Black Meme: A History of the Images That Make Us

A history of the meme as a form of Black visual culture, running from 1900 to the present and arguing that internet virality rests on Black life and Black death.

Legacy Russell works through archival and contemporary media. Her cases include the circulation of lynching postcards, Jet magazine's publication of the open-casket photograph of Emmett Till, television coverage of the protesters at Selma, the Rodney King video often called the first viral video, the Anita Hill hearings, and Lavish “Diamond” Reynolds's Facebook Live recording after Philando Castile was killed by police. She contends that digital culture would not exist in its current form without the contributions of Black people, and she also looks at positive depictions of Blackness in the media. The book was shortlisted for the NBCC Award for Criticism.

Legacy Russell is Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Kitchen in New York, the first Black person to hold the post since the organization's founding in 1971. From 2018 to 2021 she was Associate Curator of Exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her earlier book, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso, 2020), develops a term she coined in 2012 for error as a resistance to the gender binary. Black Meme was also published by Verso, in 2024.