Social Media Memes Are Inexorable In Popular Culture

With the evolution of the internet, social media memes have become inexorable in popular culture. Although memes tend to expose situations satirically, at times they display underlying negative media representations of certain groups. This essay will answer how the social media meme presented in this essay uses stories of inequality as a way to spread anti-Islamic rhetoric. Recently, the alleged injustices against African migrants in Libya have been widely circulating and protested against on social media which inspired a number of social media memes that allude to Western perception of Muslims. Since Western public perception of Muslims is influenced by an aura of fear towards the ‘foreign other’ that is perpetuated by politicians, the meme

As the meme reinforces the notion of Orientalism, it constructs a negative narrative about Muslims where the issue of alleged slavery in Libya is generalized while portraying non-Muslim religions and its followers as superior. Edward Said, who coined the term, defined Orientalism as a discourse that constructs a contrived binary between the West (Occident) and the East (Orient) in which the ontological stands in contrast to the epistemological conception of the Orient (Abu Hatoum, 2017). As such the discourse of the West holds power over the knowledge about the East and designates the ‘Orient’ as the ‘deviant other’. Within this context, this meme homogenizes Muslims as a ‘barbaric’ group that “still owns black slaves” thus juxtaposes the ‘good’ West with the ‘bad’ East. Furthermore, as Abdolmohammad Kazempur (2014) points out these notions about Muslims create a “false universality” while ignoring the cultural and geographical differences within Muslim society which is represented in the meme as it plasters the issue of slavery in one Muslim country on all Muslim countries. As discussed in class (Abu Hatoum, 2017), Orientalism can then be understood as a “new form” of racism in which race is based on the cultural instead of biological or genetic markers thus culture becomes an inherent and fixed trait of a

Within this context, the meme also uses the process of racialization to assign inherent cultural distinctions between Muslims and non-Muslims by drawing negative assumptions about Muslims as something fixed within their culture or race. This meme displays these notions by designating Muslims as “slave owners” who hold “black slaves” thus deeming Muslims as an overall unethical group. Using this imagery of Muslim “slave owners”, it knowingly distorts Muslim culture and its people, which in turn affect how Muslims are viewed namely as ‘evil’ and ‘violent’ people. As such dehumanizing Muslims also enables race-thinking, which according to Sherene Razack (2008), is “a structure of thought that divides up the world between the deserving and the undeserving” (p.8). Using satire, the meme places Muslim people into the category of the “undeserving” as they are following “the only religion in the world [that] still own black slaves.” In this sense, the meme seems to attempt invoking emotions regarding the alleged injustice of slavery in Libya to justify hatred and violence towards Muslims that is present in the West. Interestingly, the prevalent Western assumption of “Muslim women needing protection from violent Muslim men” (Razack, 2008, p.4) draws a parallel in the way the meme seems to substitute “Muslim women” with “black