When I first started working on this assignment, I thought I was going to take this opportunity to find some funny memes and make light of the situation. However, when I started looking up destructive memes, a dark shadow started to cast over me and instead I am deciding to take this a big more seriously because memes really do have a particular type of power to let people gradually accept more and more heinous things as a joke. This was the one I saw that broke me:
“Oh lighten up, its just a joke.” How many times have you been on the receiving end of abuse, and had endured this line when you have an appropriate response?
When you no longer see the humanity in someone or a group of people, and instead have them reduced to a ‘thing’, you can justify it in your mind to do horrendous acts against them – and laugh – and oh what a ‘joke’ we have here…
This is an anti Black Lives Matter meme that I came across on the internet, and I was speechless when I saw it. How do I even begin to articulate just how despicable this is. To be honest, I don’t feel as if I am qualified to fully dismantling the horrors this meme is suggesting. It’s not only minimizing, but laughing in that special “buddy-buddy” kind of way that can get people who are not even all that committed to agreeing with the message here; to laugh at it and erode the lines this is crossing.
This is the exact kind of rhetoric that not only emboldens existing racism, its the kind that can recruit it. This is an example as to just how extreme and dangerous a “partial truth’ can be weaponized with dishonesty, so let me try and break this down:
“All lives matter” – This is a technically true statement. All lives do, indeed, matter. Is truth an honest one, though? Absolutely not, and here’s why: would you walk up and down a cancer treatment center and yell “all diseases matter”? How about someone on your birthday saying “yeah, but my birthday matters too you know.” This is a technique of minimizing and discrediting something while refusing to understand it, straight out of a “How to Gaslight for Dummies”. This meme takes it to another step though, and takes that already established line, and further abstracts it to transition into an even more extreme view that they should be ran over by a car. “Splatter, matter, get it? They rhyme! Also, they deserve to die if there gonna stand the in the middle of the road! lulz”. Deeply disturbing. Got to love that Trump Train plug in at the end too, really seals the deal.
“No body cares about your protests” – people globally have made a stand with BLM, and this is yet another gaslighting technique. Regardless of this, If you truly are surround by no one who cares about these civil rights protests, then well… maybe its time to reevaluate some things. This is a vital issue that needs to be fought for so that all lives really CAN matter.
Now, in case the context of this meme isn’t understood (a problem memes often have, its like a giant cabal of inside jokes and you either get it or you don’t), this is a frame of Morpheus from the 90’s movie The Matrix where he is about to tell Neo, the main protagonist, the truth about what the Matrix is: a human enslavement simulation that converts the energy of brain into a battery for the ‘machines’ that grow farms of humans in the real world. Reality as you know it, is a lie kind of moment. So this mind blowing revelations that “black lives matter” is actually a battle to make it so that all lives CAN matter, is pretty tongue in cheek. It was hard for me to find an adequate counter meme to the first one because it was so heavy, but this one does make the point that I think most should walk away with. That the BLM movement is a civil rights movement to push back against police brutality and systemic oppressions that people of color are battling for their lives in – battling to just matter. No more, just… matter. And until we all can say black lives DO matter, then we can’t say that all lives matter.
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