Does anyone else think that these jokes have a racist undertone?
I can't put it into words but the whole genre of black men replacing historical figures of memes feels wrong to me. "wouldn't it be silly if Lenin was black🤣🤣" is basically the entire joke.
Idk this seems like a joke a black person might make to do a tongue-in-cheek claim of Lenin and make fun of all the other people white people people have whitewashed.
Anyway, what people don't know is that Karl Marx's real name was Karim Malik. Uphold Malikism-Leoninism.
I view these posts sort of like the ones about various historical figures being from the Balkans / Turkish. It seems fairly harmless to me at least, but I also don't live in a country with a noteable black/african population (most non-whites here are either Turkish or Arabs, and most North Africans don't seem to consider themselves "african" in any way).
I never understood the point of this. There are so many great people of color who were also great revolutionaries. Why not just post one of them instead?
In a perfect world replacing every historical figure with a black version of them for black history month would be a good bit. In our world it is too messy to untagle why we are laughing at black people being in history for it to be a good idea. Further racist liberals enjoy it too much and there has to be something wrong with it if they enjoy it. Even if we don't have precisely the language to articulate why.
It appears to be making fun of afrocentrist "Beethoven was black" pseudohistory.
Imo, yes, these kinds of memes come from the same sort of racism as mayos posting those racist "we was kings" memes.
That said, the image where someone ran Lenin through some filters to make him different races, I did find funny if only cause it reminds me of all those different depictions of Jesus where it's like hey, Jesus is Chinese now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyDiC8zBwsI I remember this BadEmpanada video being a pretty good one on the topic but I haven't seen it since it came out. Making fun of black israelites and afrocentrists constantly devolves into racism despite them genuinely being pretty wacky.
It does come across kinda sus, I wouldn’t probably make that joke personally. But it is mocking black Israelite weirdos more than I think it’s racist I guess.