Fidelis ad mortem: multimodal discourses and ideologies in Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter (non)humorous memes

ABSTRACT

This paper reports the findings of a study of two automatically generated corpora of multimodal digital items user-tagged as ‘Black Lives Matter memes’ and ‘Blue Lives Matter memes’. The central aim is to flesh out the memetic trends representing the discourses and ideologies on the Black and blue memescape, which is explored in the wake of the most infamous but interest-generating tragedy in the history of the Blue Lives Matter movement, namely George Floyd's death at the hands of white police officer Derek Chauvin. Studied through a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analytic lens, the internet memes are shown to contribute to the polyvocal political discussion and, with some neutral or ambiguous exceptions, to display a positive (pro-) or – more often – negative (anti-) stance on each of the opposite movements (with anti-BLM items consituting the largest category in the dataset). Also, contrary to the well-entrenched conceptualisation of memes as a type of humour, the majority of the memes at hand manifest no humorous potential. Humour is present mainly among the negative-stance memes, which points to the disparagement of a target as a concomitant of humour in the memes on this serious political topic.

KEYWORDS:

• (Non-)humorous memes
• Black Lives Matter
• Blue Lives Matter
• Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis
• stance

Acknowledgement

The Authors would like to thank Gosia Krawentek for her assistance in the process of corpus data collection and her advice on methodology (in accordance with her duties in the Sonata Bis project 2018/30/E/HS2/00644).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/

2 https://www.facebook.com/bluematters/

3 https://www.startribune.com/derek-chauvin-charges-trial-george-floyd-murder-manslaughter-police-minneapolis-minnesota/600030691/

4 https://mashable.com/article/black-lives-matter-george-floyd-social-media-data/?europe=true

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Chauvin

6 Vickery (2014) submits that the sad-looking bear template inspired a non-humorous meme cycle based on people's serious personal revelations. However, there may be an epistemological error involved in (part of) her analysis, stemming from the assumption that the meme authors have shared their genuine problems, which may not have been the case; rather, at least some of the memes may have been submitted as cases of dark humour (see Dynel & Poppi, 2018), whether or not making truthful admissions. Some of the examples are nothing but absurd and overtly untruthful (Dynel, 2018) and/or evince humorous potential in the way the alleged confessions are structured, finishing with incongruous, surprising punchlines (Dynel, 2016), as in ‘7 years ago my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. We convinced him not to kill himself. I wish we hadn't’. Even if this text is partly truthful (e.g., the meme creator had a father suffering from Alzheimer's), it is very likely to have been submitted with a humorous intent, given the deliberate surprise effect in the closing statement (cf. the evidently non-humorous ‘I wish we hadn't convinced him not to kill himself’).

7 Williams (2020) presents what she calls ‘Black memes’ based on the stigmatised Becky and Karen categories as critique of white surveillance and casual racial dominance. She concludes that these ‘Black memes’ help fight against racial injustice. However, it needs to be pointed out that the memes discussed by Williams (2020) are primarily orientated towards genuine disparagement (see Dynel, 2020) of the two female stereotypes, while the Black issues are not at stake, let alone being endorsed, in each and every case (e.g., one meme showing Barack Obama sitting at his presidential desk as the nosey Karen is lingering outside his window).

8 Yoon (2016) lists a few trends that seem to endorse racism (e.g., stereotyping and othering, as well as denial of racism) based on what seems to be a cherry-picked sample of 85 memes (from among 7762 memes labelled ‘that's racist’) that the author selected based on their relevance to the topic and popularity. These findings give a rather limited and biased picture of what the racist memescape involves.

9 https://imgur.com/gallery/ZMQG9/comment/706677335?nc=1

10 It needs to be emphasised that humour does not necessarily entail funniness, which is a gradable property of humorous items subject to personal evaluation and is dependent on many psychological variables (see e.g., Martin & Ford, 2018). This is especially important in the case of racist humour, which may be considered offensive rather than amusing.

11 This template comes from Eric Andre's late-night show. In one sketch, the host suddenly pulls out a gun, fires a number of shots into his co-host Hannibal Buress only to turn deadpan into the camera and ask naively, ‘Who killed Hannibal?’.

12 https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge

13 It consists of two stills and a quotation from Troy, where Achilles (Brad Pitt) looks down (both literally and metaphorically) on the messenger.

14 https://web.archive.org/web/20130709152558/http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/20/richard-dawkins-memes

15 It should be noted that also positive-stance memes may easily involve disparagement of a target of some kind.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland (Project number 2018/30/E/HS2/00644).

Notes on contributors

Marta Dynel

Marta Dynel is Associate Professor in the Department of Pragmatics at the University of Łódź and part-time Chief Research Fellow in the Department of Creative Communication at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University. Her research interests are primarily in humour studies, im/politeness, the pragmatics of film discourse and social media, and the philosophy of irony and deception. She is the author of 2 monographs, over 110 journal papers and book chapters, as well as 15 (co)edited volumes and special issues. She is Editor-in-Chief of Lingua. [email: [email protected]]

Fabio I. M. Poppi

Fabio I. M. Poppi obtained his PhD in Linguistics from the University of East Anglia (UK). He is Research Associate at the University of Łódź (Poland) and Associate Professor at Sechenov Moscow University (Russia). His research interests include multimodality, critical approaches to language, ideology and social cognition, all with reference to film, art, and social media discourse. He has published extensively on these topics in international journals. [email: [email protected]]