 A very good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to another session of the RSM Spring Speaker Series. Today we're very excited to host Revan Marat-Loyd talking about Black Network Resistance Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age. Before we introduce our speaker of the day, I would love to introduce our moderator of the day and also RSM Rebooting Social Media Visiting Scholar, Dr. Meredith D. Clark, who is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Department of Communication Studies and Director of the Center for Communication, Media, Innovation, and Social Change at North Eastern University. Dr. D. Clark's research focuses on the intersections of race, media, and power and has been published in top communication journals and publications, including New Media and Society and Communication in the Public. Her first book, we tried to tell you all, Black Teeth Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counter Narratives, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Meredith, Dr. Meredith, happy to have you here and let's start the call. This is on? Yeah, it's on. Okay, so I can sit down and do it, actually, I can't, so I have to go ahead, okay, I'm so sorry, and I'm going to tell you why I have to do it this way. So I'm a graduate of an HBCU, Historically Black College or University, and we have very specific approaches to education. And when you stand up before a group and you're presenting, we're talking, we were required to stand. So even in forums where we're just asking questions, unless I really feel like I'm among friends or I'm frankly just too tired to do it, I will stand up and introduce myself. But this is not about me. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Raven Mara Lloyd. And in addition to being just an outstanding scholar, I want you to know that she's a wonderful person, a wonderful human being. And I trust colleagues that you will give her your attention and your friendly faces because I have told her that we are a friendly bunch of folks, that we are enthusiastic about the research and looking forward to hearing about it. So a little bit about Dr. Mara Lloyd. Raven Mara Lloyd studies the intersections between race, gender, and digital media culture. Her first book, Black Networked Resistance, was published in January by UC Press. She explores the shifting nature of Black resistance strategies like humor, care, and archiving online. Where broadly her work makes central the ways that Black and African American folks tap into long existing channels of communication toward the goals of community, survival, and visibility. Dr. Mara Lloyd holds a PhD from the University of Iowa and she is currently an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies and the program in Film and Media Studies at St. Louis, or excuse me, the University of Washington in St. Louis. One of Dr. Mara Lloyd's most recent publications is Digital Pleasure and Danger, a roundtable discussion. And if I read this correctly, I believe this came from a forum that she hosted at Wash U last year, which brought together feminist, Black feminists working in this area to have a discussion about what it's like to engage in online spaces in terms of building community and protecting the communities that you love. In addition to her book, she's working on a couple of projects, or she's published the book but is working on a couple of projects that I hope she'll talk to us about today. But we had the opportunity to fellowship over breakfast this morning and I saw that in addition to the work that she does as a researcher, she is a mom of two, she is a wife, she is a dog mom, and as I said, an all-together wonderful human being. So colleagues, please join me in welcoming Dr. Raven Mara Lloyd. Thank you so much, Dr. Clark, for that introduction. Okay, you know I'm sensitive, thank you. I am thrilled to be here today. Thank you all so much for being here, to Dr. Clark for hosting and the RSM team and the whole Berkeley clientee has been wonderful to work with, so thank you for hosting me. I am here today to talk about Black Networked Resistance and forgive the postcards I passed out. We have a new Office of Public Scholarship and they're very excited to print things for us. I don't know what to do with that, I don't know what to do with that, but like, hand them out, I don't know, and have fun with beans. Okay, so I will talk about a chapter of the book today, the Karen chapter, but I'll broadly introduce the book and a little bit of the projects I'm working on. So Black Networked Resistance is about Black online users engaging in activities that are often passed off as insignificant or unworthy of internet inquiry. For me, the book came out of questions I had around 2014 and again in 2017, 2017 after the murder of Michael Brown, I was seeing a lot of discussions online related to hashtag Black Lives Matter, of course, and lots of protests, right, related to the hashtag, but what I wasn't seeing was conversations about how people live and resist that weren't like official activist narratives, right? Like my friends and I were sharing memes with each other and that was our way to stay upright, right? And so that's sort of where this project came from. So for me, that meant taking seriously Karen memes as pushing back against centuries of white supremacy and vitriol, wrapped in the form of protecting white femininity and thus the nation. The book meant taking seriously the ways that Black women show up for each other online, even when their needs are not prioritized or worse, erased, right, through loyalty to the race narratives. The book was also an opportunity for me to wrestle with this idea of resistance as over determined. So as one of my students said recently actually, okay, as one of my students said recently in class, we're talking about resistance again, right? So like I'm thinking through these ideas of resistance. And while I agree that Black folks and other marginalized groups should be able to be ratchet or mad or sad, just for the sake of being, I don't necessarily