From Megan Thee Stallion to Breonna Taylor, Black Women’s Trauma Deserves Better Than Memes

For weeks now memes about Breonna Taylor, the EMT who was fatally shot by Louisville police on March 13, have proliferated on the Internet. Classic meme formats have been repurposed, like “4 houseplants for beginners” or a text-based recipe with a twist calling for justice for Breonna. Some tweets used sex to sell their call to action, placing it within a zoomed-in image of Rihanna in a bikini; others posted thirst trap selfies on social media with gotcha captions: “Now that I have your attention, arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.” All meant to draw greater attention to the case, the posts also succeeded in making her death an online trend.

More recently another meme trend took off about a Black woman who was a victim of violence, this time with a much more malicious intent. Houston rapper Megan Thee Stallion took to Instagram last week in a Live video to address the July 12 shooting that left her wounded and in need of surgery. The artist who gave 2019 the mood of the year with #HotGirlSummer, starts a TikTok trend with each song drop, and tops billboards with Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj, sat onscreen, holding back tears, and discussed her recovery, as well as addressed the assumptions and insensitive statements people have made at her expense. The so-called jokes downplayed the incident, stooped to victim-blaming and similarly sexualized her trauma; while many were simply transphobic. Fellow rappers like Cam’ron and 50 Cent were among those to pile on, reducing the shooting to pithy 140 character punch lines. (50 Cent has since apologized and taken down the post he’d made.)

The internet’s go-to trick is making a spectacle of Black women’s emotions, particularly pain and frustration. The term “digital blackface” was coined to describe the reaction GIFs of everyone from Viola Davis to Oprah Winfrey that remain the norm online, even as they perpetuate a long-standing, deeply damaging cultural tradition. Even as Black women’s pain is taken less seriously by doctors; even as Black women are more likely to die as a result of intimate partner violence, even the smallest degree of empathy for a woman like Megan was ignored in favor of so-called jokes.

Memes have been a powerful tool of protest, and among the proven strategies for helping online organizers push for radical change and bring others into the fold, especially when demonstrators cannot always convene in person safely. But crafting a meme out of the brutal killing of Breonna Taylor at the hands of police is none of that. Considering we have not actually reckoned with the well-ingrained misogynoir that runs through our society, these types of posts only further detach the history from the horror. The trauma Black women experience should not be boiled down to a cute Instagram caption or GIF. Black women are not bottomless wells society may draw from as it sees fit.

Everyone wants to have a hot girl summer but no one gives a damn about the Black girl who ushered in the wave. Everyone wants someone to “go harder for Breonna Taylor” but refuses to recognize the ways they fail Black women when they’re still on this earth to speak for themselves. It is unsurprising. It is not novel, and therein is the true pain. Campaigns like #SayHerName have attempted to bring issues of police violence against Black women to the same level of national recognition as that of Black men and still to minimal response with the hashtag even being co-opted and watered down by others proclaiming #SayHisName and #SayTheirNames. For so much of the world, a Black woman’s pain and trauma remains fodder for entertainment. Everybody gather and stare.

What would it take for Megan Thee Stallion to have garnered the sensitivity she deserves? Should she have been a less good rapper? Should she have been lighter-skinned, less herself, less Black? Would that have been enough? Like Rihanna and Whitney Houston before her, Megan is a successful, well-known Black woman whose fame was not enough to keep the world from dehumanizing her. And it is those very Black women who have rallied around Megan and offered their support, evidenced by care packages the rapper received and posted to her Instagram story from Lizzo, Beyoncé, as well as Rihanna. The artist has since announced a collaboration with Cardi B—making it clear that despite the world’s continued indifference to the feelings of Black women like her, Megan’s show goes on.