Black women began to utilize the public sphere to advocate for themselves. This
activism coincided with the social justice movements of Civil Rights and Women’s rights. The
1970s also marks the period in which Black women (and other marginalized groups) acquired
increased access to the academy (Hill-Collins, 1989, p. 109) and began to formally theorize their
social position and thereby reshape the negative narratives about Black womanhood.
In social media spaces, Black women have found powerful tools for countering harmful
narratives about themselves. They have also found spaces in which they can connect with
like-minded individuals and assume roles as thought leaders within the Black community. Black
women are responsible for a significant number of the hashtag resistance movements
orchestrated by the Black Twitter community: #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, #OscarsSoWhite,
#SayHerName, #HandsUpDontShoot, #BlackGirlMagic, and #BlackLivesMatter, to name a few.
As Sherri Williams explains, Black feminists have taken to Twitter and employed hashtags as a
79
77
Collective, Combahee River. “The Combahee river collective statement.” Home girls: A Black
feminist anthology (1983): 264-74.

78
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous discontent: The women's movement in the Black
Baptist church, 1880-1920 . Vol. 14. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
79
Williams, Sherri. “Digital defense: Black feminists resist violence with hashtag activism.”
Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 2 (2015): 341-344.
55

mechanism for resistance because they recognize that these tools allow them to circumvent the
mainstream media’s historic indifference toward covering their concerns .
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Williams points to several hashtags initiated by Black feminists who sought to raise
awareness or bring justice to situations where Black women survivors are ignored. For instance,
#IStandWithJada and #JusticeForJada originated after teenagers began mocking a viral photo of
a nude and passed out rape victim, a 16-year-old girl named Jada. Black Feminists created
#WhyWeCantWait and #BlackFeministFuture to bring attention to the fact that while President
Obama’s announced initiatives such as My Brother’s Keeper to assist young men of color, he did
not outline specific legislation to support women of color in need. #RememberRenisha was used
to raise awareness of the 19-year-old Black woman who was shot in the face and killed in Detroit
after knocking on someone’s door to seek assistance. #FreeCeCe was used to raise awareness of
the case of CeCe McDonald, a Black transwoman who was charged with manslaughter after
fighting off an attacker. Williams also points to #FastTailedGirls, a hashtag used to initiate a
conversation about how Black girls are vilified, dehumanized, and often blamed for their sexual
assault and victimization.
Recent work published by writer, social worker, and popular Black feminist social media
“influencer” Feminista Jones (2019) explores how Black women have “taken up space” online to
advocate for themselves. By this, she means that Black women have used social media platforms
to assert themselves politically, to circulate Black feminist ideology, to push back against
misogyny and racism, to raise awareness to their issues and to call out anti-Blackness within the
mainstream feminist movement:
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Jackson, Sarah J., Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles. # HashtagActivism: Networks of
Race and Gender Justice . MIT Press, 2020.
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Black feminist women are being heard in ways they have never been heard before….
What was once whispered or only shared in the sacred comforts of sister circles and
ladies’ brunches is now on public display for all to access, learn from, and build upon….
Black women have been trailblazers in this new digital landscape (Jones, 2019, p. 6).

Jones highlights the vital connection between the rise in digital resistance movements on behalf
of all Black people and the leadership of Black women and Black feminists in specific. She too,
highlights that #BlackLivesMatter, #FergusonSyllabus, #SayHerName, #OscarsSoWhite,
#MuteRKelly, #MeToo, #WhyIStayed, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, #YouOKSis,
#RapeCultureIsWhen, #GirlsLikeUs, #BlackGirlMagic, #BringBackOurGirls,
#EffYourBeautyStandards and more are all hashtag resistance movements started by Black
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women aiming to counter-frame harmful narratives about, or erasure of, Black people. These
hashtags and many others have been successful in engaging the broader public on issues
concerning race, racism, sexism, homophobia, or misogynoir.
This trend of Black women engaging in digital hashtag activism is salient because this
group has had a fraught history when it comes to entering public space and advocating for
themselves. Black Feminist ideology in specific, is a historically subjugated discourse both
within Black public spheres, as well as feminist counterpublics. Although Black Feminist
ideology is on record as early as the late 19th century, it did not rise to prominence until the
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1960s when Black women began to highlight the plague of sexism within the Civil Rights and
Black Power movements. At the time, Black women reported being passed over for leadership
positions or being subjected to sexual assault by movement leaders and other members. Black
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Jackson, Sarah J. “(Re) imagining intersectional democracy from Black feminism to hashtag
activism.” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 4 (2016): 375-379.
82
Though not formally identified as “Black Feminism,” ideals consistent with modern Black
Feminism exist within the writings and speeches of well-known interlocutors such as Maria
Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Anna Julia Cooper.
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women spoke candidly about the fact that their uniquely gendered and racialized concerns were
not acknowledged in favor of maintaining male-centered agendas.
Within the mainstream feminist movement, Black feminist concerns have always been
pushed to the back, both literally and figuratively. Take, for instance, the false assumption that
“women received the right to vote in 1920.” In reality, that was the year that white women were
allowed to vote, Black women were not given the same rights until almost 45 years later. At the
time when the Women’s Clubs were protesting for women’s suffrage, Black women’s clubs
wanted to participate, and they were relegated to the back of the line, both literally and
figuratively.
As Black Feminist thinker and social media figure Mikki Kendall has pointed out,
“commodified feminism” is a privileged discourse. Kendall is best known for starting the
hashtag resistance campaigns #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen and #FaistTailedGirls. She was also
actively involved in the organization around #MuteRKelly and the production of a documentary
about Kelly’s habitual sexual assault of young Black girls. In her own words, the hashtag
#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen originated to serve as a reminder, “White feminism tends to forget
that a movement that claims to be for all women has to engage with the obstacles women who
are not white face” (Kendall, 2020, p. 2). In her book Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women
that a Movement Forgot (2020), she argues that despite pushback, she maintains her stance that
privileged white women continue to limit the scope of feminism. In specific, she argues that
white women define feminism in terms of their privileged station. They do not consider issues
compounded by the nature of race or class privilege (such as food insecurity or gun violence) as
inherently feminist.
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Whereas many white feminists engage in the vapid, performative version of feminist
work, Black women and other women of color (WOC) organize very differently. Black women
are not exempt from this type of performative feminism. However, Black women have
capitalized on the heightened visibility of Black Feminist Ideology to organize around their
traditionally marginalized concerns. The differences between how and why Black feminist
ideology has become popular (as opposed to white feminism), as well as the socio-historical
context of how Black women’s bodies and voices are read in public spaces, is salient for an
understanding of how the widespread, networked backlash operates as well.
However, the phenomenon of “context collapse” within the digital space has made these
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Black women hyper-visible, and with the hypervisibility has come individuals who wish to
silence or suppress them. These opposing groups reify white patriarchy and in a similar fashion
as white supremacists have become a hotbed for vitriol, misinformation, and disinformation.
However, because they primarily attack Black women, they have primarily gone
unacknowledged, unaddressed, and under-researched.
Catherine Knight-Steele similarly argues that “the design and affordances of the [Twitter]
platform fall short of allowing for the creation of a separate sphere of discourse that provides
ownership (control and profit [social or economic] for the proprietor), builds upon the
high-content culture of participants, and whose features best make use of the rhetorical strategies
of Black oral cultures” (Steele, 2016, p. 2). Knight-Steele instead centers her attention on blog
sites as a space where the “black counterpublic” can be articulated more effectively because
there is more ownership over the space. She argues that “Blog sites, unlike Twitter, provide a
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Marwick, A. E., & Boyd, D. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users,
context collapse, and the imagined audience. New media & society , 13(1), 114-133.
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platform where the primary blogger and a community of involved commenters can utilize
narratives, storytelling, extended metaphors, and other features of oral culture to preserve Black
culture and challenge the dominant culture” (Steele, 2016, p. 2). She theorizes the “blog space”
in similar terms as Melissa Harris-Perry and the new “barbershop.” While I would agree with
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that comparison, I would add, Black American people have a distinct way of making spaces their
own. In the same way that these groups do not own the hosting sites of the blogs they speak on,
they do not own the social media platforms either; yet they are just as effective in servicing the
digital Black public sphere, especially subaltern communities there. Social media platforms such
as Twitter and Instagram act as a continuation of these digital counterpublics.
“Internet Afrocentrics,” “The Ankh-Right” “Fauxteps” or “Hoteps”
Internet Afrocentrics are a small group within the larger Black social media communities,
however they are widely recognized, most often by the disparaging nickname “hotep.” Writing
for The Root , Damon Young describes hoteps as:
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“Over the past decade or so, the working definition of ‘Hotep’ has morphed into an
all-encompassing term describing a person who’s either a clueless parody of
Afrocentricity-- think ‘Preach’ from Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking
Your Juice in the Hood -- or someone who’s loudly, conspicuously and obnoxiously
pro-black but anti-progress.”

Young humorously describes the following signs that a person is a hotep:
“Look for the following: (1) a steadfast belief in illogical conspiracy theories, (2) an
arrogant adherence to respectability politics, (3) sexism and homophobia that vacillate
from ‘thinly veiled’ to ‘If being gay is natural how come there ain’t any gay elephants?,’
(4) unbowed and uncompromising support for any black man accused of any
wrongdoing, even if said man’s guilt is clear, (5) ashy ankles… Hotep logic takes
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Harris-Perry, M. V. (1999). Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Dialogue and the Development of
Black Political Thought (Doctoral dissertation, Duke University).
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Young, Damon. (2016) “Hotep, Explained.” The Root . March 5, 2016. Accessed August 1,
2019. https://www.theroot.com/hotep-explained-1790854506
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the-straight-male-is-the-center-of-the-universe way of thinking and adds a dollop of
Afrocentricity to it. Ultimately, they don’t want true equality. They want to replace white
male patriarchy with black male patriarchy.”