think that resistance and joy are antithetical to each other and I'm happy to have further conversation about that and hopefully we do. I want to start by defining the theoretical grounding of the book. So bear with me for two slides on some theory stuff. I use the cultural studies conceptual framework of rearticulation, which is a mouthful and shout out to Dr. Rebecca Wanzo who was like, take that out of the title in terms of the before the colon. She was like, you need something snappier, right? To signal the reorganization or reshaping of ideological themes to advance an alternative agenda. So in the talk today, I'm thinking through the strategic reshaping of Black humor specifically across time periods and media platforms, such that Black humor responds to differently response to the changing faces of domination. In this case, white femininity and its historical ties with the police state. Okay. And then for network resistance, the definition is made up in the book of three integral pieces. First, I'm framing digital resistance historically in order to place the roots of contemporary advancements of racial justice with our forebears, especially when we're doing work on digital media. We know this, right? It's really important to historicize and contextualize whatever inquiry we're doing in my case, Black histories. So advancements of racial justice with our forebears, many of whom were Black women who experimented with and laid the foundation for successful strategies from economic divestments to care networks. These languages help us to understand not only what worked or not in the past, but also how Black publics have crafted and reshaped resistance strategies towards specific ends. Second, I'm focusing on resistance itself as connective and iterative, centralizing the agency and brilliance of Black folks past and present who create and reshape resistance networks not only for our current needs, but for generations to come. So like this conversation is also thinking through Twitter and X and like the movement of platforms which Black publics are not beholden to, right? And then third, an intervention in and outside of digital spaces prioritizes racial justice as diverse and unobligated to specific platforms or online versus offline debates. Given that so many media technologies from pamphlets to the Black press to Twitter or X are imbued with their own sets of power-related inequalities, I focus on interventions across the milieu in hopes of rescuing resistance narratives from a reliance on any particular media tool or even a space of impact. I'll briefly mention another project I'm a part of and we can talk more about it during Q&A if you're interested. My approach here of historicizing digital media and the approach of historically lived experiences as they deeply impact the technological world around us helps me think through other projects. So another one I'm a part of with a research team is we're working on identifying global misinformation campaigns across three continents, the US, Kenya and country, Kenya and the Ukraine and uncovering what the sociocultural factors are that make certain users perhaps more vulnerable to misinformation campaigns than others. So this is a multi-year mixed method approach. We're running focus groups, survey data and then pulse data so like user data online. And what we're trying to figure out is again like what makes people vulnerable to online strategic information operation campaigns. So you'll sort of see this thread through my talk today about offline variables, sociocultural variables as they impact online movements. I've mentioned this project too because I know some folks here are working on algorithms right in half for a while. So if that sparks your interest I'm happy to talk more. Okay so let's get to the juice, the good stuff. I'm going to play a quick video of Permit Patty. Let me give you some background information if you're unaware but hashtag Permit Patty first appeared online in June 2018 after a white woman Alison Edel in California called the police on a young black girl Jordan Rogers for selling bottled water without a permit. Black users then extended the alliterative name Permit Patty to several cases involving white women who align themselves with the police state to try to keep black folks in their place. In the chapter I also engage with a broader internet character of a Karen who at least within the last four years refers to a white woman unnecessarily calling the authorities on black individuals. I'll talk about earlier aesthetics of the Karen to the Bob cut the scowling face it's a whole character right. These two cases reveal existential dangers for black individuals existing particularly in public spaces. I have to raise the volume a little bit. Hi I'm having someone that does not have a vendor permit that's selling water across from the ballpark The woman Permit Patty reportedly said she didn't actually call the police on a child who was selling water on a San Francisco sidewalk but phone recordings obtained by a local news station prove otherwise. Okay one second let me transfer you over to the police department hang on. Great thank you. Her name is Alison Edel and she resigned from her job after getting backlash when this video spread of her claiming to call police on an eight-year-old girl who was trying to raise money for a trip to Disneyland. She called police on an eight-year-old little girl you can hide all you want the whole world gonna see you boo. Yeah and um illegally selling water without a permit on my property it's not your property. Edel told the Huffington Post she didn't actually call 911 she was just pretending to because the girl and her mother were being loud she also said she regretted her actions Hi I'm having someone that um does that have a vendor permit that's selling water across from the ballpark. The call later cuts off and it's not clear if Edel hung up or got disconnected but the police reportedly did not show up. For InsideEdition.com I'm Mara Montalbano. Alright so after the 2018 instance right of Alison