Memes as Vigilantism: The Multi-Racial Right and Anti-Black Racism

We took a short break in August to get situated and finish up some on-going projects. During the pandemic, we considered ‘weekly’ to be a state of mind. We are pleased to introduce you to one of our fellows, Jonathan Corpus Ong, a Professor at UMass Amherst and scholar of Global Digital Media, who took the lead on this week’s MWW.
For this issue, we are exploring the memes related to vigilantism, the multi-racial right, and anti-Black racism by looking in depth at the memetic use of “Rooftop Koreans,” a slogan and set of images depicting armed Korean store owners perched on the roofs of businesses in South LA during the 1992 LA uprisings. This meme’s popularity waxes and wanes, but is often revived in reaction to Black Lives Matter protests.