Their popularity within social media circles is evidenced by the various monikers created
for them by outsiders to their community. Ankh-Right, Fauxtep, or Notep are some of the other
names given to this group. Ankh-Right is used to highlight the parallel between internet
Afrocentric discourse and white supremacist discourse of far right conversatives generally or
members of the alt-right community in specific. The alt-right is defined by the Southern Povery
Law Center as “a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that
‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social
justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization .” An ankh is an Egyptian symbol that
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resembles a cross and is a popular adornment amongst Afrocentrics. Fauxteps is a portmanteau
of the french word “faux,” which means not real or genuine and hotep. Fauxtep is used
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alongside Notep to underscore the difference between actual hoteps and the individuals that are
incorrectly mimicing them online.
Throughout this dissertation I use the term internet Afrocentric which I borrow from
education scholar David C. Turner III to specifically address the communities online that
espouse myopic, oftentimes contradictory forms of Afrocentricity. Turner writes about his
frustrations with internet Afrocentrics, asserting that they are responsible for the trend of
adopting the “language, aesthetic, and some of the ideas of African centered scholars and
practitioners” to “discipline Black radicalism and domesticate Black political and ideological
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“Alt-Right.” Southern Poverty Law Center. Website. Accessed June 23, 2020,
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alt-right
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“Faux.” Merriam Webster . June 18, 2020. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faux
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autonomy .” Turner highlights that although an imperfect philosophy, Afrocentricity has
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redemptive qualities that are obfuscated by these groups’ misarticulation of the ideologies and
principles. He argues that by misrepresenting Afrocentricity, these groups are turning off
generations of Black people to the beauty and power of Afrocentrism. More importantly, these
groups and their circulation of misinformation and disinformation are hindering political
discourse online, especially within Black communities-- a key voting bloc for Democratic
candidates.
The conservative turn in Afrocentricity is not solely a product of the internet age. During
the economic downtown of the 1980s and 90s, the rhetoric of Black Power and Black capitalism
(Allen, 1992) were erroneously intertwined by many. However, as Turner argues, in the internet
age, the Conservative turn in Black Radicalism does feature an added layer-- anti-Black
discourse that conflates patriarchal, white supremacist ideology with Africanness. Whereas this
ideology amounts to nothing more than a jumble of misreadings of Black Liberation Ideology
and vitriolic contempt for Black people (especially Black women) on the front end, the rhetoric
of these groups enact material harm to Black women and children on the backend. They also
represent an unchecked and unmonitored corner of the internet that continues to grow in tandem
with white supremacist groups.
To be clear, internet Afrocentrics are not the only groups that produce and circulate
derisive content about Black women online. However, they are a focal point of this study for two
reasons. First because of their networked efforts-- internet Afrocentrics leverage social media
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Turner III, David “#MakeAfrocentricityRadicalAgain: Against the Conservative Turn in
Afrocentric Thought and Practice.” Medium, December 29, 2016. Accessed August 1, 2019
https://medium.com/@davidcturneriii/makeafrocentricityradicalagain-against-the-conservative-t
urn-in-afrocentric-thought-and-practice-9747f39dd0e8
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platforms to connect with one another but also to organize coordinated attacks against Black
women and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Akin to Sarah Banet Weiser’s concept of
popular misogyny , popular misogynoir is a similarly “networked… interconnection of nodes in
all forms of media and everyday practice.” Misogynoir is intensified by the enhanced
“connection, circulation, publicness, networks, and communication” (Banet-Weiser, 2018) that
social media platforms afford. However, these groups are often not discussed in these terms
because their existence falls below the radar of most researchers who focus simply on white men.
Second, internet Afrocentrics are technically “in-group” members in the fight against
anti-Blackness. By definition, internet Afrocentrics are most often Black Americans, mostly men
but there are some women who have internalized sexism, who join in as well. The fact that they
are in members of the in-group makes their actions especially insidious but also illuminating for
research purposes-- their discursive activity lends credence to the notion that it is time to move
beyond myopic notions of identity and focus on the harmful narratives that are taken up by all
groups. Their elision of white supremacist discourse with afrocentricity is particularly troubling
and sets up perfect conditions for discursive analysis.
Context Collapse
“Context collapse,” or the experience that many have when their separate offline spheres
collapse into one world online and therefore restrict the possibility for routine maintenance of
self-presentation (Goffman, 1978), has been identified as a facilitator of these social clashes.
While there is much research on the phenomenon of context collapse and how it identity is
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performed online (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; Belk, 2013; Wesch, 2009), there is less research
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Marwick, Alice E., and Danah Boyd. “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users,
context collapse, and the imagined audience.” New media & society 13, no. 1 (2011): 114-133.
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on the compounded impact of this phenomenon on subjugated groups who rely on
code-switching , or switching back and forth between socially accepted dialect or social standards
and more culturally preferred modes of communication, as a means for survival. To be fair, the
salience of code-switching or the frenetic experience of duality that marginalized groups endure
has been addressed extensively in the field of Black Studies (Du Bois, 1903; Fanon, 1967), as
well as gender studies (Cooper, 1892; Beal, 1969; Cade-Bambara, 1970; Murray and Eastwood,
1965; Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977). However, this work has yet to be applied to
the internet age.
One noted by-product of context collapse in the U.S. has been a heightened awareness of
the Black political voice (Anderson, 2016). However, less attention is paid to the heterogeneity
of the Black voice, despite the fact that there are many Black political voices competing for
recognition in these spaces. Studies on the Black political voice online tend to center on Black
political resistance movements and activism online. Within this realm, highly visible advocacy
organizations such as Black Lives Matter have received the lionshare of attention. However, I
contend that the contemporary Black digital public sphere is unique in that it reflects not only an
increased amplification of the Black voice but an unprecedented transparency and vulnerability
of the Black political voice. The technical affordances of social media platforms, including
context collapse, allow for this heightened transparency. The Black voice is not only visible-- it
is being presented in it’s full complexity. Of course this means opportunities for individuals who
are marginalized within the Black community to have a platform to speak to their issues—
namely Black women and the LGBTQ+ communities have used social media platforms to
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pushback against masculinist patriarchal rhetoric that equates Black liberation to the
establishment of a Black male-centered, heterosexual patriarchy.
Online Harassment
According to two subsequent Pew Research Reports released in 2014 and 2017, a
substantial number of American internet users have personally experienced harassment online
(41%), still more have witnessed it (Duggan, 2017). Read in sequence, these studies indicate
online harassment has grown alongside the rise in popularity of social media platforms. As a
result, online harassment has become a central concern for researchers, who attempt to define,
describe and decrease harassment online. However, within these studies, a premium is placed on
tangible assaults-- instances that can be quantified, observed, and assessed via empirical data.
These metrics do not typically account for the forms of racialized gender abuse that Black
women or other people of color may endure online. Of course, the definitions of “online
harassment” vary greatly. For instance, the Pew Research Center has defined ‘online harassment’
as “anything from garden-variety name calling to more threatening behavior.” The limited
definitions of online harassment/online harm also do not account for the many “everyday forms”
of misogyny and misogynoir that are enacted in the digital spaces.
Another key oversight in this area of research has been the way in which some scholars
tend to take on gender-neutral analyses of online harassment, despite the fact the fact that
harassment takes on gender-specific forms. For instance, “revenge porn ” is typically an act
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against women. This happens despite the fact that we know that women are harassed online at
higher rates than men (Duggan, 2017) and despite the fact that we know that various forms of
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Merriam Webster defines revenge porn as “ sexually explicit images of a person posted online
without that person's consent especially as a form of revenge or harassment”
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online harassment often have differing, oftentimes greater, impact on women than men.
(Duggan, 2017). There are a number of scholars who account for this oversight of
gender-specific/gender-based violence against women. Still others highlight how members of the
LGBTQ+ community, as well as people of color are the targets of most online
harassment.Within this research there is still less scholarly inquiry regarding how women of
color, and in specific Black women experience harassment online.
However, the approach of seeking to delimit the material consequences of issues that are
rooted in the spread of harmful ideology, puts the proverbially cart before the horse. I posit that
the extant research on harmful speech/harassment online and misbehavior online, over
determines the importance of tangible violence in their assessments. Instead, this project takes an
approach that is rooted in Black Feminist ideology, which resists universal knowledge claims
and instead attempts to circumvent Eurocentric masculinist politics and epistemologies by
articulating its own epistemologies.
Meme as unit of cultural transmission
This research uses internet memes as an entrypoint for analyzing subcultural
communities online. As many researchers have noted, the analysis of internet memes as units of
cultural transmission may provide insight into the habits, values, and beliefs of an online
community. More generally speaking, memes have a critical function: their ability to
manufacture consent of the status quo. Essential to this work is an understanding of memes,
internet memes and how the latter contributes to or detracts from knowledge production and
cultural transmission within a community.
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The term ‘meme’ was coined in the 1970s by controversial evolutionary biologist
Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976) , as a way to describe how cultural information is
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transmitted. Dawkins defined the meme as “small units of culture that spread from person to
person by copying or imitation” (Dawkins, 1976, p. 2). By his definition, a meme could be a
musical style, clothing fashion, fad diet, slang term, ceremonial protocol, architectural style, or
any minute element of culture that evolves into a trend on either micro or macro levels, for
instance. In the text, Dawkins analogizes the meme's ability to spread culture and facilitate
cultural evolution to how genes aid genetic evolution and transmission. He writes, “Just as genes
propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so
memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain-to-brain” (Dawkins, 1976,
p. 192). However, as a number of scholars have asserted, Dawkins fails to account for the ways
in which nature and culture are distinct. Thinking of the meme primarily as self-replicating
obfuscates the role that humans play in facilitating cultural spread. Memes do not self-replicate
as much as they are dependent on humans for whom their messages or sylings may resonate and
inspire to replicate.
However, the term meme did not become a commonly used word until after the
widespread penetration of digital culture, especially the advent of social media. Short for the
Greek word ‘mimeme,’ which means ‘to imitate,’ the term meme was not applied to internet
culture until Mike Godwin used it in a June 1993 issue of Wired magazine . Using Dawkins’s
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theory, Godwin defines the memes as “an idea that functions in a mind the same way a gene or
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Dawkins, Richard. The selfish gene . Oxford university press, 2016. [1976]
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Godwin, Mike. “Meme, Counter-meme. Wired, 2.10.” (1994). Retrieved from
http://www.wired.com/1994/10/godwin-if-2/ on March 30, 2020
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virus functions in the body. And an infectious idea (call it a ‘viral meme’) may leap from mind to
mind, much as viruses leap from body to body.” He warns that the danger of the meme is that it
has the ability to “crystallize whole schools of thought.” He calls on “net culture” to commit
themselves to memetic engineering: “crafting good memes to drive out the bad ones.”
In this article, Godwin recalls his 1990 campaign to get “net dwellers” to “make a
conscious effort to control the kinds of memes they create or circulate.” Here Godwin refers to a
“Nazi-comparison meme” --a trend he identifies in which many people online referred to any and
everything they did not like to be “similar to the Nazis” or “Hitler-like.” Godwin identified this
as a “bad meme” because it trivialized the gravity of Adolf Hitler and the violence he enacted.
Godwin took a Darwinian approach to the bad meme issue, proposing that the only way
to stop a bad meme was to counter it with a better meme. As he argues, counter memes “put the
[the bad memes] into perspective.” The problem with the Darwinian approach to the internet
meme is that it assumes that good memes will rise to the top or cancel out bad ones. In the
present social media ecosystem, the exact opposite has proven to be true. By design, data-driven
algorithms feed users more of the content that they engage with, and harmful or incendiary
content has proven to be more engaging online. Dawkins also used this language at the end of
The Selfish Gene , but in the context of the hypermediated internet environment, this analogy is
particularly apt.
Meme as internet artifact
Communication scholar Limor Shifman defines internet memes as “(a) group of digital
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items sharing common characteristics of content, form and/or stance, which (b) were created
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Shifman, Limor. Memes in digital culture . MIT press, 2014.
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with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated imitated, and/or transformed via the
internet by many users” (Shifman, 2014, p. 41). Importantly, she points to the fact that memes
shape mindsets and behavior because they not only circulate from person-to-person, “but
gradually scale into a shared social phenomenon” (Shifman, 2014, p. 18). This is why I chose
memes as an entry point for analyzing harmful discourses about Black women online. Memes
effectively use humor to manufacture consent-- that is, humor manipulates individuals into
buying into certain ideologies without them realizing that they are being influenced. They also
do this at a much faster rate and on a more grand scale. Memes thrive on copying, imitation, and
sharing. Social media platforms have made it much easier to disseminate information-- both
good and bad.
Considering such a broad interpretation of what a unit of cultural transmission by
imitation or meme can be-- internet memes too, manifest in many forms. Internet memes can be
hashtags, visual images, or other sorts of viral trends online. Dance challenges on the social
media platform Tik Tok, for example, are also forms of memes. Communication theorist Limor
Shifman outlines how the term meme is used colloquially in internet culture to describe “the
propagation of items such as jokes, rumors, videos, and websites from person-to-person via the
internet” (Shifman, 2014, p. 2). Shifman’s officially defines the internet meme as “(a) a group of
digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance; (b) that were
created with awareness of each other; and (c) were circulated, imitated and/or transformed via
the internet by many users.” Most importantly, Shifman points to the value of memes as more
than just trivial images, trends, or jokes. Instead, memes “actually reflect deep social and cultural
structures. In many senses, Internet memes can be treated as (post)modern folklore, in which
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shared norms and values are constructed through cultural artifacts such as Photoshopped images
or urban legends” (Shifman, 2014, p. 15). Importantly the circulation of memes via likes,
comments, and reposts (which all work to not only validate the content of the meme but also
enhance the overall “reach” of the meme) functions as a bonding/community building practice
(Miltner, 2014; Shifman 2014a, 2014b; Phillips 2015). As Shifman points out, the current
internet era is one that centers on “networked individualism” that is in the digital space where
people desire to “be themselves together” (Shifman, 2014, p. 15). Meaning that individuals are
no longer beholden to the traditional structures of close-knit family and community ties but
connect in new ways as a result of the evolution of digital technology and new models for
connectivity. When it comes to marginalized communities, these digital social ties and online
activities take on added meaning.
Information Studies Professor Andre Brock’s work on Black Twitter (Brock, 2012)
highlights how popular communication research contributed to the normalization of whiteness by
insisting on taking a color-blind, universal approach to the analysis of digital technologies. Brock
instead highlights the way in which Twitter mediates Black cultural performances. The ubiquity
of the phrase “Bye Felisha” is an exemplar of this. To assess these memes in terms of fandom, as
Shifman and many internet researchers popularly due would be to completely miss the layered
cultural meaning of the meme. The meme was created and shared not merely as a marker of
identification within a fandom community, but as a cultural performance indicating that the
sharer is a part of a greater shared community.
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Why study memes?
Internet memes are the chosen focus of this research because, as units of digital cultural
transmission, they are ripe with information about a culture’s hegemonic values and beliefs. As
Shifman explains, internet memes are “prism(s) for understanding certain aspects of
contemporary culture” (Shifman, 2013, p. 367). In the context of social media, internet memes
survive and thrive on their “spreadability ,” which is their resonance with a particular group and
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the relative ease with which the meme can be imitated and disseminated. Successful memes,
therefore, are those that get copied, refined, and recirculated. Imitation signals that these
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memes have the tacit approval of a majority of the respective culture and therefore provide
invaluable insight into cultural norms.
Internet meme-sharing, then, is a discursive social practice. Internet users engage in a
performance of group belonging by circulating memes that are consistent with in-group jokes,
beliefs, opinions, or humor. This performance of group belonging manifests in two most
common ways: First, when individuals share online content, they are engaging in an implicit
social practice of co-signing, validating or showing approval for certain opinions or beliefs. On
the surface, a user may share something simply because it is humorous, thought-provoking, or
important. However, these are relative valuations, and the act of sharing itself signals that the
distributor is placing value on that content. Second, shared content may also signal in-group
solidarity and belonging by constructing boundaries, as Kuipers writes, ‘sharing humor signals
similarity and similarity breeds closeness… laughing together is a sign of belonging.’ Humor is
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Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning
in a networked culture . Vol. 15. NYU press, 2018.
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Ţăran, Flavia. “The Structure and Dynamics of Meme Aggregators.” Studia Universitatis
Babes-Bolyai-Ephemerides 59, no. 1 (2014): 75-102.
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relative. Not everyone thinks the same things are funny. Most of the vilified subjects caricatured
in the memes analyzed in this study would not find them funny. However, those individuals who
do will connect based on their shared identification humor (Meyer, 2000).
Cole Stryker discusses memes in terms of social capital or cultural currency, arguing that
there is a ‘language of memes’ or ‘visual vernacular’ that allows internet users to deliver
critiques and opinions seamlessly. This concept of the language of memes is useful when it
comes to an understanding of how communities form online around shared ideas and values. In
the online space, formerly disparate offline communities grow steadily because of the
interconnectedness of the web . Here entire online communities are co-constructed by social
practices such as sharing thematic content in the form of memes. Black Twitter, for instance, is
not defined by the specific identities of the people active in the community, but by the social
practice of sharing content that is rele vant to Black cultural issues.
Memes are popular because participatory culture (Bruns, 2007, Couldry, 2003, Lievrouw
and Livingstone, 2002, Jenkins, et al. [2016]) has shifted the traditional top-down power
structure of mass media, to one that allows for peer-to-peer production and consumption model
and therefore amplified traditionally marginalized voices, there is a dark side to phenomena as
well. Not all socially networked groups are constructed for benevolent purposes, as Nakamura
highlights in her article about racial violence and scambaiters . Here Nakamura, highlights the
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racist nature of individuals who share memetic images produced by ‘scambaiters’-- internet users
who subvert potential online email phishing scams. Scambaiters present what they are doing as
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Nakamura, Lisa. “‘I WILL DO EVERYthing That Am Asked’: Scambaiting, digital
show-space, and the racial violence of social media.” Journal of Visual Culture 13, no. 3 (2014):
257-274.
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heroic vigilante work-- they are scamming the would be scammers. However, in practice, the
production and circulation of the memes that feature African people in compromising,
dehumanizing positions as a result of their lack of technological prowess, actually reifies decades
old racialized subjection. Byrne (2013) likens these acts of anti-Black vigilantism to the offline
historical artifact of the lynching postcards that were once popular in the American south. In
light of these comparisons, Nakamura (2014) calls for scholarship that “traces the origins of
memetic culture’s racist and sexist image practices.” Nakamura also notably highlights how
racism is most often interpreted by scholars online: “Everyday online racism is a ‘glitch’ or
malfunction of a network designed to broadcast a signal, a signal that is hijacked or polluted by
the pirate racist” (Nakamura, 2013). In other words, Nakamura argues that many scholars ignore
the fact that racism is typically intentional. It also fuels the spread of racist anti-Black memes.
The same is true for sexism. This study intends to contribute to the growing body of work that
attempts to contextualize memetic practice.
In the same ways that memes co-construct communities, they also reify the
common-sense cultural norms of a society Andrew Peck describes the “memetic vernacular” as
the “way of communicating enabled by the digital age that is simultaneously individual and
collective. It offers users new potential to seek empowerment by circulating and legitimating
their own sense of authority and common knowledge” (Peck, 2017). Internet memes represent a
different type of knowledge sharing, in that they typically pre-empt any conversation. The meme
takes on an authoritative tone as it typically makes a definitive statement about an issue or
phenomena-- conducting the beginning, middle, and ending of a conversation in a succinct
format.
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While most scholarship on participatory culture focuses on how it subverts traditional
power structures by affording platforms to bolster or amplify the voice of marginalized groups
(Rintel, 2013), it is also true that memes are weaponized to silence or further marginalize those
who are least powerful (Steele, 2013). As Kate Miltner writes, “When it comes to participatory
culture, it may be true that almost anyone is allowed to speak; however, not everyone gets heard,
and this has a clear impact on the shaping of cultural agendas” (Miltner, 2014).
In the digital age, media models have shifted in such a way that the consumers have
become the producers of content (Toffler, 1980; Jenkins, 2006; Bruns, 2007) and, as such, have
been able to create hyper-specific niche genres of interest. There is also a growing body of
literature that addresses how white masculinity is central to much of participatory culture
(Milne r, 2013), and not much literature about how masculinity is also central in communities of
color (and what these groups look like.) Recent studies show that when it comes to organized,
targeted harassment campaigns online, straight men comprise the majority of assailants, and
women and men who present as more feminine are typically the victims. The issue of online
harassment rarely gets framed as the crisis in masculinity that it is. However, several scholars
attempt to address this issue but seldom from an intersectional perspective that would account for
racialized differences, for instance.
In the last decade, growing numbers of internet and media studies scholars focus on
memes as they have become “as important to the American consciousness at this point as
Hollywood movies” (Grigoriadis, 2011). The role of internet memes in public discourse
(Phillips, 2012; Milner, 2013) is of interest to researchers who foreground the connection
between offline political mobilization and digital organization. However, not many researchers
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have answered Nakamura’s call to explore the racialized and gendered nature of memetic culture
online. When it comes to marginalized groups online, the lion's share of attention goes to
movements such as Black Lives Matter, which is a topic that is most resonant with the Black
middle class. Critical internet studies scholars, however, have more readily embraced the
phenomena of networked hostility online that is intertwined with racism, anti-Blackness and
sexism offline (Brock, 2009; Nakamura, 2013; Silver, 2006) In the digital space, explicit racism
and sexism is prevalent. More importantly, it has the wallpaper effect that so many
taken-for-granted discourses have-- it is everywhere yet still difficult to see if one is used to
ignoring it.
Frequently when people discuss racism in offline spaces, their attitude toward it is that it
is a dirty word. Racism is something that other people do or say, bad people. It is not something
that good people do. By associating racism with “bad people” or “incivility,” individuals create a
cognitive distance from a concept that may still apply to them, even as good peop le. The distance
hinders them from understanding how someone may internalize racist or sexist values, such as
anti-Blackness or misogynoir, without their awareness. Whiteness works similarly- - everyone
else has a race, but white people do not. This idea that whites are non-raced implies that
whiteness is the norm from which all others deviate . Of course, this is not the case. However,
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whiteness is reinforced as the norm every time a white person refers to others or blindly asserts
their specific cultural norms as a shared norm with all others. This normalization of whiteness
happens in academic research as well. The hesitancy to discuss race, for example, manifests
itself in colorblind scholarship that reproduces racism.
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Richard, Dyer. “White: Essays on Race and Culture.” (1997).
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If the content of a meme is indicative of a particular group’s cultural values, then it
follows that themes within memes may be analyzed to illuminate a particular cultural value--
such as hegemonic patriarchy-- if it is present in the discursive exchange. The focus of this study
is on memes as a form of civil, widely accepted discourse, in order to chip away at the notion
that only “bad people” with “bad intentions” spread and circulate harmful ideologies.
Critical Theories of Race and Technolog y
For years, critical race and digital studies scholars have advocated for internet studies
scholars in general to engage seriously with race and racism as guiding logics of technological
design. Instead as Jessie Daniels posits, “the burden of noticing race on the internet has been left
to ‘minority participants,’ that is, to researchers who are people of color’” (Daniels, 2013, p.
707). The mutually constitutive relationship between race and technology affects all people and
is one that researchers can not and should not ignore.
White supremacy and patriarchy poses an insidious threat to “the epistemological menace
to our accumulation and production of knowledge about race, racism, and civil rights in the
digital era (Daniels, 2009, p. 8).” The failure of scholars within this realm of digital and
technological research to examine these areas means that they, too, are working within the
restricted confines of the white racial frame and, therefore, complicit in reifying white
supremacy.
Joe Feagin’s work on the white racial frame and “systemic racism” (a concept originally
theorized by scholars of critical race theory) has been useful for assisting researchers in
understanding the insidious nature of racism and the mechanisms that perpetuate it. According to
Feagin, three primary characteristics comprise the white racial frame: “(1) A white racial framing
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of society with its racist ideology, stereotypes and emotions, (2) Whites’ discriminatory actions
and an enduring racial hierarchy, (3) Pervasively racist institutions maintained by discriminatory
whites over centuries” (Feagin, 2013). In articulating the white racial frame, Feagin builds off of
Erving Goffman’s (1974) concept of “frame analysis.” Wherein, according to Goffman, the
“frame” refers to the filter or lens through which an individual interprets the world. This frame is
culturally determined and is very influential to the meaning-making process. According to
Daniels, “The epistemology of white supremacy reinforces the white racial frame by allowing
whites to retreat from pluralistic civic engagement into a whites-only digital space where they
can question the cultural value of tolerance and racial equality unchallenged by anyone outside
that frame” (Daniels, 2009, p. 8). The “white racial frame” is integral to understanding how
‘willful ignorance’ persists in the face of evidence that racism exists or that technological
systems may enact racism.
Studies of “incivility” in online spaces tend to focus on the impact of harmful discourses
as opposed to thinking about how the technological design actually facilitates certain types of
bad behavior (Phillips, 2015; Reader, 2012; Rheingold, 2000) As Bill Reader (2012) writes
neither the presence or absence of civility or incivility signal the absence of racism. Oftentimes,
as Heather Kettrey and Whiteney later found in their 2014 study of YouTube comments-- both
intentional and unintentional forms of racism maintain white supremacy.
These studies tend to focus on overtly negative discourses (Phillips 2015) as opposed to
thinking about the way that these bad ideologies are embedded in the context of the content. The
focus on incivility-- plainly unacceptable messages obscures the many ways in which these same
bad ideologies are reinscribed in everyday civil conversations. However, as Daniels argues,
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“white supremacy in the United States is a central organizing principle of social life rather than
merely an isolated social movement” (Daniels, 2009, p. 10). When researchers accept racism as
fact, they may then begin the process of interrogating “how we know what we know,” which is
being rapidly changed by the era of the internet (Daniels, 2009). My hope is that this project, in
its intersectional approach to examining the issue of discursive practices in the Black digital
public sphere will serve as an exemplar for analytical approaches that decenter whiteness as a
guiding logic for internet studies.
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CHAPTER 3: METHODS
Making Meaning of Content Shared by Internet Afrocentrics
This dissertation employs Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) (Brock,
2016) as a method for analyzing how Black feminists utilize social media platforms to increase
the visibility of their ideology online. I use CTDA to understand how misogynistic discourses are
reified in online spaces and also how the specific technical affordances of the social media
platforms in this study may impact, shape, or otherwise influence discourse.
This dissertation asks and answers the following questions:
RQ1. What are the “internet Afrocentrics” and other anti-Black feminists online saying
about Black women and girls?
RQ2. To what extent do these discursive exchanges online reify patriarchal
anti-Blackness and misogynoir?
RQ3. How do the technical affordances of the relevant social media platforms contribute
to ‘networked misogynoir’?
I conducted a textual analysis of memes within the relevant social media spaces to answer
the first research question. Through this textual analysis, I establish a typology of internet
afrocentric or anti-Black woman memes and use themes gathered through the development of an
emergent, or data-driven coding schemes to answer the question. In this chapter, I outline the
process of conducting said textual analysis. In this chapter, I present the typology, primary
themes, and other findings from the textual analysis. I present these findings in anticipation of
the following chapter, in which I delve into the critical technocultural discourses analysis
(CTDA) to answer research question two. As I outline here, CTDA is an interpretive framework
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that uses cultural artifacts from the internet as an entry point for analysis. The analytical
approach requires researchers to draw from critical theory in their analysis as well. In chapter 2, I
introduced and defined the primary methodological concepts and frameworks I engage with in
my analysis, including Black Feminist Thought (intersectionality, misogynoir, controlling
images) and critical theories of race (i.e. the social construction of race). This conversation
continues in this chapter, as I explain how these frameworks are relevant to my analysis.
In the first half of this chapter, I introduce and define the relatively new analytical
approach of CTDA and how previous studies have engaged critical cultural frameworks with
CTDA. This section covers some of the vital critical theories of race and technology that inform
my analysis including Joe Feagin’s “White Racial Frame,” and further explanation of the
importance of approaching technical analysis from a critical race perspective. That is, it provides
a rationale for critically interrogating whiteness and how it often over-determines technological
design, as well as research and analysis. This section explores the potential of what unique
insights may yield from approaching analysis from the perspective of the margins.
In the second half of the chapter, I outline the more process-oriented details of my
research design, including how I gathered my material, collected my data, and processed it. Here
I also outline the scope of the study, limitations, and share my positionality statement. In the
following chapters, I analyze and discuss the findings of this study.
Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA)
CTDA is a critical cultural approach to studying the internet and digital technology
through it’s cultural artifacts. As defined by Professors Miriam Sweeney and Andre Brock,
CTDA is “a multimodal analytic technique for the investigation of internet and digital
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phenomenon, artifacts and culture” (Sweeney and Brock, 2014, p. 3). I chose to employ this
analytical approach because it is best suited to illuminate the connections between discourse,
cultural context (both online and offline), digital artifacts and interfaces, and technological
practice. CTDA takes into account cultural specificities, including offline power relations, which
allows for a more nuanced analysis of digital practice.
CTDA is a derivative of the more widely recognized methodological approaches of
Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough & Wodak 1997, Pêcheux
M 1982, Wodak & Meyer 2001). Both methodological approaches draw from interdisciplinary
scholarship in producing their analysis of the impact that culture and power relations may have
on discourse. Ruth Wodak, one of the most prominent theorists of CDA, identified the analysis,
understanding, and explaining of “the impact of new media and new genres” through the
development of “multimodal theoretical and methodological approaches” as one of the most
crucial research agendas of the current moment (Wodak, 2013, p. 307). Both CDA and CTDA
draw from scholarship across disciplines to analyze the impact that culture and power relations
may have on discourse:
“CDA can be defined as a problem-orientated interdisciplinary research programme,
subsuming a variety of approaches, each with different theoretical models, research
methods, and agendas. What unites all approaches is a shared interests in the semiotic
dimensions of power, injustice, and political-economic, social, or cultural change in
society” (Fairclough, 2013, p. 302)