Edel purportedly calling the police Jordan Rogers aunt then put up this tweet that's on the far right with the hashtag permit petty and the character was born. We see from there block users started to use permit petty using humor right like we got a new meme y'all and then you see other sorts of memes with humor interspersed to the left. Since the permit petty incident San Francisco has passed the Karen Act which many of you may or may not have heard of or the Caution Against Racial and Exploitative Non-Emergencies Act this points then to the connections between online block humor and policymaking. For the chapter I scraped about a thousand Instagram posts and Twitter posts related to the hashtags permit petty and Karen. I scraped the keywords with and without the hashtags to get posts where people were talking about my Karen's without the hashtag as well. I chose Twitter as the platform of analysis or X I'm gonna keep calling the Twitter okay. Given its material and social allowances that map on to existing black linguistic and cultural practices such as call and response and humor as resistance of which I relied on folks like Dr. Clark's work right who wrote a whole book on black Twitter although less studied Instagram also offers an additional layer of analysis as the platforms image centered affordances allow for levels of creativity and imagination regarding storytelling and resistance for black publics means as we probably know also thrive on both platforms right and then I connected a historical comparative analysis of black humor which I'll talk about here so embedded in many of the means that you saw earlier reference there were references of heinous and dangerous behavior of these white women but there was a unifying piece that I saw and that was humor specifically black humor so in the chapter I'm not only interested in connecting the historical threads of black humor but I saw users doing that work of placing contemporary iterations of white violence in historical context we see that here with memes of placing permit petty and then the other woman is Becky Becky on the bus with Rosa Parks right okay so what I did then was try to understand the historical roots of black humor so humor specifically allows black users to draw critiques of white womanhood in ways we have historically not been able to given the well documented and deadly consequences historian Mel Watkins writes of humor as it stitches together the ways black folks have had to navigate between their public engagements and their private selves he writes in an interaction with whites humor eased tensions that might otherwise have exploded into violence in the privacy of completely black settings black humor was more a survey and quote another tension of black humor is that of grief and grievance I'm thinking through public private and also grief and grievance as Glenda Carpio writes writing about African-American expressive culture and the tragic comic mode Carpio describes the grief and grievance that black humor activates through both a cathartic release and political critique I'm also thinking of baby Bambi Hagan's work where she talks about unclenching the jaw right so like you're walking around with a clenched jaw your whole life and humor is the thing for black folks where you can just like relax and unclench for a minute black comedians have long lived in this space between the privacy and a cervix black humor and between privacy of a cervix black humor and public perhaps more palatable forms of humor I'm thinking about Richard Pryor mom's Mably right as some of the most famous so in the chapter I talk more specifically about the Chitlin circuit which is known for black performers like singers but actually a lot of comedians travel telling jokes okay and then so again I'm thinking through public private sort of that tension with black humor as a type of that black public's online are able to navigate given like the public affordances of social network sites right okay so if black humor isn't new and has seen various iterations in terms of black humor I'm going to talk about the white women hood be set in public I also have to contend with white womanhood is the undergirding mode of power that Karen and permit Patty means are responding to I want to be clear that I'm not talking about individual white women right I say this is my class I teach a Karen class I say that in my classes all the time we're talking about like the structural innocence particularly during the Victorian age such access has placed white middle-class women at the center of the nation which is to be protected at all costs I'm writing a conversation with folks like Rafa shawms there have been a wiser Richard Dyer and others who theorize white womanhood as ideologically tied to imperialism modernity and civilization white women have historically then been positioned in contrast to the uncivil and pathologized other white women in art cinema poetry and more situate them in a position of moral superiority that Richard Dyer writes required deference to their needs thinking about Karen's requiring deference right the ideal white woman further positions white imperial discourses by ensuring that the home as a microcosm of the nation produces civilized subjects for the future so to critique a white woman then is to critique an entire nation so when block users create and reproduce photos from captured videos of white women yelling running away and calling the police representations of the angelic virtuous white woman are directly called into question I think about what it would look like to create a meme of Hazel Brian in 1957 here famously photographed screaming at Elizabeth Eckford who was 15 in Little Rock, Arkansas during desegregation we know the Little Rock 9 right one of the first schools to be desegregated and many of you might know this but the high school put the two women in conversation to there was an event held years later where Hazel Brian was invited with Elizabeth Eckford and the high school made friends and had a whole they had a whole conversation Elizabeth