I had no idea Black Twitter was a thing before today. Then again, I check my twitter like once every two months, so there's that.
I like the idea in the article about "a cultural singularity".
For Turing, the holy grail of computer science was a machine that could produce more ideas than those with which it had been fed.
So, in other words, a computer that could receive input, and then output a series of unique ideas and thoughts. A creative computer. Technological Singularity.
We might not have gotten there yet with machines, but it looks like black culture has probably hit a point of Cultural Singularity. Weve spent the past 400 years as a society generating data points about what black people are supposed to look, think, and act like. Now, finally, the machine that is capitalism has begun to move on its own. It is creating its own content.
Dont get me wrong: the idea of black people is still entertaining, but black people are no longer required to provide that entertainment.
And he's right. "Acting black" on social media is easier than ever before, and anything you create to entertain can and will be repurposed to make a larger group laugh.
Azula said:
Why does it have to be about sexuality with this joke? I realize I sound like an old conservative, that's not my intention. I just wonder why these jokes have to aways come back to women and men feeling superior or inferior with regards to having sex with them or others having sex with them.
Is it because white people still have a bizarre fear of females choosing to have sex outside their race or something?
Short answer, yes.
Fear and fetish, both go hand in hand. As the author points out, there are people looking at the images going "wow, that's so true!" and others going "wow, that's so absurd!" When I first saw the meme, I thought it was just projecting the absurdity of a stereotypical ghetto-black-teen-daughter-with-a-thug-bf-speak onto stock photos of white people. The creator was poking fun at the fear that white people have of this happening their homes. That was the joke, to me.
But I can see now how people can appreciate it on different levels. The stereotype that all black men lust after white women, the stereotype that all black men have animalistic sexual prowess, the stereotypes that black men just want to get drunk/get high/sell drugs/run trains/dance to hip hop music/have babies out of wedlock...these are all reasons why these jokes work. Like Chapelle, Mooney, Pryor, and the author of this article eventually realize is that parody can easily become mockery depending on the perspective.
Unlike Dave, I don't think this a problem though. People who don't get satire or social commentary (ie, people who don't like Robocop or think the Boondocks is just coonery and South Park is just fart jokes & profanity) shouldn't really be the consideration when these things are created.