However, as a technique, CTDA differs from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in that it
applies CDA to technological artifacts. Sweeney and Brock first theorized CTDA with the
acknowledgement of studies of the internet, specifically digital divide research, which
propagated narratives of cultural deficiency when it came to people of color. Digital divide
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research tended to be devoid of nuance and cultural understanding, and therefore typically reified
the false binary of the digital haves vs. the digital have-nots . As Selwyn argues, much of the
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digital research perpetuated techno-determinism in its presentation of increased access to
technological platforms as a cure-all for underprivileged communities. Brock echoes this
sentiment about early research on ICTs (Internet and Communication Technologies), arguing
that they often perpetuated narratives of deficiency . CTDA was presented as an alternative
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because it “interrogates… material and semiotic complexities, framed by the extant offline
cultural and social practices its users engage in as they use these digital artifacts” (Brock, 2018,
p. 2), thereby producing more nuanced analysis that also locates power.
I chose CTDA as my primary analytical approach because it is robust. CTDA is a useful
approach for my dissertation project because it allows me to delimit the technological artifact not
merely by what it does on a discursive level, but also its cultural meanings and implications.
CTDA engages with the cultural aspects of technology which Pacey (1985) describes as the
“values, beliefs and ideologies that shape the design, use, and meaning of ICTs in society.”
Culture and technology are not two separate entities; they are entangled. CTDA allows the
researcher to analyze digital spaces as modes of communication but also as cultural artifacts.
This is apt for this project which historicizes the current digital moment, but also draws on
historical contexts to interpret the meaning of these cultural artifacts.
CTDA also works well for answering these research questions because it allows for
critical interrogations of power. All too often, studies of the internet do not engage with
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Selwyn, Neil. “Reconsidering political and popular understandings of the digital divide.” New
media & society 6, no. 3 (2004): 341-362.
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Brock, André. “Critical technocultural discourse analysis.” New Media & Society 20, no. 3
(2018): 1012-1030.
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questions of power dynamics. Of course, there are several critical approaches to the study of the
internet from the fields of Science and Technology Studies (Pinch & Bijker, 1984; Latour, 2005)
and Information Studies (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1999; Pacey, 1985) for example. However,
as Brock and Sweeney argue many of these approaches do not locate power in their analysis of
the intersections between Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and human
beings (Sweeney and Brock, 2014, p. 2) CDA and CTDA are primarily interested in uncovering
the underlying beliefs that maintain the status quo, which makes the location of power a central
concept for CTDA and CDA (Wodak, 2013, p. 306).
CTDA is an interdisciplinary approach. According to Wodak, CDA requires
multi/inter/transdisciplinary and multi-methodological approaches because of its goal of
interrogating social phenomena alongside the “text” (Wodak, 2013, p. 302). By
“transdisciplinary,” Wodak means that the researcher uses the logic of various disciplines to
formulate one’s theory and methodology (Fairclough, 2013 p. 452). I believe that special
attention needs to be paid to race, gender, class, and other methods of social organization and
hierarchy because these are complex constructs that impact every social arena. This approach is
consistent with CTDA. “CTDA is designed to be open to any critical cultural framework, as long
as the same critical cultural approach is applied to the semiotics of the information and
communication technology (ICT) hardware and software under examination and the discourses
of its users” (Brock, 2018, p. 2). CTDA is a prime method for my work because it allows me to
center Black theory and Black people as a way to disrupt some of the stereotypical narratives of
deficiency that plagues non-critical, non-nuanced studies of the internet.
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CTDA does not reproduce the biased research that traditionally plagues research on
lower-resourced communities. As previously mentioned, the earliest internet research centered
on narratives of deficiency when it came to poor people and people of color. This research relied
heavily upon dominant or “appropriate” uses of technology and assumptions that were not
culturally specific or sensitive. Continuing in the tradition of Selwyn (2004), Byrne (2007 and
2008), and Brock (2011 and 2012) this project is as free from assumptions about the
communities I analyze as possible. CTDA is conscious of avoiding “the techno-deterministic
premise that access to the ‘digital’ improves the lives of underrepresented groups” (Brock, 2018,
p. 3) As Selwyn (2004) has argued, much of the early “digital divide” research produced
deficiency narratives, that positioned “access” as the key barrier to equality and therefore, the
great equalizer within the digital space. The replication/prevalence of deficit narratives reflect
offline, real-world biases of the privileged gaze. CTDA takes these biases into account.
CTDA draws heavily from Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough and Wodak 1997;
Pêcheux, 1982; Wodak and Meyer, 2001), an umbrella term for a variety of approaches to the
social analysis of discourse and is derived from the even more widely recognized method of
Discourse Analysis. Discourse analysis is a traditional method for interpreting a text within the
meaning of its larger context. In the interrogation of a particular text, Discourse Analysis thinks
of the text “not only as form, meaning and mental process, but also as complex structures and
hierarchies for interaction and social practice and their functions in context, society and culture”
(van Djik, 1997). Similar to Content Analysis, Discourse Analysis is primarily concerned with
discovering patterns or relationships within or across texts (Faircough, 1995). However, Critical
Discourse Analysis adds the layer of making the connection to larger systems of power
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(Fairclough, 2004; Van Dijk, 1993; Wodak, 2001), whereas CTDA does this work for
technological artifacts.
CTDA in Practice
Although a relatively new approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, many scholars have
used CTDA in their attempts to analyze the iterative relationship between discourse, user
interface, technological systems, and offline power relations. For example, Miriam Sweeney’s
work on Microsoft’s interactive virtual search assistant Ms. Dewey, engaged with gender studies
as her critical theory of choice to analyze the semiotic elements (i.e., web design, visual
elements, interface aesthetics) of the technological artifact. Sweeney gathered and analyzed
“fan-archived search terms and search results (visual and audio), as well as user discourses from
blogs, internet fora, comments, and reviews about the search engine” (Sweeney and Brock, 2014,
p. 6). While Sweeney’s project focuses on anthropomorphization as a design strategy, it also
illuminates how cultural beliefs about gender and race are embedded in technological design.
Andre Brock’s work on Black Twitter serves as an example of how to use CTDA as a
methodological approach. In his article, “From the Blackhand Side, Twitter as Cultural
Conversation” (2012), Brock uses CTDA as a method to illuminate how Black oratory practices
are exhibited on Twitter. In the article, Brock analyzes the use of the hashtag (a cataloging and
indexing tool on Twitter) as appropriated by the Black community to serve their information
needs and distinctive oratory practices. Using critical theories of race as his critical theory of
choice, Brock found that:

“Black hashtag signifying revealed alternate Twitter discourses to the mainstream and
encourages a formulation of Black Twitter as a ‘social public’; a community construction
through their use of social media by outsiders and insiders alike. Using a CTDA approach
to examine Black Twitter illustrated how culture shaped social interactions on the
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network. CTDA also showed how Twitter’s interface and discourse conventions helped
to frame external perceptions of Twitter as a social AND a cultural public” (Sweeney and
Brock, 2014, p. 5)

Lastly, Alexander Cho built off of Nancy Baym and danah boyd’s concept of “socially
mediated publicness ” to establish the concept of “default publicness .” In this article on
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Tumblr, Cho engages with gender studies and queer theory to analyze how the technical
affordances/features of the anonymous blogging platform Tumblr operated as a space that was
welcoming of the LGBTQ+ community because of its design. Most social media platforms, Cho
argues, have the design bias of “default publicness which “includes baked-in normativities that
rehearse a standpoint that being-in-public is somehow neutral, low-risk, unraced, ungendered,
and unsexed (Cho, 2018, p. 3190). Cho describes default publicness further as having,
“heteronormative understandings of identity as static, singular, intrinsic, and state-validated are
woven into design. By ‘state-validated identity’ I mean the identity that would be on your birth
certificate, driver’s license, or the like” (Cho, 2018, p. 3192). Cho uses ethnography to inform
his analysis of the discourse, so this is not a traditional discourse analysis, however, as he states
in the article, he was influenced by CTDA as a method for using critical theories to analyze the
embedded cultural values in technological platforms.
This research project looks to internet memes as textual/cultural artifacts that can provide
readings and interpretations that help to understand the dynamics of online communities. As I
explain in further detail in the “Process” section of this chapter, internet memes may take any
number of forms, including visual, textual, or stylistic/aesthetic trends that are copied and
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Baym, Nancy K., and Danah Boyd. “Socially mediated publicness: An introduction.” Journal
of broadcasting & electronic media 56, no. 3 (2012): 320-329 .
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Cho, Alexander. “Default publicness: Queer youth of color, social media, and being outed by
the machine.” New Media & Society 20, no. 9 (2018): 3183-3200.
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disseminated online. For example, a hashtag is technically an internet meme if it is copied or
imitated, and redistributed. For this study, I focus primarily on image-based memes that circulate
via network leaders and meme aggregator accounts.
Black Feminist Thought and Praxis
In this dissertation, I draw from Black Feminist epistemologies such as Intersectionality,
as both theory and method. As a theoretical framework, Intersectionality explicates how Black
women experience interlocking oppressions. Applied more broadly, Intersectionality can be
used, as Smith (1998) argues, for “addressing the multifarious ways in which ideologies of race,
gender, class, and sexuality reinforce one another” ...additionally, it “can illuminate the diverse
ways in which relations of domination are produced.”
As an analytic, or way of thinking about and conducting analysis, intersectionality
challenges traditional processes and categories of analysis. Traditional positivist approaches to
research have necessitated that the researcher creates distance from the object or subject so as not
to produce biased scholarship. It seeks to produce “generalizable results.” I employ Black
Feminist Thought as an alternative epistemology because it is not invested in western traditions
of positivism as the only way to validate knowledge. As Hill-Collins argues, “Such criteria ask
African American women to objectivity themselves, devalue their emotional life, displace their
motivations for furthering knowledge about black women, and confront, in an adversarial
relationship, those who have more social economic and professional power than they”
(Hill-Collins, 1989, p. 343). Instead, I build from the intellectual tradition of Black Feminism as
a way to contextualize the subject of my dissertation -- Black women in digital spaces.
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Establishing Black Feminist knowledge claims are challenging because they must pass
through opposition from three key groups-- working class Black women, Black women scholars
and it “ must be prepared to confront Eurocentric masculinist political and epistemological
requirements” (Hill-Collins, 1989, p. 350). However, the Black feminist epistemology is integral
to any understanding of how any subjugated communities utilize knowledge production as a
form of resistance but especially Black women (Hill-Collins, 1989, p. 344).
Within political science, for instance, Professor Ange-Marie Hancock-Alfaro argues that
intersectionality could be useful as a ‘research paradigm’ and provides an example of how
single-axis categorization has a universalizing tendency. For example, “in large-N quantitative
studies,” which might “assume that race operates identically across entire cities, states, and
nations, when placed in interaction with gender or class’ (Hancock, 2007, p. 67). As a research
paradigm or tool, intersectionality “changes the relationship between categories or investigation
from one that is determined a priori, to one of empirical investigation.” Without explicitly
labeling itself as such, CTDA is an intersectional method because it requires the researcher to
take critical cultural approaches to rethinking research design.
Glitch Racism: Critical Theories of Race and Technology
Within studies of the internet and technocultures, the issue of racism and, more
specifically, anti-Blackness has continued to be grossly under-theorized and under-researched.
As sociologist Jessie Daniels (2013) found in her review of internet research, most studies of
race and the internet focused on the topic of identity without giving much consideration to
“issues of race and epistemology as they relate to life online” (Daniels, 2013, p. 19). Carolyn De
la Peña echoes these sentiments in her article on the history of technology (2010). Here she
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argues that there are few interrogations of the cultural values embedded in technologies, while
the supposed “bigger” questions of the influence that technology may have on values or social
change are more popular. De la Peña argues that “Within this landscape, there are few built-in
mechanisms for producing scholarship that prioritizes race” (De la Peña, 2010, p. 921). This
trend persists today. It is much more common for researchers to discuss notions of “race” or
“ethnicity” as static variables in a study than it is for them to engage in critical research. What is
needed are more researchers that challenge how metrics of measure, research design, and even
the design of the technologies themselves, may reinforce racism, sexism, classism, etc.
In attempting to address how and why race and, in specific, Blackness, matters in studies
of the internet, I am reminded of the central question, Professor Lisa Nakamura asked her in her
article on “glitch racism ”:
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“What if, in the spirit of media archaeology, we understood online racism not as a glitch
but as part of the signal? What if we paid attention to racist comments with the same
intensity that we do the rest of the content? Why is Internet racism the bad penny of the
internet economy? Online racism is unruly, nonsensical, but it is not an interruption from
the ‘content,’ indeed, it is less an exception than an inevitability… Rather than viewing
Internet racism and sexism as ‘off-topic,’ an example of filter failure, what could we gain
by seeing it as an effect of the Internet on a technical level?” (Nakamura, 2013).