Eckford and came out years later and said like I don't know her like we are not friends right it was this post-racial moment that the high school was trying to position so the affordances of means and perhaps aggregation of humor online situate critiques of white womanhood though a little differently for the sake of time I'm not going to go through both arguments of the chapter I'll focus on one so I'm saying then that black online publics use humor as resistance I'll talk about the second thing here by using storytelling to create an inverse of stereotypes exposing white womanhood's long standing relationship with the police state so inversion or incongruity I'm thinking through theories of humor here inversion or incongruity is central to the makings of a comic scene black users deployed this humor technique with and circulate the name Karen inversion is why we laugh at Michael Che who's the NSL he's on a Saturday Night Live 2018 stand-up where he details being in an elevator with a white woman the occurrence he says happened not on purpose though he says the white woman grabbed her purse real tight in the elevator and he said I got scared the inversion here is that Che a black man is a terrified one in a situation that often paints white women because of their connection to vulnerability right and innocence as fragile and threatened particularly by black men so we I in the post that I we're scraping I saw a lot of this inversion right like here you see this example of it took me a second but I got it I'm going to use it without the hard and Karen or care right so we're inverting to sort of point to how ridiculous it is for Karen to claim innocence or vulnerability Karen posts online function as humor precisely because of this classic inversion technique what's more black people and specifically black women have long had to contend with stereotypes of their names from school to professional setting so I'm thinking through like the naming of Karen's and the naming of permit had his first names and many black folks were crafting a new generation of familial heritage particularly when we haven't had control over our names right still the jokes and stereotypes of black names are found Crystal Brent Zook writes about the actor and comedian Martin Lawrence though a black man himself as he builds on and perpetuates these stereotypes and his problematic on and off screen relationships with black women so sorry to my Martin fans I love myself but it is it's super problematic right okay so black women specifically the deliberately named character Shanae Jankins Shanae play by Lawrence and drag is almost always seen with exaggerated buttocks large earrings and colored hair extensions though she owns her own salon and is in a relationship she often is shown as lusting after other men the details that make up the Shanae character are important about the that's my time it's important in thinking about the intentional choice of a name and the importance of black users reversal of names through the deployment of Karen so Karen can't become a stereotype in the same way that Shanae does right and stereotyping black women based on the power dynamics of each group but the name inversion serves its purpose and critiquing and creating a monolith of white woman right all of a sudden the stereotype I'll end here so through inversion black users take control of the narrative of white women being able to call the police so easily by deploying in this instance the reverse racism frame right in this example black folks become the dominant group that complains about being discriminated against the Karen examples here serve as rearticulations of humor this is the inversion technique users reshape to weave together an incisive critique about white womanhood and its complicity with domination whereas traditionally the most assertive kinds of critique are reserved for private spaces where protection can be guaranteed black folks use the affordances of online media to their advantage to achieve both protection and public facing critique so the first theme that I didn't get a chance to get to is this idea that like we all add to a larger story about a Karen which in essence like protects us so you can't come from me personally talking about a Karen because there's thousands of us talking about Karen's online protection and indeed credibility appears in the form of networked traction that is the sheer volume of black users who add to the Karen conversation makes it both difficult to attack just one user and difficult to ignore the broader resistive narrative so we can't attack one person in theory and also it makes a super visible conversation right okay so neither black humor nor its utility is a tool of resistance I was playing the audio here neither black humor nor its utility is a tool of resistance is born of digital culture yet black publics rearticulate the storytelling and inversion techniques by dispersing a resistance narrative among ourselves so we also rearticulate past uses of the misanthrope to disrupt the assumptions of innocence ideologically attached to white womanhood so I'm looking forward to a conversation Thank you Jess stop sharing Thank you so much this was delightful I had the opportunity to see this recently in New Orleans and I just love having the opportunity to talk about things like Karen means to show people that it's a lot deeper than the fun and the jokes so you briefly touched on this and before I get fully into the conversation piece I'll say I think we have until 1.30 so I have a couple of questions just to warm things up as you're thinking about the questions that you may have and I'll turn it over to the audience for those questions in just a moment but I like to get into a couple of things I'm going to let these folks do the technical questions I like to get into the methodologies and the rationale and really the impetus for the research so take me back to the moment when you realized that what you were seeing in terms of these means was a thing worthy of study and how you have made that argument not only in your own