“El Negro de WhatsApp” is a platform-specific meme particularly popular amongst Spaniards and Latin-American WhatsApp users.
The meme involves the posting of a picture of any current topic that looks legitimate in preview, but when clicked on reveals a lurking image of a semi-naked Black man with disproportionate genitals, a turquoise towel around his neck, and a plaid hat on his head (see Figure 1). Popular culture has stereotyped Black bodies for centuries, and this meme follows this long tradition of commodifying Blackness to please the white gaze (hooks, 1992). The meme taps into racist fantasies of hypersexualized Black bodies (hooks, 2004), with the exaggerated, photo-shopped large penis a sign of a subhuman otherness.įigure 1: “El Negro de WhatsApp”. On the left, there is a picture sent on a WhatsApp chat showing that someone has gone mushroom hunting.
#Meme el negro de whatsapp photo full
When a WhatsApp user clicks on the image to zoom in or to see it full screen on the phone, the image on the right appears. This is the most common bait-and-switch use of “El Negro de WhatsApp” meme (screengrabbed by author, September 2018. Male genitalia in the meme has been blurred by the author). What is critical to establish is that white people’s commodification of Black bodies through this meme, and WhatsApp mediation of these interactions through design and (lack of) governance, contribute to perpetuate white racism. Internet memes are “the mediating mechanisms via which cultural practices are originated, adopted and (sometimes) retained within social networks”. Therefore, I argue that the seemingly playful and apparently benign ritualized engagements with “El Negro de WhatsApp,” combined with WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, actively contribute to cement white framing of racialized others and has an impact on an already racist society. This article addresses Black-as-performed on social media platforms through the examination of a platform-specific meme, “El Negro de WhatsApp”, within the context of Spain. New processes of commodification of the Black body in the digital realm push us to think about how people “do” race online, to look at “race as technology”.
For Chun, “race as technology” allows us to pose the question: “Could race be not simply an object of representation and portrayal, of knowledge and truth, but also a technique that one uses, even as one is used by it - a carefully crafted, historically inflected system of tools, mediation, or enframing that builds history and identity?”.
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