Here Nakamura highlights the tendency for researchers to use a variety of mechanisms to
“explain away” or rationalize instances of racism or other forms of hatred or harassment that
arise from technological design. She uses the term “trolling” as an example of one discursive
tactic. As defined by the Urban Dictionary, trolling is “the deliberate act, (by a “Troll”-noun
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Nakamura, Lisa. “Glitch racism: Networks as actors within vernacular internet theory.”
Culture Digitally 10 (2013).
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Drog65. (2014) Urban Dictionary . Trolling. Accessed on August 1, 2019. Retrieved from:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Trolling
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or adjective), of making random unsolicited or controversial comments on various internet
forums with the intent to provoke an emotional knee-jerk reaction from unsuspecting readers to
engage in a fight or argument” ( Urban Dictionary , 2014). Of course, many instances of trolling
are innocuous, for instance, if someone were to say something funny or mildly controversial just
for laughs or to derail an online conversation. However, since humor is subjective, the term
“trolling” may also be used to refer to instances of racism, sexism, etc. Trolling in these cases
becomes a euphemism for online harassment when it minimizes the material harm of vitriol
circulated via social media platforms by mischaracterizing it as a playful, harmless element of
internet culture.
The ideological roadblock that stops many researchers from critically analyzing how
technological platforms reinforce inequality, likely stems from the prevalence of erroneous
assumptions about technology. Many people assume that technologies are inherently neutral, that
technological development and progress are inherently good, and that digitization and
automation processes are inherently better than manual processes, among other false notions.
These are the myths of American technoculture. As Joel Dinerstein points out (2006), the
ideology of American technoculture is a combination of six beliefs: modernity, the future,
progress, religion, masculinity, and whiteness. So any study of race in technoculture must begin
from the standpoint that race and technology are mutually constitutive. Within the field of STS,
many scholars have attempted to challenge these assumptions (Winner, 1980; Bowker and Star,
2000). However, none have so succinctly executed this task than those scholars who have
centered Black theory, Black thought, and Black scholars in their research.
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The work of Professor Simone Browne provides an exemplar of how concepts borrowed
from Black Thought can be applied to studies of technology to yield new insights. In Dark
Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015), Browne “locates Blackness as a key site
through which surveillance is practiced, narrated and enacted” (Browne, 2015, p. 9). In her
words, “ Dark Matters stems from a question of what would happen if some of the ideas
occurring in the emerging field of surveillance studies were put into conversation with the
enduring archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, in this way making visible the many
ways that race continues to structure surveillance practices” (Browne, 2015, p. 11). Through this
approach, Browne develops several useful concepts and insights into how Blackness and the
preservation of racialized oppression factors heavily into the logic and design of surveillance
systems in America to this day.
“Absented presence” is a term Browne uses to describe how “Blackness” is an
ever-present undercurrent in the archive as well as any critical study of American history. She
argues that Blackness must be acknowledged even though it is “absented” from “what is
theorized and who is cited” (Browne, 2015, p. 13). For Browne, Blackness is an elusory
boundary object-- easy to ignore but impossible to miss when one is trained to look. This idea is
similar to theoretical concepts for reconciling absences and silences within the archive of the
TransAtlantic Slave Trade advanced by African American Studies professor Saidiya Hartman.
Hartman uses the term “critical fabulation ” to describe a methodology that joins a fictional
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narrative to archival research and critical theory to account for silences. Additionally, her
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Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in
nineteenth-century America . Oxford University Press on Demand, 1997.
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concept of the “afterlife of slavery ” refers to the enduring consequences of the Trans-Atlantic
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Slave Trade that have been rendered invisible but persist in contemporary society. Lastly, her
concepts of “non-history” and “non-space ” also name the enduring absences that echo from
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the archives.
Browne’s work establishes the fact that the concept of surveillance does not derive from
sincere safety concerns or neutrality. Browne uses the term “racializing surveillance” to describe
how the earliest surveillance systems in the Modern Age were created to reify racial boundaries,
and therefore reinforce the social construction of race and racism. She explains, “Racializing
surveillance is a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and
performances concern the production of norms about race and exercise a ‘power to define what
is in or out of place.’ (Browne, 2015, p. 16) Browne states that Frantz Fanon’s lectures on
surveillance inspired her concept of racializing surveillance. In these lectures, Fanon discussed
“the embodied effects and outcomes of surveillance practices on different categories of laborers”
(Browne, 2015, p. 5-6). In Black Skin, White Masks , Fanon refers to this as “sociogeny” or
“sociogenesis,” which is similar to the modern, popular conception of “socially-constructed”
phenomena such as race. Fanon highlights how many negative “sociogenetic” phenomena such
as violent behavior are mistakenly characterized as “ontogenetic” (innate, static) and
subsequently attributed to particular racial groups as inherent racial qualities. This concept is also
taken up in the work of Black studies scholar Sylvia Wynter, via her concept of the “sociogenic
principle.” According to Browne, the sociogenic principle is “the organizational framework of
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Hartman, Saidiya. Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route . Macmillan,
2008.
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Hartman, Saidiya. Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route . Macmillan,
2008.
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our present human condition that names what is and what is not bounded within the category of
the human, and that fixes and frames Blackness as an object of surveillance” (Browne, 2015, p.
7). In this same vein, this dissertation takes a pragmatic look at communities that exist just below
the purview of mainstream attention.
Studies of technology that focus on race but more specifically, Blackness necessarily
begin from the standpoint that race and technology are mutually constitutive, and therefore
embedded, as a guiding logic, in the systems. As Bauman (2000) makes clear in Modernity and
the Holocaust , a text that connects the advent of modernity and the tragedy of the Holocaust,
“Racism is unthinkable without the advancement of modern science, modern technology, and
modern forms of state power. As such, racism is strictly a modern product. Modernity made
racism possible” (Bauman, 2000, p. 61). Bauman argues that the Holocaust occurs not because
its perpetrators were necessarily more evil but because of the cultural shift of modernity, which
valued science, systems, and processes over traditional values. Modernity introduced new
systems based on “logic” and “ration,” which allowed enough psychic distance from horrific acts
of violence to absolve its perpetrators. “The cult of rationality, institutionalized as modern
science, proved impotent to prevent the state from turning into organized crime; at worst, it
proved instrumental in bringing the transformation about” (Bauman, 2000, p. 110). The benefit
of taking on the perspective that race and technology are mutually constitutive is that the
researcher is better able to identify how offline social values are embedded into platforms and
may intentionally, or unintentionally reify offline inequalities. It also puts the researcher in a
better position to identify how whiteness operates as a technology to maintain social hierarchies.
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Assumptions
Centering Blackness and Intersectionality
Centering Blackness also means being critical about the assumptions of the respective
disciplines. Ideally, projects that center Blackness should take on an intersectional lens and also
engage with interdisciplinarity. By this, I mean that researchers should not continue to research
in the traditional ways that they have inherited from their disciplines. As De la Peña has proven
“We cannot rely on the archives and methods that have served many others engaged in the
history of technology to serve the study of race and technology” (De la Peña, 2010, p. 921).
Working within political science, Professor Ange-Marie Hancock states that “Intersectional
empiricists cannot rely on the same old data, or more precisely, data collected in the sale old
unitary way… I argue that continuing to collect data, in the same way, helps us assimilate into
old questions generated by old paradigms regardless of their ongoing utility at the cost of
answering pesky new questions unanswerable by the old approaches” (Hancock, 2007, p. 67).
Researchers should be critical, that is, they should rethink the normative categories of
measurement and also think beyond traditional frameworks.
Centering Blackness also means proffering the scholarship of individuals (many of whom
may be Black) who are already doing the work of centering Blackness in their research. Scholars
must support this research by engaging with the ideas of critical race and Black studies scholars
and not merely “name-check” them in the way that many have done with Kimberle Crenshaw’s
useful framework of intersectionality .
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Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist
critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.” u. Chi. Legal
f. (1989): 139.
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As long as researchers continue to center whiteness as the norm, technological systems
that perpetuate white domination will continue to reproduce itself. As De la Peña writes, “Rather
than imagining ‘race’ as a term that describes particular individuals marked as nonwhite, I want
to suggest that we think of race as an epistemology at play in all technological production and
consumption… white people have race. And they make it, sustain it, and protect it in part
through technology” (De la Peña, 2010, p. 923). Whiteness is harmful to epistemological
integrity and also has detrimental effects on the way we all understand ourselves and view the
world. “The scapegoat of white society, which is based on the myths of progress, civilization
liberalism, education, enlightenment, and refinement, will be precisely the force that opposes the
expansion and triumph of these myths. This oppositional brute force is provided by the black
man” (Fanon, 2008, p. 171). Brock argues that “identifying the ways in which technocultural
narratives bolster particular arrangements of power provides a starting point for formulating
interventions and for identifying counternarratives” (Sweeney and Brock, 2014, p. 7). Naming
might be the most critical reason for centering Blackness in our studies of the internet and other
technologies: when we can see the power and make it visible to others, we are better positioned
to address its detrimental effects.
In addition to questioning the dominant white, western, European knowledge validation
process, a commitment to centering Blackness in the analysis of technocultures necessitates a
critical interrogation of everything that is known to be true about race as it pertains to
technology. To this end, Omi and Winant’s “racial formation theory has been beneficial in
understanding how the notion of ‘race’ is not a biological certainty but a socially constructed
ideology. They define their theory of race as: “an unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social
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meanings continually being transformed by political struggle. With this in mind, let us propose a
definition: race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by
referring to different types of human bodies” (Omi and Winant, 1994, p. 55). They define racial
formation as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited,
transformed and destroyed” and argue that “racial formation is a process of historically situated
projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized” (Omi and
Winant, 1994, p. 56). Omi and Winant argue that their definition of racial formation “emphasizes
the social nature of race, the absence of any essential racial characteristics, the historical
flexibility of racial meanings and categories, the conflictual character of race at both the
“micro-” and “macro-social” levels, and the irreducible political aspect of racial dynamics” (Omi
and Winant, 1994, p. 4)
Jessie Daniels importantly challenges the use of racial formation theory in studies of the
internet. She makes the argument that the focus on racial categories obscures the issue of racism.
When scholars do acknowledge racism, they downplay its effects. Instead, “the State” is blamed
mostly for inequality (Daniels, 2013, p. 709). Daniels writes
“The reality is that in the networked society (Castells, 1997) racism is now global
(Daniels, 2008a, 2009a; Back, 2002), as those with regressive political agendas rooted in
white power connect across national boundaries via the internet, a phenomenon that runs
directly counter to Omi and Winant’s conceptualization of the State as a primary
structural agent in racial formation. Ultimately, racial formation theory is, in the way it is
most often used an unsatisfying theoretical framework for interrogating the complicated
connections between racism, globalization, and technoculture in which the internet is
implicated” (Daniels, 2013, p. 710)

Indeed individual interpretations of racial formation theory, namely the essentialized
belief that racism is merely a “figment of society’s collective imagination,” elides the material
consequences of racism. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva uses the term “color-blind racism” to
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describe individuals who perpetuate post-racial narratives and also mistakenly believe that
racism would go away “if only everyone would just stop talking about it or paying it so much
attention.” In his book Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of
Racial Inequality in the United States (2003), Bonilla-Silva uses ethnographic research to
highlight the various discursive tricks and leaps of logic individuals may use to circumvent the
topic of race. He insightfully points out that “not seeing race” is a form of racism in itself. Not
only is acknowledging difference essential, but so too is thinking critically about how whiteness
is continuously “non-raced.”
Process
Context
At its core, this dissertation is a Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis of memes
shared by internet Afrocentrics. The goal is to establish a typology and also to determine whether
anti-Black, sexist, and patriarchal tropes are present in them. Additionally, this dissertation seeks
to understand how the technical affordances of relevant social media spaces may facilitate the
circulation of anti-Blackness, sexism, and patriarchy.
In previous studies, researchers have often initiated their inquiry by identifying the sites
that are “most popular” according to metrics such as highest Alexa rankings, most page
engagement, most likes, etc. The decision to study the “most popular” memes or meme
aggregator accounts is implicitly political as it guarantees that the focus of the study will be
white technoculture. This research intends to subvert or decenter whiteness in this study. To this
end, this research focuses on Black conservative leaders who, from initial observations, appear to
circulate harmful rhetoric similarly to white supremacists. These internet Afrocentric leaders,
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represent “supernodes” in these subsets of Black political discourse as much of the community is
formed and solidified around following them.
As a starting point, I went to the Instagram pages of known internet Afrocentric leaders. I
chose “Terrell Khalif” and “Iman Jackson” based on their relatively large followings and
familiarity with their names as a part of the zeitgeist of Black digital culture. Each of these men
has a large social media following on various platforms (Instagram, YouTube, Twitter) and are
leaders in a movement toward racial equality and economic empowerment. Of course, none of
these men self-identify as internet Afrocentrics, a typically pejorative term. However, internet
Afrocentrics are identified by their actions (and the ideologies they espouse) in social media
spaces, not by self-identification. I understand that this labeling is, in itself, a form of discourse.
Data Collection and Preparation of Materials
It would be impossible to collect, code, and analyze every single tweet or meme shared
about Black women on the internet. However, I gathered a sample of 400 and memes from four
separate leaders within the internet Afrocentric community and meme aggregator accounts on
Instagram.
Each set of memes was gathered between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2019.
Some datasets include posts from the entire year or close to it. Others may cover only a few days
or weeks. This spread is due to the variant volume of posts that these pages individually made
during the respective period. For example, one page posted only two to three times per week,
whereas another page posted 15-20 times per day. I went through each of their followings and
identified any meme aggregator accounts that they follow. Meme aggregator accounts are pages
that curate and repost particular memes .
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I manually collected screenshots and links to the memes in this study. I organized and
coded these screenshots using the computer software MAXQDA. I chose a starting point of
December 31, 2019, and worked backward on every account-- collecting any memes that made
mention of Black women specifically. I did not include moving images such as gifs and videos.
Instead, I focused on collecting only still images. Once the initial sets of memes were collected, I
audited the memes to make sure that everything I gathered was usable. I relabeled every file with
a code name that combined the name of the page it came from and the date that it was published.
In a separate project folder, I extracted any textual information from these same memes to
conduct a separate textual analysis of just the language used.
Instruments
I used MAXQDA as a tool for organizing and coding qualitative data. MAXQDA is a
reflexive software system designed specifically for qualitative and mixed methods research. I
chose this system because it allowed for relatively easy coding and tracking of web content that I
collected in Excel spreadsheets ahead of the analysis. The platform worked particularly well for
coding visual images as it allows for codes of the entire image but also included a zoom feature
that allowed for zooming in and coding particular sections of the photo. I felt that this type of
robust metadata would be essential in producing a more in-depth analysis. This software system
was particularly useful for my emergent coding scheme as it allowed me to easily manipulate
codes and work with a second coder to establish themes.
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Statement of Confidentiality
Interaction with human subjects was not necessary for the data collection process of this
study. However, this research does utilize social media posts published by individuals. Every
social media post analyzed in this study was public, and every page examined was anonymized.
This study uses code names to refer to specific pages, yet conceal their identity. Much of the raw
data collected includes identifying information. These identifying markers are redacted. The raw
data collected includes identifying information. However, the data was stored in
password-protected files on a password-protected computer. No data other than what is present
in their public social media posts and comments were collected.
Coding the Data
I took an inductive, data-driven approach to the development of the coding schema. That
is, instead of starting with a particular set of codes in mind, I used MAXQDA to manually tag
each image with as many elements that I noticed. From there, I identified thematic trends and
used them as the initial codes. This allowed for the discovery and identification of new codes
that are not necessarily already present in the analytical framework. I also worked with a partner
who is also familiar with the Black social media subcultures such as Black Twitter. We worked
independently to come up with an emergent coding scheme codebook. After we established the
codebook (separately, then together), we then worked on coding the data.
Scope of Study
The general purpose of this study is threefold: 1. To establish a typology of internet
Afrocentric memes, 2. To determine to what extent white supremacist patriarchal discourses are
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reified in visual memetic discourse in the Black digital public sphere and 3. To discuss how the
technical affordances of relevant social media platforms contribute to a phenomenon, I call
“networked misogynoir.” Toward these ends, this study centers on one particular subset of the
Black digital public sphere-- the internet Afrocentric community, as they are known for
circulating anti-Black woman rhetoric that also tends to be xenophobic and homophobic as well.
This study looks at the visual memes circulated by “supernodes” within the internet Afrocentric
community, that is, those leaders or meme aggregator accounts whose posts are amplified by
virtue of their cultural capital within the digital subculture. These internet Afrocentric leaders
and meme aggregator accounts are, to use epidemiological terms, “super spreaders.”
The internet serves as both a field site and a tool within this study. I used internet
software MAXQDA to store the data that I collected by hand. The data was anonymized, less to
protect the anonymity of these individuals, but also to deny them an expanded platform. Their
rhetoric is harmful, and I do not wish to spotlight them any more than needed to formulate ways
to counter their harmful activities.
I collected 400 memes from four different pages, two of which were meme aggregator
accounts and the other two, which were known internet Afrocentric leaders as defined by their
visibility within the broader Black digital public sphere. A sampling of visual memes was
collected between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2019.
Limitations
In this section, I outline the primary limitations of this study, which are all related to
either the size of the sample or the methods and equipment available at this time.
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Sample size
There is no way to gather every single internet Afrocentric meme on the internet. The
feasibility of such a project limits this study. However, I selected a sampling of tweets that I
deemed adequate for interpretation. The sample size is relatively small in comparison to how
many internet Afrocentric memes and meme aggregator accounts there are that may circulate this
content, especially when you consider the fact that these accounts probably post thousands of
memes per day (collectively). However, I did gather enough memes to generalize and get a
glimpse of the communities I am interested in studying. I was, however, able to collect data from
four of the most well known internet Afrocentric leaders. These subjects are popular enough to
do speaking engagements/tours; they have been featured on numerous television shows and have
sizable followings. They are essential nodes within the internet Afrocentric digital circles.
Methods
I gathered visual memes-- image in the form of still images only. “Image macro” memes
are analyzed when it comes to looking at emerging themes in content authored by the page
owner themselves. Except for one meme aggregator/author who also produces videos-- most
often the memes circulated by these groups is not their original work. Because I wanted to focus
on their original work, interrogating images only made the most sense.
Equipment
During the data collection process, I had to recode data and collect entirely new datasets
late into the project. This was because I narrowed the scope/criteria of what I wanted to focus on
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numerous times during the course of writing this dissertation. I think it is essential to know that
much of the data was collected manually because I did not have access to a PC system and the
typical software systems I would use (that only run on PCs) because of the Covid-19 health crisis
in the United States. I do think this hands-on process might be a benefit as it brought me closer to
my data.
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CHAPTER 4: ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

This chapter is divided into three primary sections, each of which presents the findings
that are relevant to answering the research questions proposed initially. First, I present the
findings of the textual analysis to answer the initial research question: “What are internet
Afrocentrics saying about Black women and girls?” I found that Black women are a focal point
within the everyday political conversation of the internet Afrocentric community. However, the
conversation about Black women is very contradictory. For example, Black women are
simultaneously exalted and denigrated through frequent use of empty honorifics such as
“Queen.” While the term sounds complimentary and is likely meant to be a sincere compliment,
it denotes a Black woman who adheres to the narrow standards of Black femininity
conceptualized by the men in these groups. These parameters mirror the Cult of True
Womanhood or Cult of Domesticity that historians say limits the role of the woman to the
household and consists of three additional values: submissiveness, piety, and purity. However,
they incorporate racist, anti-Black ideas about Black women, including the notion that Black
women are hypersexual, or otherwise deviant.
Secondly, I provide an overview of the themes that emerged from the emergent textual
analysis as a precursor to determining their consistency with anti-Black patriarchal discourses to
answer research question two “To what extent do these discursive exchanges online reify
patriarchal anti-Blackness and misogynoir?” I found that Internet Afrocentrics employ various
elements of mysticism and the occult in their discourse. This is consistent with their pre-digital
predecessors but also with other ethno-nationalist groups such as white supremacist groups. This
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is best evidenced by their tendency to enact Afrocentric essentialism, as well as their affinity for
engaging in conversations around pseudo-science and imagined histories.
I also found that misogyny manifests itself repeatedly through the objectification of Black
women but also in virulent anti-feminist. These internet Afrocentrics believe that feminism is a
threat to not only masculinity, but also the preservation and integrity of the Black family unity.
Therefore they combat feminist doctrine through championing sexist beliefs, denial of rape
culture, and anti-abortion rhetoric. This virulent anti-feminism works in concert with blatant
homophobia and transphobia. In these discursive spaces, LGBTQ+ identities are vilified as
threats to the primacy a particular brand of masculinity that is predicated upon heterosexual
relations and sexual domination of women. Through this lens, homosexuality is interpreted as a
threat to the Black family structure which, they say, needs to be on guard against the so-called
Gay Agenda which in their eyes disrupts or dismantles their ideal of the heterosexual nuclear
Black family unit.
Internet Afrocentrics are also defined by their open hostility toward non-black groups but
especially immigrants. Their xenophobia manifests itself most often in outright prejudicial
statements against non-Americans, immigrants, or even Black Americans who are not
descendants of African slaves to America. It is also marked by an undercurrent in many circles,
of antisemitism and intolerance for interracial relationships.
Lastly, but not least importantly, anti-Blackness is prevalent within the discourse of
internet Afrocentric which is perhaps the most counter-intuitive element of these groups.
However, as this study shows, much of their rhetoric is borrowed from anti-Black white
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nationalist rhetoric, only repackaging in Blackface. These parallels are most obviously
represented in their consistency with the controlling images framework of Black womanhood.
While many of these discursive trends are parallel to the rhetoric of pre-existing
Conservative Black nationalist groups, I argue here, that what makes them different is the fact
that they are networked. In the final section, I conclude by engaging the preceding analysis with
recent critical internet studies scholarship to theorize how the technical affordances of social
media may contribute to networked misogynoir. In an attempt to answer research question three
“How do the technical affordances of the relevant social media platforms contribute to
networked misogynoir?” I use the concept of networked misogynoir to describe how these
previously fringe groups find community online, bond together around shared qualities, values,
insecurities, and fears as well as a hatred that is intimately linked with Anti-Blackness and
Anti-Feminism. This trend is largely reactionary and can be understood as a backlash to the
rising visibility and popularity of Black women’s voices and epistemologies in the Black digital
public sphere
In the following chapter, I discuss the implications of this research and further directions
for this area of inquiry.
On Genre: Anatomy of Internet Afrocentric Meme
This project analyzes the discursive exchanges of one particular Internet culture in order
to provide insight on the inner workings of the broader social group. Internet communities and
their novel forms of play (such as meme-sharing) are hotbeds of information for researchers
seeking deeper understanding of societal trends or phenomena. For example, in a study of
seemingly trivial internet memes, Kate Miltner found that the light-hearted internet practice of
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sharing distinct cat memes, or “LOLcats,” provided several services to individuals within this
particular online community. For one, in-group jokes embedded in the cat memes facilitated
bonding. At the same time, other groups used the memes to express negative or confusing
emotions (Miltner, 2014, p. 14). Additionally, Miltner framed the irreverent internet subculture
erected around LOLcats as “an example of how the same content can be used to perform vastly
different, almost oppositional, shared group identities.”
This study of memes similarly found that the practice of meme-sharing has layered social
meaning. Establishing internet Afrocentric memes as a genre is important because it concretizes
a social media phenomenon that, to date, has not been taken up as a serious area of inquiry
within internet studies-- especially as they pertain to the growing problems of the spread of
misinformation, disinformation, and targeted harassment online. Internet Afrocentrics,
themselves, do not even use the term hotep or identify with this moniker. However, as Miller
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(1984) argues, “when a type of discourse or communicative action acquires a common name
within a given context or community, that’s a good sign that it’s functioning as a genre” (Miller
and Shepherd, 2004). Genres are salient because they are social constructions that dictate not
only the forms of communication but also how they are received .
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Internet Afrocentrics online are identified not by who they are or how they identify but
how they act. In a social media context, this means that internet Afrocentrics are judged by their
interactions on social media-- what they like, what they share, who they follow, what they talk
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Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as social action.” Quarterly journal of speech 70, no. 2 (1984):
151-167.
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Yates, JoAnne, Wanda J. Orlikowski, and Julie Rennecker. “Collaborative genres for
collaboration: Genre systems in digital media.” In Proceedings of the Thirtieth Hawaii
International Conference on System Sciences , vol. 6, pp. 50-59. IEEE, 1997.
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about, etc. When the term hotep is applied it is typically done so to connote ideologies that are
not necessarily aligned with the Pan African Spiritual teachings from which the hotep name was
originally popularized. Instead, the term hotep is typically imbued with sarcasm. The term is
most often used to condescendingly excoriate internet Afrocentrics for their lack of formalized
education.
Scholars such as the renowned historian Greg Carr , would argue that using the term
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hotep as an insult obfuscates and devalues the positive origins of the word . Carr shares that:
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“Use of ‘Hotep’ as a pejorative demotes a keyword from perhaps the world’s oldest
language. It has a very specific meaning and universe of honorific usages. Ironically, it’s
lazy misusage mirrors the same microwaved thinking as legitimate elements of the
critique it imagines.” (Greg Carr, Twitter post)