research but really for the field that's a good question I think first how I saw Karen means being a thing honestly had to do with I was lucky in that when I was going through grad school black digital studies really started taking off publicly like in journals and so because of the folks like you I was able to do the research in a rigorous way and people took it seriously even though like you still get told you're going to be pigeonholed or like it's just a meme books were starting to come out journal articles were starting to come out and not books yet but like journal articles were people started to take us seriously in my own networks like on black twitter there was never question it was never a question that I was able to do back then there were things where we made fun of certain situations like things we would DM each other about because it wasn't appropriate to share more publicly when because they were funny but this isn't a funny situation my friends and I knew there's this public and private tension of tension of like how serious something is and how we use humor that not everybody understands and that's what I wanted to get to with the research. Right? Like making fun of something doesn't mean you're taking it less seriously. It means you're tapping into a long historical tradition. And it's a survival tactic. Yeah. It's absolutely a survival tactic. One of the projects that you touched on and I did want to get a little bit more into it because I think it's important specifically for this audience talking about applied social media research. You mentioned that you're doing archival work and this project required archival work. And I think the digital archives are often an afterthought. And I'm curious about based on the experience that you've had attempting to retrieve some of these digital materials what sort of things do researchers doing work in this area need from technologists when it comes to preserving digital archives and making them available? Yeah. Skill sets. So we know that sites like X make it harder now to download and archive content especially like having to pay for said content. So I love going to workshops that are accessible to humanities folks. So we have computer science folks and humanities folks working together to like gain the skill of how to scrape data and sort of make scraping data less intimidating but also listening to humanities folks. Like there's a history of whatever topic that like we should probably know before you just scrape data and make assumptions or conclusions about. So like I love a good workshop. I don't know if that answers it. Yeah, absolutely. It absolutely does. One of the follow up question to that is about if there were something that you could reshape about the corpus that you used is there an access point or is there a means of access that you might change or want to see designed differently? Ooh, that's what's hard about the book is like when it's done, it's done, right? And it's out, which is gray, I think, but also definitely there are certain things that I'm like, oh, I wish I would have added that. I was lucky in that when I was pulling data from Twitter, this is before X. So like I had sort of access to full keywords fairly simply. I have some, like there's some platforms I barely get into like TikTok because it was newer as the book was coming out. So maybe I could have spent more time with newer platforms, but the beautiful thing about doing historical, like media history is I centralize black folks history and not the platform itself, right? Right. So less of a technological determination is needed. Yeah, that's the place, the spot for the inquiry to be centered. Makes sense. One of the things that I'm gonna bring up something that you did in New Orleans and I loved it because especially for scholars who are just entering the field or scholars who are working on their early book projects, I thought it was really artfully done. You said that there were questions that you presented in the book that you plan to take up later in your work. Could you tell us a little bit about some of those questions that you're pursuing? The last chapter, I follow the hashtag The Black Delegation. Do y'all know about The Black Delegation? It's a Chappelle Show skit, Chappelle Show, Dave Chappelle. This was 2006, I think. And he has the racial draft skit where he like uses humor to have a whole racial draft. We can pull up the episode later if you want. It's pretty funny. But I saw folks on Twitter using hashtag Black Delegation and sort of using the hashtag as a way to talk back to power in terms of Clarence Thomas and other folks. And then I saw it again on TikTok. So I'm like, what is happening with this hashtag over the course of like decades, right? That we are not forgetting. Not at all. Maybe some folks don't know about its origin but we're not forgetting the conversation. So the last chapter, I'm thinking through this idea of Black Evergreen Network. So I have a journalism background and I'm thinking through Evergreen content as content that never goes stale. You write a story and they shelve it for until they have a free moment to publish, right? So that's what I'm thinking with Black Evergreen Networks, not necessarily content, but these networks of Black users that sort of like tap into these conversations at any point, decades later, which I think predates the internet, right? Like this is sort of intergenerational knowledge. And so that's something I left in the chapter that I'm interested to pick up again as I go on. Makes sense. My last question and then I'll turn it over to our colleagues here. Raven is incredibly humble and doesn't promote herself the way I am about to promote her in this moment, but she mentioned the digital Black studies, critical digital Black studies being sort of coming into its own as she was doing her early doctoral work and she is a certified part of this canon. If you're not citing her work and you're working in this space, it's a hole that people are going to call out if they are equipped to read the work. I want to ask