In the past five to seven years, internet memes have become increasingly more popular. People from a wide range of ages, cultures, races and religions have begun using memes all across the globe as a primary form of communication. Memes are a quick and comical way for people to process, cope with and express their emotions about the events of their daily lives.
Since memes can be made out of any video or photo with relative ease, there is really no limit to meme content. On the one hand, this is a positive thing because people are able to find or create memes representing nearly any emotion or circumstance. For example, if someone is feeling sad, they can easily search for the character “Sadness” from the movie Inside Out and create a meme about it. Memes can help users feel less alone and add comedic relief to otherwise troubling emotions. On the other hand, the ease-of-use means that oftentimes inappropriate content is used to create memes, or memes are made with messaging that reinforce negative stereotypes.
Below are five memes I was able to find on social networking sites, all of which reinforce negative stereotypes based on topics such as race, class and age.
While some may find the above memes comical, others may be extremely offended. An individual's response to the above memes is likely a result of the biases or stereotypes they hold true in their life.
I chose to use these memes because each of them are examples of reinforcing stereotypes. The memes depict the following stereotypes:
The angry Black mom
The bad, white dancers
The smart Asian student
The Black children with no father
The bad, old driver
While these memes do share more extreme and overtly biased messages, I believe it's important look at them so we can recognize these kinds of offensive memes when see them in our own timelines.
I'm not entirely sure who created each of these memes, but one of the reasons I picked each of these is because they closely resemble REAL memes I've been seen by people I'm actually friends with on social media. It is shocking to think that some people, even in my own network, would create and share memes with such overtly racist or stereotypical messages in them - but it does happen.
I hope the more we analyze these kinds of stereotypes in media, the more we'll be able to address them and break them down.