The competing definitions associated with internet Afrocentrics are consistent with the
logics of ‘spreadable media.’ As Henry Jenkins explains, “as content passes through various
communities, it is interpreted in new ways and takes on new connotations; these are usually
specific to the needs and desires of that community, and quite often divorced from the original
intent of the creator (Jenkins, et al, 2009).” The internet Afrocentric meme is a fabric of the
Black social media zeitgeist and, as such, warrants critical exploration.
Although this study focuses on the digital realm, by no means do I wish to imply that
hoteps or internet Afrocentrics are a new phenomenon. As the adage goes, “History always
repeats itself.” In 1993, Feminist scholar bell hooks wrote about the growing trend of Black
people internalizing white supremacist patriarchal value systems. She wrote:
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Carr, Greg. Twitter Post. December 27, 2018, 7:30AM.
https://twitter.com/AfricanaCarr/status/1078312076559433728
111
Wong (Omowale), Dwayne. “Stop Using Hotep as an Insult.” Huffington Post , January, 18,
2018. Accessed: June 18, 2020.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stop-using-hotep-as-an-insult_b_5a4bad9ee4b0d86c803c799c
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“We are witnessing a proliferation of the false assumption that somehow black life can be
redeemed if we develop strong black patriarchies. This is certainly the reactionary
message of Shahrazad Ali’s The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman .
All our observations of patriarchal white families in the United States should indicate that
reproducing this unhealthy model in black face would do little to heal the woundedness
and broken-ness in black life. While it is important that we call attention to the particular
ways black men are assaulted, dehumanized, and slaughtered in this society, we must
simultaneously acknowledge how much of this violence is promoted by patriarchal
thinking. Hence, it cannot be meaningfully addressed by black people promoting
patriarchy.” (hooks, 1993, p. 118)

Although not a new phenomenon, the critical element that delineates internet
Afrocentrics from other Black Nationalists, conservatives and Afrocentrics is networked
misogynoir – their keen ability to congregate, connect and collaborate via networked social
spaces online. As Jessie Daniels warns in her report on white supremacist ideology in the digital
age “old forms of overt white supremacy (e.g. racist hate speech) have entered the digital era
alongside new, emergent forms of white supremacy” (Daniels, 2009, p. 23). Therefore,
researchers must be vigilant and aware of the fact that new age white supremacy will assume
new formations.
Black Women as Property
This study found that Black women are regularly referred to as queens within internet
Afrocentric spaces. The term comes up in both the discursive exchanges as well as the visual
representations and serves a number of purposes. In text-based exchanges Black women are
often referred to as queens, in what initially appears to be a common term of endearment.
However, this term operates on a number of levels as it reflects a core value of the internet
Afrocentric community– a deep investment in traditional, binary gender roles which may be
interpreted by some Black women as not only limiting, but insulting.
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Figure 1. “Women come and go” meme.

Figure 2. “Working to be queens” meme.
Take for instance, Figures 1 and 2. In Figure 1, a Black king and queen are depicted
side-by-side on a throne in what appears to be Ancient Egyptian royal garb. The words affixed to
the meme read “Women come and go but you only get one queen in a lifetime!” This is an
obviously positive message especially since the woman is positioned in a seat of power.
However, there are a number of ways that this Black woman’s power can be interpreted. On the
one hand, the king appears to be listening to her and possibly regarding her as an equal or
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someone in an advisory role. However, she is also seated at a lower level which could signal her
secondary or subservient status to the king. Either way, the distinction from other women in the
text underscores the inherent belief that a queen is something distinct from ordinary women and
also perhaps represents the ideal woman. Her relative power over other women is the focus here.
Figure 2 similarly depicts Black women as regal. The Black women depicted here are
adorned in some sort of headdress or formal garb that connotes elegance. The policing of Black
women’s bodies is more clear here. The words around the meme read: “Start working to be
queens, instead of twerking to be seen.” In effect, this meme not only upholds Black women as
queens, but also chides other Black women for engaging in activities that would be considered
improper. Twerking, is a style of dance that was popularlized in the United States by Bounce
music culture in New Orleans although it has its roots in West African dance. Twerking is not
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exclusive to women but is primarily performed by them. In this style of dance women squat low
and shake their buttocks in repetitive, rhythmic movements that are often considered sexual.
Therefore the meme serves as an admonition to women that if they want to be queens then they
can not engage in these dance styles, presumably because of how highly sexualized, and
therefore inappropriate they are. In short, queens do not twerk. This style of policing of women
bodies is directly connected to the politics of respectability. As Evelyn Higginbotham defines in
her seminal text Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church,
1880-1920 (1993), “the politics of respectability” refer to a response to the negative
representation of Black women in mainstream media. According to Higginbotham, “The politics
of respectability emphasized reform of individual behavior and attitudes both as a goal in itself
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Miller, Matt. Bounce: Rap music and local identity in New Orleans . Univ of Massachusetts
Press, 2012.
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and as a strategy of reform of the entire structural system of American race relations”
(Higginbotham, 1993, p. 187). Essentially Black church women at the turn of the century
believed that if they maintained the highest moral decorum and standards, they would disprove
the prevailing negative stereotypes about them. Higginbotham argues that Black women at the
time were plagued by the “technologies of power” which included “films, school textbooks, art,
newspapers--produced and disseminated a ‘rhetoric of violence’ in the form of negative
caricaturing and stereotyping’ (Higginbotham, 1993, p. 189). Under the false belief that
respectable behavior would garner acceptance from white people, Black church women publicly
condemned a variety of behaviors including but not limited to “gum chewing, loud talking,
gaudy colors, the nickelodeon, jazz, littered yards (etc.)” (Higginbotham, 1993, p. 195).
However, it is important to note that, as Britney Cooper points out, these arbitrary standards of
decorum that encompasses the politics of respectability, were also a manifestation of class-based
animosity and tension. Black club and church women were mainly upper and middle class Black
women, who “expressed acute anxiety about how the practices of poor Black women would
make them look” (Cooper, 2017, p. 19)
The politics of respectability had unexpected effects. E. France White argues that the
politics of respectability was less a “discourse of resistance” than an unwitting affirmation of the
negative stereotypes about Black people (White, p. 21). In other words, these black church
women and their movement to persuade Blacks to be more respectable tacitly implied that they
were less than respectable and therefore affirmed some truth to the stereotypes about them.
Considering the class-based animosities, it is clear that the brand of respectability politics
championed by Black women at the turn of the century was rooted in a contempt for lower class
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Black people, and therefore an expression of internalized anti-Blackness. Also, as Higginbotham
states, “Respectability’s emphasis on individual behavior served inevitably to blame Blacks for
their victimization and, worse yet, to place an inordinate amount of black on Black women… the
politics of respectability equated nonconformity with the cause of racial inequality and injustice”
(Higginbothm, 1993, p. 202-203). Cooper, also makes a salient connection between
respectability politics and the policing of Black women’s bodies in particular. She writes that, the
politics of respectability, “not only regulated African American gender performance, but also
acted to produce the gender categories themselves” (Cooper, 2017, p. 95).
Figure 2 is also representative of one of the many ways the queen moniker serves as an
empty honorific, that is, a supposedly uplifting title of praise that actually works to disempower.
The term queen reaffirms male supremacy as it positions men as the primary leader. In
traditional monarchies power is transferred from father to son and is never held laterally. Queens
are second in command. While being second in command sounds like an important role, it is
actually meaningless in a context where power is not held by the queen and does not suggest
absolute power or autonomy, instead it actually connotes subservience. The queen archetype also
presumes male posession of women as queens or wives in monarchies or traditional patriarchies
are wards of the king. This is loosely related to the often repeated call to protect Black women or
Black queens which comes up a lot in the discourse amongst these internet afrocentrics, as
opposed to empowering them or envisioning a world from which they do not need to be
protected. These terms hint at the notion tht Black women are property, as internet afrocentrics
often place themselves in the position of protector, but in actuality the owner, of Black women
and their bodies.
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So regardless of its intent, the subtext causes it to come across as condescending
especially when it is most often invoked when it comes times to chastise, chide, or otherwise
remind Black women of their proscribed place in society, as is the case in Figure 2.
It is important to note that the use of the term queen as an honorific for Black is neither
new nor specific to internet Afrocentrics . Pre-digital internet Afrocentrics or masculinist,
patriarchal Black conservatives were who the women of the Combahee River Collective
referenced in “The Statement” when they wrote: “We reject pedestals, queenhood , and walking
ten paces behind . To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough” (Combahee, p. 234).
The Combahee River Collective believed that true freedom and equality would only be achieved
if all oppressed groups worked in concert to eradicate all oppression. At the time, they called for
a much more progressive Black Nationalism.
The imagery of the Black woman as queen also serves another purpose. In addition to
exalting Black women at the same time that they hold them to narrow definitions of ideal
womanhood, the queen archetype also solidifies the supposed connection between contemporary
Black women and the imagined historical lineage of royalty in Ancient Egypt. The image of the
Black woman as queen is but one example of the many ways that internet Afrocentrics engage in
racial or, more specifically, Afrocentric Essentialism.
Afrocentric Essentialism
The term racial essentialism refers to the action of reducing the complexity of race and
racial identity to overly-simplified, one dimensional variations. Typically this manifests itself as
a reduction of a person to the prevailing stereotypes of their racial identity group. The term
Afrocentric essentialism also describes how complex histories of continental Africa have been
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flattened to fit into a narrow, Americanized conception of African-ness. In The Case Against
Afrocentrism (2011), Nigerian-born scholar Tunde Adeleke defines Afrocentric essentialism as
“ the use of Africa to advance a monolithic and homogeneous history, culture and identity for all
blacks, regardless of geographical location” (Adeleke, 2011). Within the internet Afrocentric
community, there is a tendency to point to Africa as a motherland or homeland-- without
acknowledgement of the complexity of the histories of the 54 different countries in Africa, as
well as their centuries-old cultural traditions and evolution over time.
According to Adeleke, essential elements of the concept of Afrocentric essentialism
include: (1) an embodiment of the Manichean conception of history (2) collapse of time and
space/de-emphasization of the impact of cultural evolution over time and space (3) logical
response to alienation and explo itation in America. The Manichean conception of history refers
to the belief in a dichotomy between the so-called black race and white race, without
acknowledgment of the fact that race is a social construct employed by whites within the western
context to exploit or exert power over all people of color.
Internet Afrocentrics appear to have a limited concept of the breadth and complexity of
the evolution of the multitude of cultures that have existed on the African content over centuries.
This is evidenced by their fixation with Ancient Egyptian culture. Internet Afrocentrics, as well
as their offline predecessors, appear to have an affinity for Egyptian iconography-- a
stereotypically western perspective on African culture. The elision of Egypt with Africa reflects
a superficial, Americanized understanding of the vibrant cultures in the various societies across
all of the 54 countries in Africa.
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Within the American imaginary, Africa is typically depicted as one of two things: (1) A
backwards, “dark continent” with uncivilized, animalistic people or (2) a country of unparalleled
wealth and knowledge. However, when represented as resource rich, the focus is typically on
that of Ancient Egyptian culture which is romanticized in American popular culture. Both of
these representations of the country rely on stereotypical, narrow views constructed by white
supremacist anthropologists and historians. The infatuation with Ancient Egypt in specific
reinforces the predominant stereotype in western culture that Egypt is the only African country
that is worthy of attention and high regard. The following examples are representative of the
obsession that many of these group members have with Ancient Egyptian pyramids as signposts
of a highly advanced society.

Figure 3. Ancient Egypt, meme.
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Figure 4. Meme, alleged pyramid discovered in Antartica.

In the rhetoric of the internet afrocentric the Ancient Egyptians were Black. It follows
that if Ancient Egyptians were Black and there are markers of their technological prowess and
advancement all around globe, then the stories of Black cultural pre-colonial predominence are
have credence. Tunde Adeleke, who wrote extensively about Afrocentric essentialism, argues
that the desire to believe in a greater sense of self by connecting with another identity (African in
this case) is a direct product of the cultural alienation and marginalization Black people
experience in America. In a way, these essentialist conceptions of Africa promote pride in the
face of white hegemonic exploitation. As the results of the study illustrate, many of the integral
elements of “Afrocentric essentialism” that Adeleke highlights within his work, are prominent
within the internet Afrocentric com munity. For instance, the invocation of Egyptian symbolism
and culture (Kemet, Ankhs, kings, and queens, etc.) over-simplify an extremely long history of
people on the African continent who should not be considered as “Black” since that is a very
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new term, that is also incredibly inconsequential. Blackness is an extremely modern American
convention that is also dependent on forced migration patterns and cultural situatedness that
comes as a byproduct of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. As Gilroy argues “Blackness” is a
distinctly hybrid identity that is equal parts African, American and European.
As outlined in the literature review chapter of this dissertation, many scholars have
articulated race as a distinct product of Modernity (Gilroy 1993; Bauman 2000), or as a social
construction (Omi and Winant, 2014 [1986]) created to justify that racial caste system in the
modern world in order to maintain capitalist systems of exploitation.
The notion that capitalism is reliant upon a racial caste system is best outlined by
theorists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, or Paul Gilroy who aptly described the
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade as ‘capitalism with its clothes off.’ In this matrix of capitalist
exploitation, erroneous notions of biological inferiority and cultural deficiency based on the
essentializing concept of ‘race’ are used to maintain a consistent underclass of people who are
exploited for their labor. This race-based capitalist system that colonialist and the Trans-Atlantic
Slave Trade birthed is known as “racial capitalism” (Robinson, 2000 [1983])
As a consequence of the fact that “white” people (from England, from Spain, from The
Netherlands, etc.) led the global colonial project, their culture and false conceptions of biological
racial difference become the measuring stick upon which all others are evaluated. As a result of
the far-reaching scope of the global colonial project, hegemonic whiteness has spread across the
globe and is often taken for granted as the norm.
Normative whiteness is insidious in the fact that it goes relatively unseen and unnamed.
Everyone else is assumed to have a culture that is affixed to their racial identity except for white
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people because they are non-raced, seen as “raceless”-- they are the norm. Film historian Richard
Dyer describes the elusive nature of whiteness in his theorization of how the film industry,
especially film production, was constructed around whiteness as the norm. In order to understand
the seemingly contradictory nature of what I hypothesize here-- Black Afrocentrics who uphold
white patriarchal values-- one must first take a step back from the investment in the biological
conception of race and its attendant social construction of whiteness as normative, neutral and
central to society. Whiteness is more aptly understood as property (Harris, 1993), as it is a tool
for social control. Historian Carter G. Woodson once wrote:
“If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.
When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about
what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him
to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is
justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being
told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.” ―Carter Godwin
Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro

An investment in whiteness and white supremacy most closely resembles an individual
who upholds white cultural values and beliefs above all others even to their own detriment.
White patriarchy is not often readily identified as white because of how it is constructed as
“normal” or “natural.” As I discuss in the section about humor, internet Afrocentric memes are
highly ironic. On the one hand, it appears that their overall intent is to challenge white
supremacy and domination over Black Americans as subjugated people. However, at the same
time, they reinforce white supremacist ideology and patriarchy by bolstering misogyny, sexism,
homophobia, xenophobia, etc. The irony in internet Afrocentrics disavowal of white supremacy
in name, but reification of white supremacist ideology in praxis, is a primary reason why people
who are more educated in the theories of critical race and gender, tend to deride their ignorance
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to the fact that they are contributing to an ideology (patriarchy, which encompasses capitalism)
that was erected to disenfranchise them.
Joe Feagin points to the ‘white racial frame’ in America to describe the ways in which
hegemonic whiteness is internalized by non-whites. Feagin argues that the white racial frame is
the lens through which the Internet and the entire world is seen. It centers masculinity and
domination as primary to success. For example, like white supremacists, internet Afrocentrics
also seem to espouse an erroneous belief that racial difference is biological. Biological
conceptions of race were conceived by colonialists, then perpetuated by white supremacists, and
later buttressed by the pseudo-scientific endeavors of eugenicists.
Another critical element of Afrocentric essentialism is the collapse of time and space. As
Adeleke writes, “Afrocentric essentialism underscores historical and experiential uniformity and
conformity for Africans and all blacks across historical time and space, without due
acknowledgment of the historicity of time and space. That is, both time and space are treated as
static and ahistorical entities, and not the conduits of historical and cultural transformation”
(2011). One of the stereotypical tropes of internet Afrocentric memes, the common refrain “We
were kings” or references to Black people being descendants of kings and queens is fallacious
because not only is it impossible for everyone single person in a society to be a king or queen.
Homophobia and Transphobia
Internet Afrocentrics are typically highly homophobic and transphobic. This is closely
related to their misogyny and anti-feminist stance. One of the distinct markers of patriarchal
culture is a deep investment in binary thinking– if something is not Black then it white, if it is not
up it is down, etc. Such polarity leaves little room for nuance. This is why, in patriarchal terms
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social justice becomes a zero sum game-- what is given to one group is perceived to have been
taken from another. Another distinguishing marker is the deep investment in the logic of
domination, namely the belief that one group, some group, must dominate over the other. This
explains the ideological investment most men make in the mythology of the so-called natural
order of things, which is conveniently consistent with the primacy of white, male,
heterosexuality and often remains unquestioned. Both of these foundational principles help to
account for why it is so difficult for patriarchal thinkers to understand that feminism is not
anti-male.
Through the patriarchal lens, men are only understood as polar opposites of women, as
opposed to complementary entities vis a vis the yin and ying philosophy of Chinese culture.
Therefore if women have, they do not. If women are in power, then they are subservient. For the
individual raised in a sexist misogynistic society, the feminine is regarded as not only bad, but
evil because it threatens the predominance of a certain type of masculinity. This has
consequences for the perception of women but also queer people. Homophobia and transphobia
threaten the so-called natural order– a set of nebulous beliefs passed down in patriarchal cultures
from the elders to all, but especially from men to boys.
Within internet Afrocentric spaces, femininity is demonized to the point that it manifests
in homophobia. Take for example, the following memes:
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Figure 5. Meme urging people “Stop promoting homosexuality to our children!”