you, for people who want to be well oriented to digital Black studies, studies of culture within Black digital spaces, who else should they be reading? Ashley Greenway has a book, Black Girl Autopoetics, out right now. And I love the way she works with method in that book too. So like centralizing Black women and also like listening to their stories as serious research. So Black Girl Autopoetics is out right now Chamiah Sutherland's work. The Black Resurrected Body is out. Of course Meredith D. Clarke, we know this. We know Andre Brock's work. We know Catherine Knight-Steel's work. That's a good list. That's a good list. You're reading there, you will definitely find the pathways that you're looking for. I believe we have about 15 minutes for questions from the audience. I'm going to leave it to you to get out people. Yeah. Sure. Hi. Thank you for coming. Certainly. And I'm going to ask you to do us a favor and introduce yourself so we know who you are. Hello, my name's Gianna. I'm a CS Ph.D. at Northeastern studying algorithmic folk theories. Yeah. Algorithmic folk theories and like optimization on TikTok. Specifically within the context of like Black and Brown folks and like non-binary folks. And I was wondering, one, how do you particularly like, both of you guys, like I guess find joy within your work. My advisor is kind of like, okay, if we're going to go down this research path, just know that it's going to be a lot. And then two is when it comes to like specifically in CS, that there's a huge like jump for like, what is the technical contribution? And like for me, I'm still in the phase of like trying to figure out what that is, or how I want to like kind of like bring that on. Because like for me personally, I'm more interested in the critical piece. So yeah, I guess I have two questions. Joy. Okay, I made the decision early on, I'm going to focus on Black folks and Black publics and counter public, you know, and all their iterations. So although white supremacy comes up inevitably, that's not my lane, right? So I'm going to leave it to, I gave a talk recently, someone was asking about like white conservative women and how they're using Karens. And I was like, that's great, you do that, right? So like, I'll talk about Karens, I'll research Karens, but I'm interested, you saw it in this chapter in Black humor, right? And so for me, that brings me Joy to focus on us. And is there a specific technical contribution that you're seeing? Well, it was the second part, technical, just like technical, like when an HCI or so, you have someone that's like, an HCI will have someone that's like, oh, okay, but like what can this bring to the field? Like a design or like what type of methods do you think? Which is not always necessary. However, within CS like publication is currency. So like finding like forms that is like contributing to the space is helpful. In my collaborative work, so I like to work with like, so you're in computer scientists or in computer science, I find it useful to like keep those spaces diverse. So even as I'm working with computer scientists, I want to bring humanities folks along in the conversation, so I'm not the only one. And so I'll point to research, like I'm saying publish, like have your area, but publish widely, itch, you know what I mean? So like I'll point to the technical narratives of algorithms that I do, and also write the book on critical space. Does that make sense? So like, okay, you sort of have to have both. Absolutely, if I could pick up just a little bit of that. The course I teach at Northeastern this semester on race and technology, we just talked about this last night. And Dr. Sarita Emrute has an essay about attunements and how we can use corporeal attunements, the attunement of the glitch. And there's one more that she has as a way of rethinking the approach to technologies that instead of focusing on dominant approaches and dominant narratives of what technology is and how it should be studied, how it should be developed, we take the narratives of those people on the margins, their experiences and use those as the starting point for our design cues. And I think as Dr. Mariloy is saying, what is so important about publishing interdisciplinary work is that those folks who are in the fields that you're in need that sort of literature to be able to make the case to their advisors, to their colleagues. And so this is why it's critical that that publication happens throughout and across the borders. By the time I encountered the Karen meme, it seemed like it had been stripped of its racial content and it meant somebody, an overly demanding customer who was some of the manager over trivial things. So it seems like the meme started the black community and by the time white people encountered it, it didn't have that content anymore. Does this often happen? Yes, right? We're talking about mainstreaming of content. What's interesting is the Karen starter pack of the call your manager meme actually predates what we know in 2020, right? So if folks are familiar with Kate and John plus eight, remember that reality show on TLC? I can show you a picture, but she's blonde. She has the Bob, right? This is my blonde Robert. I think the Bob, she has a scowling face and early internet folks in the early 2000s were using the call your manager meme. So yes, to being stripped of like black humor, but I would say it's black humor is not meant to be foregrounded for everybody. Maybe it's just for us, right? And Karen's can still sort of their purpose in making visible white womanhood and its vitriol and some instances, right? Hi, I'm Bailey Fiddler, I'm a law professor and an affiliate here at Berkman Klein. These are comments which I know are sometimes the worst, but I'm gonna reframe those invitations since one thing that we do here is interdisciplinary conversations. So I'll do the boring one first. You might already be a part of this, but I'm part of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, which helps folks doing exactly the work that you're doing if you face legal barriers to getting data, that kind of thing, especially as we look ahead at what might happen in the big election, that might be a good thing for y'all to get plugged in with. Happy to talk more. My second comment was the thing that struck me, the most coming from the legal side of things was that phrase that you use that online black humor allows black folks to get the protection that they usually have in private and public. That is something that I think is missing from conversations about regulating social media. So to the extent that you're interested in that conversation, I think that would be a really cool point to bring forward. Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, okay. I actually have one. Hi, my name's Adam Holland. I'm a project manager here at Berkman Klein. And this is gonna be, I think, trying to bridge the gap between the technical question and your experiences with, I guess, the repercussion. So I manage a database of requests to take things down from online. And what I'm curious, and if this is too deep, feel free to find me later, but as you began to examine a broader corpus of social media posts and other participation online in this humorous, resistant space, I wonder if you also saw, when I'll just sort of simplify this pushback, using digital affordances, which is you have a constituency that's claiming these new tools to continue what you've artfully framed as a long historical pattern. I'm wondering if you saw people sort of saying, oh man, I can't allow this. And I'm gonna use digital tools to try to censor, suppress, and otherwise defang this newly effective modality. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. I'd like to leave, but that didn't defang. Yes, it wasn't my focus. But yes, so in the case of almost all the women, perm, at Patty, there's Barbara Hubecki and others, what's interesting is they mostly used official channels to counter what was happening to them online. So we mostly saw them on the Today Show or other news channels trying to like PR the situation. Probably rightly so, like going online and creating an anti-Karen campaign just would sort of feed into the, it would just like help write the original means. So there's this like mainstream and online thing that's happening. Like to censor the conversations. The censor's probably too loaded a word, I apologize. Yeah, if I could take that up for a second, I would say that arguably that's exactly what Elon Musk has done with what he has done in dismantling different departments and part of Twitter in specific. And you're also seeing sort of the offline application of this as well. So in the case of Twitter with Elon Musk firing so many engineers and changing the affordances of the site itself, it makes it difficult for people to circulate the information and for even the jokes to have the traction that they once had. In the offline application, one of the ones that I've seen most recently, and it was honestly kind of alarming to me, I went to one of, I'm trying to remember which health, I went to urgent treatment here recently over in Boston, and there is a sign at the check-in desk that says that clients are prohibited from filming interactions within the office. And what they really mean is the interactions with the staff. And so it's like, if we cannot stop you from circulating and protesting in this way, if we can't get you to go through the official channels for raising complaint, then we're going to silence you by saying you can't use the technology at all. And that was something that I never anticipated. It's one thing for the affordances to be changed. It's another thing to ban a certain account, but to say that people can't even use the hardware to capture the video, upload the video and circulate that narrative is a completely different level of silencing that I for long was not ready for. There are also claims of harassment, right? So like, to be sure, some of the women here probably did get, you know, like uncalled for parts of harassment, but when we see conversations about doxing and harassment has like the top of conversation when it comes to Karen, it shifts the conversation differently. And it's a 1% conversation that starts getting like most of the online traction when maybe that's not always the case. Time for one more question. One more question. Yeah, my question is related to I think online humor in the system or the infrastructure that circulating images and even producing images affords anyone from any ethnicity or background or country of origin or whatever. And I wonder what would you respond to a person that puts these faces of people in these individualities that are not necessarily doxed but sometimes exposed online in the same, how to say, level of, for instance, I've seen some cases of white nationalists interviewing protesters and catching them off guard, using humor out of it and then also exposing them. And what's that take of humor or what's that infrastructure doing in terms of humor? And I mean, beyond to judge what type of humor that is, but how can you face fate a little bit better? The one that I have is the importance of disambiguation. Like what are we talking about when we're talking about the application of humor, the use of humor, what is interpreted as humor and what is the intent of the individual who is creating the meme and the individuals who are circulating the meme. There are definitely bad faith actors whose intent is too hard. What I see, and of course I've got an insider perspective with a number of these memes, what I see is this protective measure that you haven't had the opportunity, it could cost you your life to confront someone in one of these situations. So one of the only areas of recourse that you might have if you're being harassed by someone who has the ability to invoke the police, to invoke the power of the state in that moment, if one of your only avenues is to make it public and for people to take that up and to have fun with it and to use it as a shield, if you will, from I know that this was harmful treatment, I know that it hurt you, you are