Racism and Digital Blackfacing in GIF-Culture

As Memes and GIFs are a relatively new phenomenon of contemporary digital popular culture and communication there is no large and established body of works so far. Similarly, digital blackfacing is a rather new scholarly topic. To contribute to a more scholarly discussion of the topic this paper will deploy a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of four well known GIFs that portray Black persons to answer the following questions: Do these GIFs make use of racist discourses and thereby reinforce racist stereotypes? And could the usage of these GIFs by white people be described as digital blackfacing? Inspired by Jacksons article this paper argues that many popular GIFs portray Black people in a way that reinforce racist stereotypes and proposes that using them as a white person is the digital version of blackfacing. Therefore this paper brings together the theoretical exploration of the GIF’s communicative functions, most importantly the performative aspect of its usage in digital communication and a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of four GIFs in regard to their representation of Blackness and the discourses they make use of. Through the combination of these fields, this paper will then be able to consider the implications of the usage of such GIFs by white persons in regard to digital blackfacing.