Figure 6. Instagram user imposes his face on homophobic meme.

Internet Afrocentrics openly express their disdain for gender non-conforming people as
well as all other members of the LGBTQ+ community. They also rally in defense of the
perceived threats that these individuals pose to Black masculinity.
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In figure 5, one internet Afrocentric leader posted an image depicting the words “Stop
promoting hmosexuality to our children!” While the caption for this post read:
“Your feelings are irrelevant. Some of us are NOT WHORE FOR MONEY and we don’t
give a damn about what ANY CELEBRITY SAYS! It isn’t right so STOP! DOING! IT!”
This comment reflects the belief that the Hollywood establishment– those people who are
in positions of power in the American entertainment industry are conspiring to not only get
people to accept homosexuality as legitimate, but they also believe that homosexuality is
someting that can be acquired or taken on by heterosexual people. Aside from reflecting the
depths of their lack of understanding of how sexuality works, these groups tend to conflate
sexuality with gender identity as well as racial identity.
Figure 6 includes a couple images of Billy Porter, who in 2019 became the first openly
gay Black man to win an Emmy for lead actor. He won the award for his role in Pose (2019), a
television series that centered on the lives of Black and Brown queer people of the late 1980s,
early 1990s ballroom scene in New York City. The series, featured Black and Brown gay people,
transgender people, and other gender non-conformists and was a hit show. In recent years, Porter
has gained a lot of notoreity for his striking, campy red carpet looks, in which blend masculine
and feminine aesthetics. As a result, he has become a point of derision within these internet
Afrocentric groups who believe that his presence and playful appearance poses a threat to Black
masculinity.
In Figure 6, Billy Porter poses in front of a step and repeat, wearing a green tube top
dress, adorned in silver jewelry and long citrine-colored acrylic nails. The caption beneath Figure
6 reads:
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“Answer the question…… To the #lgbt #lgbtq #lgbtqia- Look up the WORLD
DEPOPULATION AGENDA-- NSSM 200 and GLOBAL 2000 and Dr. Henry
Kissingers push for homosexuality IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY as a STRATEGY to
DEPOPULATE the BLACK COMMUNITY using the BLACK MALE! You need to
LOOK AT HOW THIS GOVERNMNET IS USING YOU TO PUSH
GENOCIDE!!!!!!!”
Many internet Afrocentrics claims that there is a Gay Agenda to promote homosexuality
and convert heterosexual people into what they call erroneoulsy call a lifestyle. The image
couple with the caption is clearly intended to shock or provocate fellow homophobic members of
the group in order to rile them into action. Emotional provocation is a common tactic within this
community and explains, in part, how these communities grow exponentially.
A common conspiracy theory among these groups is that homosexuality is being
promoted in popular media as a way to harm children and break up the traditional heterosexual
family structure. Many express the notion that homosexuality is a phenomenon within the white
community that is being imposed on Black communities through mainstream media.
Again, the focal point of these homophobic and transphobia memes are on the sanctity of
traditional masculinity. Adherents to the binary concept of gender believe that homosexual Black
men are weak because femininity is equated with weakness. The following are examples of
homophobia and transphobia expressed in internet Afrocentric memes.

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Figure 7: Meme, What is “female?”

Figure 8. Homecoming queen.

Controlling Images 2.0
The thematic analysis found that the depictions of Black women in these memes are
strikingly consistent with the stereotypes and tropes outlined in the Controlling Images
Framework of Black Womanhood of Patricia Hill-Collins. As outlined in the literature review
chapter, this includes the stereotypes of the mammy, the matriarch, the jezebel, and the welfare
queen-- stereotypes created and perpetuated by anti-Black, white producers of popular culture.
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As we know, stereotypes evolve to adapt to the times. To reflect this evolution, I present
the names of the traditional tropes, alongside the name of their modern day iterations. So for
instance, the mammy trope is paralleled with the more contemporary trope of the wifey. The
matriarch most represents the independent woman trope, the Jezebel parallels the thot and the
welfare queen parallels the gold digger. These terms are borrowed from hip-hop culture which is
popular amongst members of the internet Afrocentric community.
Under the narrow definition of Black femininity perpetuated by internet Afrocentrics
these Black women represent the range of Black womanhood. The mammy or wifey is central,
and serves as the pinnacle of Black womanhood–– she is the doting, sexless partner or ideal
woman. She is neither hyper-sexual, nor career-driven. Her primary goal is to take care of her
family. The Jezebel is a deviation from the mammy trope because she is hyper-sexual; the
matriarch is a deviation because she aspires to acquire so-called masculine personality traits or
take on traditional male gender roles (such as being a career-women; public-speaking, etc.); the
welfare queen is also a deviation because she is socially irresponsible. So in the limited scope of
the controlling images framework, women are either doting wives or bad women.
Mammy
As the Mammy serves as the most infamous depiction of the Black woman in the eyes of
the racist white person for the way that she serves the needs of whites, the Wifey serves as the
idyllic Black woman for how she services Black manhood. She is docile, servile, and a good
mother. She is neither hypersexual nor flirtatious. She is a “good woman.” She cooks, she cleans
and does not complain.
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In the same way that the “mammy” is revered for taking good care of the white family
household as wet nurse, maid, personal servant, etc. Internet Afrocentrics appear to see mammies
as the ideal Black women who assume these roles for their own family. The following is a
typical example:

Figure 9: Panafrikanism or perish.

The caption reads:

“Listen baby, if I die during this war, promise me you will raise our child to be a
revolutionary pan-Afrikan nationalist. Promise me you will teach them the ways
of the ancestors. Promise me that you will not revert to your previous unconscious
state of blonde wigs, weaves, white Jesus, booty shorts, blunts, addiction to
expensive but useless european fashions and dating corner boys. Promise me
baby…”

The woman’s bare belly is exposed and her natural, long and flowing hair is also
prominent in the photo. Her bare belly, coupled with the admonition from her male partner,
indicate that one of her primary responsibilities and goals in life should be as nurturer of the
Black family. Her long, flowing natural hair, coupled with the commentary about her “previous
unconscious state of blonde wigs, weaves” reinforces the notion that “true Black women,” “good
Black women,” or queens wear their hair naturally. This is an example of racial essentialism. As
Kobena Mercer highlights in their article on the politics of Black hair, styling is “a specifically
cultural activity and practice” that should be “de-psychologized” because it reflects the hybrid
cultural context of the wearers. In Mercer’s view, the natural hairstyle practices are no more
African than the straightened or “processed” styles because they both are situated in the
socio-historical context of Blackness in America. The notion that there is a proper or improper
way to wear Black hair is rooted in African essentialism.
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Both the man and the woman are adorned by crowns above their heads which once again
invoke the notion that Black people descend from a shared “regal lineage.” They serve as an
exemplar of the “proper” way to engage in a romantic relationship with a member of the opposite
sex.
The mammy or “wifey” trope is also exemplified by repeated calls for Black women to
take on the role of assistant or helper. The following is a typical example:

Figure 10. Hospitality club?

In this call for volunteers, Dr. Iman describes the “hospitality club” as a “group of
conscious pan-africanist queens who will decorate, determine menus, select music and create
ambience for all… community sponsored events on campus. Must have natural hair to apply.”
Once again the memes call for “queens” with “natural hair” to apply. This request not only
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tacitly reaffirms Black women’s gender roles as being primarily subservient but also invokes the
regal lineage once again by calling them queens. A subversive reading of this post would likely
find humor and irony that these women are being called queens on the front end but are
described as and invited to act more like servants. The requirement that their hair be natural,
again asserts the contemporary politics of respectability and policing of the Black woman’s
body.
Matriarch
The stereotype of the Matriarch is not the sole province of the Black community. As
Banet-Weiser writes crises in masculinity are cyclical, appearing over and over again throughout
history. Typically at times when economic crises manifest, women are blamed for disrupting the
so-called natural order of male leadership and economic supremacy by enterting the workforce,
or advocating for personal rights that equate to more autonomy and economic opportunity. She
cites Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker’s study of the Great Recession of 2007-2008, the
introduction of women in the workforce during World War II, and the infamous Moynihan report
of 1965 which pathologized Black men as less than beacuse Black women were the
breadwinners of most Black households. This continued in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan
blamed the Recession on high numbers of women in the workplace. Confidence is a zero sum
game-- if women have it, then men most be losing it.
The traditional trope of the matriarch most closely mirrors the modern day “Independent
Woman.” In contemporary discourses independent Black women are conceptualized as being
hyper-masculine and there another deviation from the doting, hyper-feminine Mammy
stereotype. The following are typical examples:
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Figure 11. Comic strip style meme depicting overbearing Black woman.

Figures 12. Comic strip style meme depicting a reversal of traditional gender roles.

In figure 11, the Black woman is depicted as fighting to pay for the bill on a date, thereby
upending social norms that dictate that the man is responsible for paying for dates. The
independent woman is caricatured as hyper-aggressive and illogical for her desire to be the one
that pays. Matriarchs are most often depicted as career-oriented women who often transgress
gender norms by taking on the perceived roles of men. This is evidenced in the second image
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(Figure 12) which depicts a matriarch proposing marriage to her partner. Like the Black woman
who fights to pay the bill in Figure 11, the matriarch in Figure 12 is depicted as financially stable
and perhaps wealthy because of the jewelry she has purchased but also the designer Gucci
handbag that she wears. The implicit message is that financially secure Black women tend to
transgress gender roles because they do not know their place. Because they are wealthy like men,
they think they are men. Again the stereotype of the matriarch stems from notions that men, and
more specifically in this case, Black men should be the head of households. The Black women
are caricatured as foolish because they transgress these traditional gender roles.
Jezebel
The modern iteration of the Jezebel trope is the “Thot”— a woman who is viewed solely
in terms of the way she appeases men’s sexual needs. Thot is a derisive slang term, for Black
women who are hyper-sexual and or sexually liberated. It is an acronym for “That Hoe Over
There” which encapsulates the dispensibility of these women. Individuals who use this term,
usually subscribe to the idea that a woman’s value is in her chastity, one of the pillars of the cult
of domesticity, from which the controlling images of Black womanhood derive.
The image below provides an exemplar of the kind of attitudes with which Black women
are regarded.
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Figure 13. Clarity or contradiction.
The meme is titled “clarity or contradiction”? and begs the question “Why do so many
Black women have a problem with polygyny, but have no problem with dating a married man?”
Aside from being a gross generalization, the question assumes that a good number Black women
approve of engaging in extramarital affairs. This claim is completely unfounded.
Welfare Queen
Lastly the traditional trope of the Welfare Queen is paralleled with the gold-digger who is
depicted as a Black woman who wants to be cared for. In the past the welfare queen is closely
connected with the erroneous idea that Black women are not only sexually promiscuous but
socially irresponsible. This notion was contrived by Republican politicians in the 70s who used
the story of one Black woman who happened to be a welfare cheat and generalized it to all Black
women. The stereotype of the Black welfare queen was a political tactic to reshape the narrative
of the welfare system. Dr. Ange-Marie Hancock-Alfaro uses the phrase “politics of disgust ” to
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113
Hancock, Ange-Marie. The politics of disgust: The public identity of the welfare queen . NYU
Press, 2004.
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describe “an emotion-laden response to long-standing beliefs about single, poor African
American mothers that has spread, epidemiologically, to all recipients of Aid to Families with
Dependent Children / Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and to recipients of
other welfare programs such as Social Security Income (SSI) and related programs for what
citizens previously considered ‘the deserving poor.’”
Again, the modern iteration of the welfare queen is the thot, who similarly uses her body
and ability to get pregant to secure money from the government via child support payments. The
following is a typical example:

Figure 14. User.

In Figure 10, the Black woman is depicted as negotiating sexual favors for material items.
It is important to note that each of these representations are byproducts of anti-Black
masculinist ideologies as rationales for the repeated violation of exploitation of Black women for
either their labor or sexual gratification from their bodies. However, this phrase has been taken
as an offensive “feminist” missive by some Black men, who, like some white men, have not
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acquired the self-awareness to understand the parallels between white masculinist ideology and
Black masculinist ideology.
In addition to being consistent with the ‘controlling images,’ these memes also exhibited
patterns that reinforce colorism. When considering the type of stereotypical cariture with the skin
tone afforded to the caricature, it becomes clear that the ‘angry Black women’ and ‘wifey’s’
were consistently depicted as darker-skinned women. The hyper-sexualized ‘thots’ and
‘gold-diggers’ are typically depicted as lighter-skinned Black women. Lighter skin appeared to
signify proximity to femininity, while darker skin signaled masculinity, or angry characters. One
particular image (Figure 2.), presents a commentary on the gender role reversal as it depicts a
woman proposing to a man. As the gender roles shift, so are the skin tones associated with the
gender. The rendering of a woman (a ‘matriarch’) who takes on the role of the man is that of a
darker-skinned person. The man who appears to be elated at the proposal is lighter-skinned. I
have identified this woman as a ‘matriarch’ because she is transgressing traditional gender roles
by assuming the “man’s role” and proposing marriage. If a woman were to take on the
proscribed role of men in a society, this is depicted as an act of aggression.
In a study of white supremacist ideology only critical internet studies scholar Jesse
Daniels argues that ‘masculinity is constitutive of white supremacy’ (Daniels, 1997) meaning
that… Daniels found that the boundaries of whiteness are “quite flexible and can expand to
include individuals that might, in another context, be considered nonwhite” (Daniels, 2009, p.
34). In Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights (2009) Jesse
Daniels uses the case study of Richard Machado, the Mexican American college student who
was convicted of sending racist hateful messages to Asian American students at UC Irvine as an
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example of the myth that “white supremacists are all white males who organize their racist
activity online.” Daniels argues that instead of categorizing this incident as an isolated event
simply because it does not fit the standard or stereotype of how most people collectively imagine
xenophobic and racist attacks in our country (as ignorant poor white men with too much time on
their hands) we should instead view this an exemplar of how Feagin’s white racial frame can be
upheld by all people including non-whites (Daniels, 2009, p. 33). I am certain that Daniels would
agree that the internet afrocentrics in this study have similarly adopted the dominant white racial
frame in their representation of Black women online.
Many Black feminists highlight the fact that the function of controlling images of Black
womanhood has historically been to keep Black women out of the public sphere by making
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Blackness and womanness antithetical to civic identification such as “American,” “citizen,” or
“political leader” for example. Political Scientist Melissa Harris-Lacewell (now Harris-Perry)
argues in Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America (2011) that
“citizenship” is a gendered and racialized term. Harris-Lacewell argues that if the predominant
“controlling image” of Black women is that of the mammy, it is hard to see a Black woman as a
political leader or public figure in general. Feminist scholar Britney Cooper echoes these
sentiments, describing the public sphere as being designed “not only to render Black bodies as
inferior but Black female bodies as unrecognizable and unknowable in civic terms” (Cooper,
2017, p. 8). In her work on Black women public intellectuals, Cooper (2017) builds on the work
of historians Darlene Clark Hine (1997) and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (1993) to highlight
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Collins, P. H. (2002). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of
empowerment . Routledge.
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the many strategies Black women public intellectuals employed to hold their positions in public
life.
Despite the fact that Black women are not not typically categorized as leaders within the
Black public sphere, they are often used as a tool within the broader American public sphere to
pathologize the Black community as a whole. In particular, Hill-Collins uses the example of
former U.S. vice president Dan Quayle, who weaponized the term “family values” in a 1992
political fundraiser. This “ear-worm” quickly caught on and was used to demonize Black people
for not living up to traditional patriarchal standards and therefore deemed them and other poor
people unworthy of government assistance. The intended goal was welfare reform or restriction
but racism was invoked to make Black women the scapegoat. This was a very successful
manipulation strategy. However, as Hill-Collins points out there are two primary reasons why
the traditional family ideal can not work for Black women:
(1) “the assumed split between the ‘public’ sphere of paid employment and the ‘private’
sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for U.S. Black women…. (2)
the public/private binary separating the family households from the paid labor market is
fundamental in explaining U.S. gender ideology. If one assumes that real men work and
real women take care of families, then African-Americans suffer from deficient ideas
concerning gender. In particular, Black women become less “feminine,” because they
work outside the home, work for pay and thus compete with men, and their work takes
them away from their children.” (Hill-Collins, p. 47)

Instead of challenging these patriarchal notions of femininity, most of American society
assumed the white racial frame and pathologized Black women for deviating from the socially
constructed norms. In more recent decades, Black men gravitate toward joining in on this, often
invoking the controlling images framework in their depictions of Black women. Black men
blame Black women for the perceived collapse of the Black family structure. However, most of
the depictions are devoid of teh historical context needed to conceptualize the challenges that
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Black women face in American society.
Hill-Collins historicizes Black familial structures, by highlighting how they were
disrupted by the TransAtlantic Slave Trade. In the context of slavery, Black people no longer
monitored “bloodlines” in the same way they had in West Africa, they now considered those
who were enslaved alongside them as their extended family members. For Black women
specifically, “their force incorporation into a capitalist political economy as slaves mean that
West African women became economically exploited, politically powerless units of labor.”
(Hill-Collins, p. 50). Additionally, Black women were required to do the same work as men.
“This enabled them to recraft West African traditions whereby women were not limited
to devalued family labor (Jones 1985; D. White 1985). (Hill-Collins, p. 50) ‘Efforts to
control U.S. Black women’s reproduction were important to the maintenance of the race,
class, and gender inequality characterizing the slave order in at least three ways: (1) the
biological notions of race underpinning the racial subordination of the slave system
requires so-called racial purity in order to be effective… (2) motherhood as an institution
occupies a special place in transmitting values to children about their proper place…. (3)
controlling Black women’s reproduction was essential to the creation and perpetuation of
capitalist class relations.” (Hill-Collins, p. 51)

Hill-Collins points to Deborah Gray White’s (1985) work which illustrates how enslaved
Black women were incentivized to get pregnant (lighter workloads, better food etc.) However,
infanticide was still used as an act of resistance (Hine and Wittenstein 1981).
Outside of the context of slavery Black families still faced issues with working in
accordance with the white patriarchal ideal family structure because “the limited opportunities
available to African american men made it virtually impossible for the majority of Black families
to survive on Black male wages alone.” (Hill-Collins, p. 54) More still, the social hierarchy of
slavery remained in tact via discursive techniques of requiring low-wage earners to wear
uniforms and/or refer to their employers as sir or ‘ma’am.’ Space was always used to create
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social distance, i.e. domestics were confined to certain areas of the house and asked to make
themselves invisible.
Co-optation of feminist discourse

While analyzing the data I noticed that the hotep community appears to be hyper-aware
of feminist concepts such as “intersectionality” and “toxic masculinity.” These terms are often
co-opted in memes shared on their pages. For example:

Figure 15. Toxic masculinity.
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Figure 16. “Masculinity isn’t toxic.”