seen and at the best we're gonna make fun of it, then that's one thing. It is another to extract a moment, to position it towards an audience that is already predicated on stripping you of your humanity and then making you a target. And I see those as completely different things. I think Joe Walther's work on hate that he's doing right now and social approval and hate is really going to bear that out. That's what I was gonna say. I think it has to do with positions of power, right? So Black folks making fun of an instance is different than tapping into centuries of white supremacy, right? Like in terms of material effects of who is the power in the situation there, you know? Is that one more hit? I saw that. Yeah, but you know, I was- No, they have to go ahead. Since we're on the topic of white supremacy, for those of us who do study white supremacy from a critical side and see white woman head as part of this natalist, ethno-nationalist thing at the core of so much right-wing movement, what are you kind of frustrating about us using that white supremacy lens all the time? Like I've taken note of some of these Black digital studies people that you've just given us, but from your perspective and your work, I'm a sociologist who also looks at like meaning-making, et cetera. What would you say to those of us who are on this sort of more visible camp? I don't know if that makes sense. Like what could we be looking at or looking for in addition to what the great help that you've given us today? In terms of studying white supremacy online? Yeah, I mean, it's just so white focused. Like, and there's so much too right-wing movement. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's, I don't know, but we often focus, you know, with this white lens. I don't know, not being very articulate, but- I think I get it. I can talk to you more after, too, if you want. Yeah, definitely. Okay. Personally, I would say I'm relieved and keep going. Right, right. Because it's necessary. If you think about the timeline of history and what we're up against, I argue all the time that everything, particularly in the West and particularly in the US, I'm an Americanist and in my work, our work generally focuses in the States. We're built on a broken foundation of genocidal attempts against Native Americans and the imposition of African child slavery. There's no getting that territory back. So the best thing that can be done is to place this intense attention on these historical imbalances and the historical imbalances of power and the people who have the most powerful ability, the resonant ability to do this, are white folks. Our research gets ghetto-ized. We're told it's not rigorous enough. It's, you know, we're not, we're studying ourselves. It's me-search, it's too personal. That's, to me, what allyship is, to continue in this and to agitate and to be able to bring these narratives together. And so that is why I would never say that the imposition of a lens of let's look at this as an outgrowth of white supremacy, it never gets tired because that history doesn't go away. I would say, too, like, studying all of that and studying the different faces of white supremacy or iterations of, because it's not gonna show up and hasn't showed up in the same way, right? It's been re-articulated online and other, in other spaces differently. And so, like, tracking and following discord and truth social and all these other spaces. It's like, it's where it would kill your spirit to go. I'm not going there. I'm not going there. I'm not going there. 100%. Yeah. So we all have marching orders. Excellent. Are there any other questions, comments, offerings? Oh, there is a Wi-Fi. Hi. Well, thank you very much for this. It just occurred to me that one could perhaps talk about other positive movements, like a little-known one from the Central Park encounter. There's an ornithologist here at Harvard who, during the pandemic, took a cross-country bicycle ride, spoke about that and had a Black Lives Matter sign on his bicycle and stayed with somebody who was a Black birdwatcher. There's an organization of Black birdwatchers. And he didn't know about that. But then he came back and talked about this cross-country trip and also talked about a fundraiser for Black scientists for graduate students and for people who could contribute to that. So these are two possible, very positive reactions to the Central Park incident. I don't know if you have any response or- I didn't know the detail with which that person did the cross-country thing. That's cool. I mentioned the Karinak, too. I think I don't know about the positive, negative, like what is positive exactly, right? Because positive might be I made it through today and the Karin means helped, right? At least to make me feel less isolated when these instances happen. But things like the Karinak also happened after many of these instances. It wasn't just Parmapatti or just, like these aren't isolated instances. So like, I agree, other things are happening positively. I think the redemption narratives, there's often a pressure on researchers who do critical work to uplift the redemption narratives. And I don't necessarily see that as the work of those scholars, particularly those scholars whose lived experiences place them in a position to be on the opposite end, to be potentially harmed, to see their family members or people who are like them face that harm. I again, see that as the work of folks who wanna position themselves as allies, that is an excellent space for them to take up. But if I'm asked the question about why not the positive things, I say the positive things are resilience and resistance within the community. And so those are the narratives that I'm lifting up, that Raven is lifting up through that work. And we are happy to see those contributions come from our colleagues in the field. Because it's resilience and doing everything else, right? And still finishing graduate school or a book or two, right? Like it's making it through the day and doing all the things. Thank you all very much. Thank you so much.