For figure 15, the caption below the original post reads:
“The term ‘TOXIC MASCULINITY’ was created by two CAUCASIAN MALES (one of
them was a homosexual) Sheppard Bliss and Robert J. Stoller. So even with using THAT
term you are STILL following the WHITE man and unwittingly pushing the system of
#whitesupremacy-- LEARN about WHERE these terms come from (Chapter #1 in my
book-- link in the BIO). Women outnumber men 11 to 1 right now… Might want to
encourage men to be masculine seeing how ALL of media, movies, television, sports etc;
are encouraging us to be feminine (GAY) while women already have SLIM PICKINGS
as it is…… Either the men are gay, on drugs, in jail, heavily abusive, uncultured or are
weak & passive. There is a small percentage of truly God-fearing, spiritual, strong,
intelligent, respectful, loving, caring, masculine men who are fearless and who stand up
for their people! Masculinity loves, protects and uplifts women AND children. I am a
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MASCULINE man and this enemy NEEDS the Black community to be SOFT in order to
CONQUER us. We are the KRYPTONITE to the system of White supremacy! NO
WEAK, FEMININE MAN WILL PUT FEAR INTO THE MINDS OF THOSE WHO
WISH TO DO EVIL TO OTHERS!!!! Women NEED REAL MASCULINE MEN! The
CHILDREN NEED real MASCULINE MEN! And OTHER MEN in order to truly BE
MEN require REAL MASCULINE MEN. No amont of WHITE SUPREMACIST
sponsored lies, propaganda or mental manipulation (Chapter #4 in my book-- link in bio)
will get ME to be tricked into this insanity. EVERY group of people who’s men are
WEAK & EFFEMINATE is a group on it’s way out, for a society without SECURITY is
an OPEN TARGET! Think…”
Figures 15 and 16 explicit mention “toxic masculinity” a feminist term that is used to
describe the harmful ways that narrow conceptoins of hyper-masculinity negatively impact boys,
men and the women and children in proximity to them. Toxic masculinity is not meant to address
all masculinity, it is typically employed to identify and address a specific form of
hyper-masculinty that is harmful. While figures 15 and 16 reflect an awareness of the term “toxic
masculinity,” it does not signal an awareness of the depth of meaning of the feminist concept. It
is instead framed as an assault on masculinity, which is at the crux of my argument about how
and why these communities come together. They form communities around the shared language
of responding to perceived attacks or restrictioons on forms of masculinity. The following is
another example of how these groups co-opt and misinterpret feminist langauge.
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Figure 17. International Women’s Day.

In figure 17, another attempts to respond to #InternationalWomensDay. This post is
interesting because as previously mentioned on the surface level all of these groups tend to place
women at the center of the Black family. They are highly regarded and revered in name, but
possibly in name only as the honorifics they afford to women such as Queen, are often only used
in reference to Black women who fit into the narroow confines of the controlling images of
Black womanhood. It would be nice to think that these groups do as they say here in this posts
and honor, respect, uplift, compliment, love and elevate Black women daily, year-round.
However, their depictions of Black women daily, and year-round speak to the contrary. The use
of variations of feminist terminology in internet Afrocentric tweets is prevalent and typically
signifies their awareness of how others perceived them. For example:

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Figure 18. Intersectionality Twitter.

The following post from ’s page reads: “I stocked up on canned goods two years ago, but
interesectionalty twitter called me “hOtEp” for being prepared. How y’all doin’ in those 5 hour
lines outside Costco right now? These sardines hit different with a little relish on em.” This tweet
is in reference to the onset of the international health crisis related to Covid-19 that sweet
through the United States in early March of 2020. The widespread closure of the economy--
including restaurants, gyms and all retails spaces, as well as public spacees where individuals
tend to congregate-- churches, schools, public parks, etc. caused a panic and rush on grocery
stories. In this repost (of his own Twitter post, to Instagram) acknowledges the stereotype that
so-called hoteps are thought to be conspiracy theorists.
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This post also references “intersectional Twitter” which is a reference to feminist or
Black feminist Twitter in a mocking way. I presume that the intent is to mock or parody because
the phrasing of intersectionality Twitter is reductive– it flattens the entirety of a very diverse
group into one that can be identified by one concept within an entire area of ideology that they
subscribe to– feminism. The nickname also mirrors the way in which this group similarly
borrowed an element of their culture and used it to mock or parody them, in empoying the
moniker “hotep Twitter.” The stylization of the word hotep in an intermittent pattern of
uppercase and lowercase letters, is meant to infer sarcasm or mimicry. This particular stylization
of the word hotep is borrowed from a lexicon of Spongebob memes within the Black Twitter
space. This redirection of the gaze signals the groups’ awareness of how outsiders to their
communities perceive them.
In these tweets, other phrases unique to this community are often used. “Buck-breaking”
references the pratice of breaking the spirit of a rebellious slave and getting them to conform to
the governing laws of the plantation life. In these tweets the term is used to refer to the ways in
which Black men are, in their words, effeminized or strategically exposed to gay culture as a way
to condition Black men into being less masculine and therefore break Black them down into
more subservient beings. Within these communities, the discursive exchanges repeatedly
demonstrate that masculinity is equated with strength, and femininity with weakness. Therefore
the normalization of LGBTQ+ people in mainstream media is understood as a threat to Black
manhood. This narrative is interwoven into historical processes of breaking down Black men. It
serves as an exemplar of how white supremacist ideologies are distorted to fit the narratives
associated with Black patriarchy.
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References to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and, in specific, slavery in the United States
are abundant. The term plantation Blacks is used to refer to middle-to-upper class, highly
educated Black people who also speak against the internet Afrocentric community. This term
references the divide between “field [Blacks]” and “house [Blacks]” in the time of slavery (of
course at the time a much more incendiary term was used). Field Blacks were typically
darker-skinned slaves who were relegated to either intense field labor, or for women a
combination of field labor and breeding (slave-holders incentivized pregnancy by giving
pregnant slaves more food rations and less work hours, among other benefits). House Blacks
were oftentimes lighter-skinned Black people (many of whom were the products of white men
raping their African slaves) who were afforded the privilege of working inside the plantation
homes (hence the name plantation Blacks). These enslaved people had the easiest jobs as they
were not subjected to field labor. They worked within close proximity to their white masters, and
are often depicted in popular culture as enslaved people who were better than the rest beacuse of
their proximity to whiteness. Therefore, the term plantation Blacks harkens back to this
plantation politics where more respectable Black people were privileged over others.
In the internet Afrocentric lexicon, plantation Blacks refers to Black people who have a
proximity to whiteness vis-a-vis their academic credentials, the jobs they hold, etc. They are also
typrically stereotyped as “Uncle Tom’s”– a derisive term for Black people who turn on other
Black people in ordeer to garner sympathy or favor with whites. Uncle Tom is the main
characters of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), a novel anti-slavery novel.
Tom was a dutiful, loyal servant whom Stowe believed would be perceived as a sympathetic
character. However, in the decades since the novel was published Uncle Tom devolved into an
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epithet used against Black people who are too loyal to whites, often at the expense of other Black
people.
Lastly, and very specifically to this account, the term FBA (Foundational Black
American) is used as an alternative to ADOS (American Descendants of Slaves), a satellite
group within the Black digital public sphere. Like ADOS, FBA is used to refer to Black people
who are descendants of enslaved Africans in American. However, beyond simply disaggregating
their unique lineage from others, this term is weaponized against non-ADOS and non-FBA
individuals. It is often used as an insult, or dismissive turn of phrase used to discredit individuals
who do not share this lineage from chiming in on conversations addressing the Black community
in the United States. This teminology is often employed in xenophobic attacks that mirror the
way white supremacists discuss immigrants to America, American birthright, purity of blood,
etc.
As we have discussed here, internet Afrocentrics from various communities share the
qualities of gathering around content that depicts a romanticized vision of Ancient Egypt as a
Black nation, as well as content that promotes misogyny, xenophobia and homophobia. All of
these white supremacist patriarchal values are framed in terms of racial pride and the protections
of the sanctity of Black women and the Black family. However, these narratives are constructed
in the image of white supremacist patriarchal values. In the following chapter I discuss the
implications of these findings.
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CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION

“Without education, people will accept anything. Without education, what you’ll have is
neo-colonialism instead of the colonialism like you have now. Without education, people don’t
know why they’re doing what they’re doing, you know what I mean? You might get people
caught up in an emotionalist movement, might get them because they’re poor and they want
something and then if they’re not educated, they’ll want more and before you know it, we’ll have
Negro imperialism.” - Fred Hampton

In 2019, I celebrated Father’s Day with my family at my aunt’s house in Los Angeles.
During dinner, my uncle (who is in his late 60s) went on a long rant about the “miserable”
condition of the Black community. This tirade came in response to my aunt (his sister)
commenting on one of her recent thrift store finds. According to my uncle, the problem with the
Black community was that they had a “poverty mentality.” He used my aunts “rummaging
through other people’s old clothes” (as he called it) as an example. “Why would you pay for
clothes that other people have thrown out?” he asked.
“The problem with Black people” is a common refrain amongst individuals who are
pro-Black, yet espouse ideologies that reflect internalized anti-Blackness, because “the problem”
with Black people is rarely structural inequality, systemic racism, or centuries of racialized
oppression. “The problem” is typically wrongfully identified as the Black people themselves.
This displacement of blame is an individualistic and neo-liberal rationale for structural inequity.
This critique not only shifts the onus of blame from the oppressors, onto the oppressed but also
completely absolves the transgressors of any blame.
Against my better judgment, I engaged with my uncle. I wanted him to understand that
the things he said did not reflect care or compassion for a group of people who still endure the
brunt of racialized oppression in the United States. He responded by posing more questions that
pointed to the fruits of white supremacist exploitation of Black people as evidence of black
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cultural deficiency, but never quite got to its roots. He asked, “Why do all Black people live in
the ghetto” but did not want to engage in a conversation about the material realities of redlining--
the legalized, systematic disenfranchisement of Black people from homeownership. Redlining
restricted Black people from living in white neighborhoods no matter their socioeconomic status,
thereby establishing the spatial segregation that persists today. He asked, “Why has no one in our
family achieved anything great?” even though the room contained college graduates, and other
gainfully employed home-owners, many of whom are servants to their community in various
capacities. He did not want to explain how he defined “great achievement.” When he asked,
“Why don’t I own a big home in Beverly Hills?” I realized we were going in circles because we
had already covered redlining. I was about to retreat from the increasingly futile conversation
when my uncle told us that we did not know what we were talking about that we all needed to
read the Willie Lynch letter. Cue the record scratch.
The “William Lynch speech,” more widely recognized as the “Willie Lynch letter” is an
alleged transcript of a speech delivered by a British slave-holder from the West Indies to an
audience gathered at the James River in Virginia in 1712. It outlines directives and strategies to
keep slaves under control-- mainly through divide and conquer tactics. Typically, the Willie
Lynch letter is invoked as an explanation for the allegedly disparate, antagonistic nature of the
Black community. The letter chastises Black people for (or cautions against) replicating the
divisive doctrines of slave owners.
The letter is widely recognized within the Black community. Its repeated invocation in
Black popular culture across the last five decades serves as evidence. In 1995, Nation of Islam
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leader Louis Farrakhan notably invoked the Willie Lynch Letter in his speech at the Million
115
Man March on Washington D.C. in 1995. Farrakhan quoted the letter at length and then told the
crowd, “So spoke Willie Lynch 283 years ago. And so, as a consequence, we as a people now
have been fractured, divided and destroyed, filled with fear, distrust, and envy. Therefore,
because of fear, envy, and distrust of one another, many of us as leaders, teachers, educators,
pastors, and persons are still under the control mechanism of our former slave masters and their
children.” In the 2007 film The Great Debaters , Denzel Washington played the role of Melvin B.
Tolson, a storied debate coach at Wiley College an HBCU (Historically Black College or
University) in Marshall, Texas. The fictional debate coach Tolson shared the story of Willie
Lynch in the hopes that it would inspire the members of the team. “His methods were very
simple, but they were diabolical. Keep the slave physically strong but psychologically weak and
dependent on the slave master. Keep the body, take the mind.” Still later, in 2015, rapper
Kendrick Lamar references Willie Lynch in “Complexion (A Zulu Love),” a song about colorism
on his Grammy Award-winning album To Pimp a Butterfly . “Then Whit’ told me, ‘A woman is
woman, love the creation’ / It all came from God, then you was my confirmation… Let the
Willie Lynch theory reverse a million times with / Complexion.” However, the most interesting
thing about the letter, in my opinion (and why it ruffled my feathers when my uncle referenced it
that day), is that it is so widely known and believed within the Black community, yet it is a
complete fabrication.
115
“Minister Louis Farakhan ‘Million Man March’ Voices of Democracy the U.S. Oratory
Project (16 October, 1995)
https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/farrakhan-million-man-march-speech-text/

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The Willie Lynch letter was purportedly written in the 18th century. However, as many
historians have noted, it is riddled with anachronisms that upend the notion that it is authentic.
Roy Rosenzweigh (2019) and Jelani Cobb (2004) have both refuted the authenticity of this
document pointing out that “the language incorporates modern syntax, and the content focuses
on current-day divisions such as skin color, age, and gender rather than ethnic and national
divisions much more important in the early eighteenth-century ” (Rosenzweig, 2020). Cobb
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highlights anachronisms such as the numerous references to “slaves,” which was an unlikely
term that a plantation owner would use at the time. “Negroes” would have been more apt. The
specific use of the word “program” in the letter did not enter the English language until 1837.
The term “outline” also did not convey the stated meaning in the letter until 1759. The terms
“indoctrination” and “self-refueling” did not enter the lexicon until the early 19th century, and
the use of the word Black with a capital B in relation to descendants of African enslaved people
to America was the most glaring tell-tale sign as it is a distinctly modern conception.
Cobb wrote that the Willie Lynch letter appeared on the internet in the early 1990s
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“bypassing the official historical circuits and making its way directly into the canon of American
racial conspiratoria” (Cobb, 2004). The Willie Lynch letter is more than merely an urban legend.
It can also be understood as a Black cultural meme-- one that is particularly useful because its
trajectory illustrates how offline memes take on new life in digital spaces.
116
Rosenzweig, Roy. “The road to Xanadu: Public and private pathways on the history web.”
The Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (2001): 548-579.
117
Cobb, Jelani. “Is Willie Lynch’s Letter Real?” Ferris State University , May 2004. February
21, 2020. https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2004/may.htm
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The Willie Lynch letter circulated for two decades in offline spaces before a librarian at
the University of Missouri - St. Louis’ Thomas Jefferson Library added the letter to an online
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reference list in 1993. However, as Catherine Knight-Steele explains, “The internet and social
networking sites have made the distribution of memes much easier and more readily accessible
to a wider number of people over a shorter period of time” (Steele, 2013, p. 2). The relatively
low barriers to reproduction and circulation allowed the Willie Lynch letter and meme to spread
more quickly and widely than predigital iterations. The letters ubiquity in pop culture since then
is a testament to its endurance-- Farakhan’s 1995 speech, Denzel Washington’s lines in the 2007
film, and rapper Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 song provide just a few of the multitude of examples.
Still, today if you do a Google Scholar search of the letter, it comes up as a book and links to a
digital scan in Google Books . Although Dr. Safiya Noble has made it clear in her work that
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“Google is not a library ,” many individuals still use it as such. Digitization lends credence to
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the veracity of the letter for those who will not dig deeper into the research, than a superficial
Google search inquiry.
While memes have always existed in oral culture, in the form of urban legends like of the
Willie Lynch letter, or common jokes or fables, in Black oral culture, these memes serve an
essential purpose-- they remind Black people of their social position in society and sometimes
118
“The Slave Consultant’s Narrative: The Life of an Urban Myth?” University of Missouri St. Louis, Thomas
Jefferson Library Reference Department, August 2006
https://web.archive.org/web/20070808080232/http://www.umsl.edu/services/library/blackstudies
/narrate.htm
119
Unkn own. “The Willie Lynch Letter and the Making of a Slave” Ravenio Books, 2011.
https://books.google.com/books?id=jNl1DwAAQBAJ&dq=willie+lynch+letter&lr=&source=gb
s_navlinks_s
120
Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism . NYU
Press, 2018.
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provide tips for survival. For example, in an article written for The Baltimore Sun, journalist
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Mike Adams spoke with historians about the utility and significance of the Willie Lynch letter.
Anne Taylor, the librarian who added the letter to the Thomas Jefferson Library at the University
of Missouri - St. Louis database, referred to it as an important urban myth— a mixture of truth
and fiction that resonates with Black audiences because it cautions them to remain
community-oriented and not divisive. Another historian Gerald Horne pointed to the urban myth
surrounding the circumstances of Charles Drew’s death. Drew was a renowned Black medical
surgeon and researcher whose developments in the area of developing the medical procedure of
blood transfusions and foundation of the American Red Cross Blood Blank saved countless lives.
Drew died in a car crash in North Carolina, but many Black people believe he died because he
was denied access to a hospital or a life-changing blood transfusion on account of his race. The
rumor resonates with Black audiences as it underscores the pervasive, malicious nature of
racism, and more specifically anti-Blackness, in this country. It is a cautionary tale as much as it
is a reminder-- that no matter what you achieve in life you will still be reduced to your race.
This study has made the case that at least one of the many purposes of internet memes
circulated within Black internet Afrocentric spaces is to reinforce patriarchal standards of
womanhood onto Black women. According to Andre Brock, the three most important areas that
critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) addresses are: artifact, practice, and belief
(Brock, 2018, p. 3). Thus far, this study has analyzed the cultural artifact of memes about Black
women within internet Afrocentric spaces of the Black digital public sphere. This chapter digs
121
Adams, Mike. “In Search of ‘Willie’ Lynch.” The Baltimore Sun. February 22, 1998.
Accessed: February 21, 2020
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1998-02-22-1998053003-story.html
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deeper into the social practices, values, and beliefs embedded in these cultural artifacts and their
modes of circulation.
This dissertation set out to determine how internet Afrocentrics spoke about Black
women, as way to determine whether or not they were reifying white supremacist patriarchal
discourse in their exchanges online. More specifically, it set out to answer the following
questions:
RQ 1: What are internet Afrocentrics saying about Black women and girls?

RQ 2: To what extent does this discourse reify patriarchal anti-Blackness and misogynoir?

RQ 3: How do the technical affordances of the relevant social media platforms contribute to
networked misogynoir?

Networked misogynoir is a phrase that I use to refer to the ways in which anti-Black
woman groups foster community online around their shared contempt for Black women and/or
the preservation of Black masculinity. Black masculinity is distinct from white masculinity
because of the historical context of how Black men have been vilified, oppressed, and
stereotyped within American society (as a direct link to and consequence of the Trans-Atlantic
Slave Trade). While the injuries to Black masculinity, mirror the perceived injury to white
masculinity, they are ensared in a complex socio-historical context of anti-Blackness. Relatedly,
misogynoir refers specifically to the “particular brand of hatred directed at Black women in U.S.
visual and popular culture .” Misogynoir is a portmanteau of the hatred of women and noir, the
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friend word for Black. It literally means the hatred of Black women specifically, but
especiallythrough popular culture representations. Whereas, Sarah Banet-Weiser and Miltner’s
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Bailey, Moya. “They aren’t talking about me.” Crunk Feminist Collective 14 (2010).
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concept of networked misogyny , refers to the ways technological platforms are taken up in
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service of coordinated attacks against women and other traditionally marginalized groups,
networked misogynoir refers to the distinct ways that the technical affordances of digital
technologies are weaponized specifically against Black women. This type of harassment is
coordinated but also specifically as a backlash to the heightened visibility of Black feminism and
the perceived threat to Black masculinity. The term networked misogynoir is needed because it
attends to the nuances and intricacies of the way anti-Blackness compounds gender dynamics.
This dissertation also focused on a very specific form of intragroup networked
misogynoir. By intragroup, I mean that the primary transgressors of this form of anti-Blackness
were Black people, and their primary targets were Black women. This is distinct from
anti-Blackness from outside groups simply because intragroup harassment and villification along
the lines of white supremacist patriarchal ideology, is a symptom of internalized anti-Blackness.
This project took an intersectional approach to exploring the issue of how white
supremacist patriarchal discourse gets reified within the discourse of Black political and social
spaces online. By intersectional, I mean that instead of focusing solely on identity-based factors,
this dissertation uses the experiences of certain groups to locate power. As I have asserted
elsewhere in this dissertation, intersectionality is often misinterpreted as a framework for
siphoning attention from one identity group to the next, however, intersectionality is a tool for
using experiences from particular groups to shed light on oversights caused by overlapping
oppressions. The results of intersectional approaches to research studies should yield insights
that benefit everyone. This project in particular, then, attempts to nuance the issue of white
123
Banet-Weiser, Sarah, and Kate M. Miltner. “#MasculinitySoFragile: culture, structure, and
networked misogyny.” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 1 (2016): 171-174.
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supremacist patriarchal discourse. In the past, acts of white supremacy online, have been thought
to be perpetrated by lone actors [citation] or solely by white people [citation]. However, as
previous studies have shown white supremacy online tends to be networked [citation] and also,
enacted by various groups of people, not solely white people. In the words of Joe Feagin, many
Americans adopt and embody the white racial frame– a particular way individuals few the world
that is dictated and determined by white supremacy. With this awareness, this study attempted to
determine whether or not white patriarchal discourse was present within Black political discourse
online, and if so, to what extent.
By using the interpretive framework of critical technocultural disocourse analysis
(CTDA) as an analytic, this study found that the representation of Black women in memes,
shared with the spaces in question, did reflect a reinscription of white supremacist ideology. I
established an emergent coding scheme and applied it to a sample of 400 memes from a set of
meme aggregator pages that are popular within the Black digital public sphere. I used these to
formulate emergent themes about the internet Afrocentric group and their discourse as a way to
establish a typology of the group. Secondly, I coded the same memes in accordance with the four
tropes of the controlling images of Black womanhood framework, articulated by Black feminist
scholar Patricia Hill-Collins as the main stereotypes about Black women that circulate via
mainstream media and popular culture. Hill-Collins outlines the stereotypical tropes’ connection
to white supremacy in her seminal text Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and
the Politics of Empowerment (2002, [1990]). This framework describes the stereotypes and
tropes of Black women created during slavery by slaveownered to justifiy their subjugation and
them later propagated/perpetuated in mainstream American popular media. In my analysis I
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detail how the parallel between the controlling images of Black womanhood framework and the
cult of domesticity which plagues white women primarily, are two sides of the same coin. That
is, the controlling images of Black womanhood framework was created in response to the
differential treatment of Black women on account of their race and insider-within status as
not-quite-woman.
Additionally, this study found that the technical affordances of social media platforms
such as Instagram, facilitate the circulation of these harmful discourses.
This study also found that despite the fact that Black women are highly regarded or
exalted within these circles, or so it appears at the surface level, the honorifics used to describe
them tend to mask the more insidious nature of how these women are regarded as property, or
how their actions are limited by the confines of the whitre supremacist partriarchal standards that
they are expected to maintain in order to deserve their title as “Queen,” for instance.
My analysis of the language including in internet Afrocentric memes also illustrates an
awareness of feminist terminology within these groups that appear to be steadfastly anti-feminist.
Their co-optation and appropriation of feminist terminology reflects not only a keen awareness
of what feminists say and do online but also mimic the type of appropriation that white
patriarchal groups online do. For example, traces the conception of the term misandry, placing its
historical context with Men’s Rights Organization’s. The term misandry refers to the “hatred of
men” and is typically used as an inversion of misogyny. This act of subverting a term used to
describe the ways women are marginalized by instead creating a term that implies the exact
opposite, is characteristic of these groups.
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Implications
The findings of this study have a multitude of implications. For the field of gender studies
and practitioners of feminism, this study broadens the conception of whitre supremacist
patriarchy, and necessitates that individuals expand their scope of who the transgressors and
victims of networked misogyny are beyond the narrow purview, of lone white males as
perpetrator and white woman, as victim. These harmful behaviors are enacted by non-whites, as
well as whites and come as a result of coordinated group efforts as well as solo missions. White
women, respectable women, cis-women, etc. are not the only victims. Even individuals who are
not women at all, become targets especially when they exhibit feminine characteristics like the
effemininate homosexual men who are attacked simply because of their perceived proximity to
womanhood. This is a pervasive problem that affects Black women and children, as they are the
most likely to be victims of the harmful vitriol promoted and encouraged within these online
communities.
Similarly, individuals who study the internet– especially those who study white
supremacy online– the findings of this study may necessitate that scholars expand their
definitions of bad actors online, to include individuals who have assumed the white racial frame.
Relatedly, this calls for more scholarship on how the white racial frame or whiteness is
internalized by non-whites.
Racial Essentialism and Internet Afrocentric Memes
When I began this study, it was because I wanted to understand the ideological feedback
loop that many Black men who participate in neo-Black nationalist spaces appeared to be
involved in online. At a fundamental level, I wanted to understand how and why these spaces
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developed and how they thrived despite being so woefully out-of-step with the current times.
However most importantly, I wanted to understand why these (mostly) men were engaging in
anti-Black discourse.
However, what I discovered was a much more complicated puzzle that involved taking a
step back from the straightforward feminist reading of the situation. If it is to be believed that all
oppressive forces are ensnared in the multi-headed hydra of patriarchy, then it is clear that these
Black men have fallen victim to the white racial frame that Feagin describes.
For Black studies scholars, this study has implications for thinking about how
post-modernity reconfigures the notion of Black Nationalism, especially in the digital space. I
think about the way pre-digital, pre-social media societies founded “imagined communities ”
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around the written word. I do not see the internet Afrocentric leaders in this study as being at all
far removed from the pamphleteers and interlocuters of the early movements toward
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Afrocentricity. On the contrary I view them on a continuum with this tradition. However, what
does it mean when fledgling ideologies are circulated more widely, faster and with more
perceived validation or veracity? What happens when notions of ethnic and cultural nationalism
become networked?
Much of what delineates internet Afrocentrics from others can be credited back to the
social media platforms on which they congregate: 1. Bonding on shared language 2. Can find
community anywhere, anytime 3. Context collapse 4. Confirmation bias (the tendency to search
124
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of
nationalism . Verso books, 2006.
125
Howe, Stephen. Afrocentrism: Mythical pasts and imagined homes . Verso, 1999.
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for, interpret, favor and recall information that confirms or support’s one’s poor personal beliefs
or values), 5. Lack of critical literacy works in concernt with lack of media literacy.
Interpreting Memes as Anti-Black Woman
For individuals outside of the imagined Black American community these parallels may
be difficult to draw because Black people are typically thought of as a monolithic group with
similar backgrounds and political needs. However, there is just as much heterogeneity in the
imagined Black community as there is among any other racial group or ethnic background in the
United States. Despite prevailing stereotypes that all Black people are Democrats, for instance,
there is a long tradition of Black Conservatism in this country. This is why numerous reporters
and conservatives could point to Minister Louis Farakhan and ask that Democrats be held
accountable to for his anti-semitic, xenophobic and sexist commentary-- despite the fact that he
is clearly a Black conservative. This stereotypical conflation of Black with Democrat is one of
the many hindrances to fully gauging the scope and scale of the problem that sexist,
misogynistic, xenophobic and homophobic Black men enact within their own community. It is a
problem that goes continually unaddressed because it is inconceivable to the people who do not
engage with the Black political sphere in a critical or serious way. Still others do not care
because these groups largely negatively impact Black women and children, who are often not
valued in our society, at least not as much as white women and children.
However, the conundrum remains. It is possible to both desire racial equality and also
engage in the oppression and marginalization of other groups. This fact should not be ignored in
students of white supremacy online. As Patricia Hill Collins remind us:
“Rather than seeing family, church and Black civic organizations through a race-only
lens of resisting racism, such institutions may be better understood as complex sites
158

where dominant ideologies are simultaneously resisted and reproduced. Black community
organizations can oppose racial oppression yet perpetuate gender oppression, can
challenge class exploitation yet foster heterosexism” (Hill-Collins, 2002, p. 86).

As Hill-Collins argues, the maintenance of images that construct Black women as the
‘Other’ provides “ideological justification for race, gender, and class oppression” (Hill Collins,
2002 [1990], p. 70). Although not a conscious act of dominance, the circulation of the meme
“allows for the dominant group to re-imagine the ‘Other’” (Steele, 2013, p. 2). Because these
memes are hegemonic they are categorically accepted as truth and rarely challenged. In effect,
the pervasive nature of the stereotypical images and representations become the “truth.”
In the same way that ‘controlling images’ functioned in early radio/television/film/theater
to justify the exploitation of/violence against Black people generally, so too do these modern
iterations of the controlling images’ (what I refer to in my analysis chapter as “Controlling
Images 2.0.) negatively impact Black women-- but they do so more quickly and more
pervasively.
No further evidence is needed than the Black women who engage in internet Afrocentric
spaces (even though the rhetoric does not work in their favor). By claiming that they are “not like
the rest,” some Black women reject connections to other Black women and demand special
treatment for themselves. Mary Helen Washington (1982) refers to these characters as
“assimilated women” (Hill-Collins, 2002, p. 94). In contemporary internet culture, these women
are known as “Pickmes” for the ways in which these Black women differentiate themselves from
the negative depictions of Black women circulated by the ‘controlling images’ reproduced by
Black men. The act of affirming these limited views of Black womanhood, is seen as a vie for
the attention of Black men. These women can also be described as “field dependent” in terms of
159

“The Crooked Room” study that Melissa Harris-Perry famously employs to describe the ways in
which some Black women may position themselves in alignment with false or negative
information about themselves unconsciously as a way to reach equilibrium in a world that is
skewed against them.
One would think that Black men, who have been similarly attacked by negative media
representation campaigns would not also perpetuate these same negative stereotypes toward
Black women, however, their desire to hold power over others like the white men in American
society has caused them to take on the role of the oppressor. On the contrary, this study found
that the negative controlling images of Black women that are rooted in white supremacist
ideology and employed to enforce policing of their bodies in order to be in alignment with
patriarchal standards of Black womanhood, persist as stereotypes in the digital age, even in
Black spaces. These harmful images have circulated via mainstream popular culture for decades
and at this point have proven to cease being images that Black folks attempt to circumvent, but
are now stereotypical images that they internalize as truth-- so much so that they engage with
them and promote the stereotypes themselves.
Networked Misogynoir
Lastly, this dissertation bring forth the concept of “networked misogynoir” which is a
combination of two disparate feminist concepts, netowred misogyny and misogynoir, which are
combined here to point to the phenomenon of coordinated efforts to attack Black women through
harassment and expressions of gendered anti-Blackness in social media representations of Black
women.
160

In many internet Afrocentric spaces, leaders mimic or mock the rhetoric of feminist
discourse, therefore signaling their awareness of and contempt for feminist ideology.The
heightened visibility of Black feminist ideology in the public sphere appears to have two
significant consequences. First, this heightened visibility has led to a more democratized arena
for less privileged women to access feminism-- an ideology that is restricted traditionally to the
confines of academia or the private homes of more affluent and educated women in the form of
consciousness-raising groups. In a recent text on intersectionality Patricia Hill Collins and
126
Sirma Bilge predict that due to the social-connectedness of the internet generally, and social
media in specific, more women are being exposed to feminism than ever before and are doing so
at much younger ages. They point to a number of case studies including:
“[Jamilah] Lemeiux’s #BlackPowerIsForBlackMen [which] targeted (hetero) sexism and
misogyny that Black women face within Black male-led social movements; hashtag
#NotYourNarrative Started by Rania Khalek and Roqayah Chamseddine which criticized
Western media's portrayal of Muslim women; or #NotYourAsianSidekick launched by
Tsui Park in support of Asian American feminism” (Hill Collins and Bilge, 2016, p.
111-112)

Collins and Bilge point to these case studies to make the case that “social media-savvy
young feminists of color increasingly use intersectional frameworks to challenge various forms
of the intermeshed oppressions they face (p. 112).” The exclusivity of feminist discourse, in
addition to feminists’ track record of avoidance of and complicity with racism, has historically
lead to the belief among many young women of color that feminism is, as Joan Morgan
infamously wrote in her hip-hop feminist memoir, “white woman shit” (Morgan, 1999).
However, perspectives on feminism among women of color are changing because of the
hyper-connected social media spaces occupied by Black feminists.
126
Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality . John Wiley & Sons, 2016.
161

The second consequence of the heightened visibility of this Black feminist ideology
online is that it has created a hostile, dangerous terrain in which Black women are being attacked
and harassed by other Black people who believe that feminism is divisive. As I have outlined
here, internet Afrocentrics actively work to counter, stifle, and harass these Black women
leaders. They are also deeply invested in “misogynoir,” a distinct form of anti-Black misogyny
127
and they often reify white patriarchal values, under the guise of pro-Blackness. Drawing from
Sarah Banet Weiser’s work on how the increase in “popular feminism” leads to a rise in
128
“popular misogyny,” I argue that as Black Feminists and their ideologies increase in visibility
and circulation online, so too does the counter-movement of “popular misogyny” or what I refer
to as “popular misogynoir.” In the same way that networked misogyny has materialized as a
backlash to the heightened visibility of popular feminism, “networked misogynoir” has appeared
in response to the heightened visibility of Black feminism online.
Future Research
In the following section, I outline potential research directions for this research. In the
previous section, I discussed at length, how postmodernity reconfigures Black Nationalism in
real life but also online. I see this as a fruitful thread of scholarly inquiry that should be explored
in greater depth in the future. Here, I outline some of the other possible research directions that
should follow this work including: (1) a project that explores the parallels between white
supremacist ideology and Black Patriarchy, (2) a project that analyzes and makes meaning of the
127
Bailey, Moya, and Trudy. “On misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism.” Feminist Media
Studies 18, no. 4 (2018): 762-768.
128
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Empowered: Popular feminism and popular misogyny . Duke University
Press, 2018.
162

co-optation of feminist language in anti-feminist spaces, and (3) a project that critically analyzes
the material harm enacted by these harmful discoures.
Parallels Between White Supremacist Ideology and Black Patriarchy
This project has only begun to pull back the layers of how much Black patriarchal
thought mirrors that of white supremacists. In highlighting the ways in which these marginalized
groups internalize and reify white patriarchal values and beliefs from a perspective that decenters
whiteness, this study did not clearly draw parallels between how the hotep groups operate very
similarly, almost identically to how white supremacist groups operate. While I am mindful that it
is not productive to conflate white nationalism with Black nationalism (one group has way more
powered and are in a much better position to cause physical harm to the other group, but also
because Black nationalism is a distinct response to violence against black people and other forms
of anti-Blackness that cause them to respond by establishing group solidarity). A full project
discussing the parallels between the two groups is warranted-- especially how networked
iterations of these nationalisms brings out the similarities. In fact, the findings of this study
illustrate a strong link between racist white supremacist ideology, showcasing how these belief
systems have been internalized by Black men who have an investment in maintaining this
particular male-dominated social order.
There needs to be an exploration of the white supremacist tropes that are present in this
community including racial essentialism. What other similarities are there between these two
communities? Further study is needed about similarities between these two communities
especially a study that foregrounds the connection between nationalist rhetoric and
patriarchy/masculinity.
163

Co-optation of feminist language
In Empowered Banet-Weiser outlines some of the terms from the vocabulary of
“masculine injury.” It includes terms such as negging, incel, Anti-Slut Defense (ASD),
129 130 131
Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW). This shared
132 133
language/lexicon helps to create community amongst these (mostly) men who, prior to social
media connection, might have felt that they were alone in their experience. This same type of
“community creation through naming” is present in the internet Afrocentric circles as well. More
importantly, there is a co-optation/mirroring of feminist terminology.
Material Harm
Future research on the material harm caused by this online rhetoric should be conducted,
in order to underscore the gravity of this issue. One of the ideological obstacles that comes with
studying memes is that many people do not take it seriously-- they’re just jokes. However, these
pervasive stereotypes often manifest in sexual assault, sexual harassment, and even inter-partner
violence and these connections should be explored (in order to underscore the gravity of this
issue).
129
To subtly insult a woman to lower her self-esteem so that she will be more interested in
having sex
130
‘Involuntarily celebate,’ a term used by men who feel that women owe them sex but who
cannot seduce women
131
A label men give to women who claim to hace been raped beacuse they were incapacitated,
say by alcohol
132
A label for women who advocate for equal rights for women and minorities
133
A label for men who refuse to have contact with women because of how they assume they
will be treated
164

Practitioners
The findings of this study– namely the way white supremacist patriarchal ideology is
foregrounded in Balck political discourse underscores the need for more critical education
programs within colleges and universities as well as the primary school level. It also highlights
the need to access alternative forms of continting adult education. Indivdiuals like Rachel Cargle
who runs The Great Unlearn , is a primary example. The Great Unlearn is described by Cargle
134
as, “a community of everyday human beings committed to curiosity for what is possible in the
world.” Cargle is a public intellectual who organizes community reading groups and classes, in
order to raise the critical consciousness and education of individuals who either want to continue
their education or do not have access to traditional forms of higher education.
Final words
The issue of patriarchal violence is not limited to certain identities. What connects these
bad actors online is an affinity for a particularly heinous form of discourse that can only be
combatted when scholars, practitioners and laypersons alike are able to efficiently identify and
name it. My hope is that this research contributes to more nuanced understanding of the issue.
134
Cargle, Rachel of @TheGreatUnlearn. Instagram Page . Accessed: June 18, 2020.
https://www.instagram.com/thegreatunlearn/
165

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Asset Metadata

Creator Gipson, Brooklyne Jewel (author)

Core Title Networked misogynoir: a critical technocultural discourse analysis of gendered anti-Blackness in the Black digital public sphere

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Degree Conferral Date 2020-08

Publication Date 08/11/2024

Defense Date 06/04/2020

Publisher University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag anti-Blackness,Black feminism,feminism,OAI-PMH Harvest,social media,technology

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kun, Josh (committee chair), Jenkins, Henry (committee member), Noble, Safiya Umoja (committee member)

Creator Email bgipson@usc.edu,brooklyne.gipson@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC11666332

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Legacy Identifier etd-GipsonBroo-8916

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