UTexas Memes have overloaded the Facebook pages of UT students and transformed our fellow classmates into twelve-year-old boys with a sense of humor to match.

Memes are humorous photos that surf the web with statements about everyday life, often in large block lettering. They can be generated by anyone with a computer and are very hard to track down due to the ethereal nature of their existence.

Over the weekend, the Facebook page of UTexas Memes went viral and gained over 10,500 likes. The memes on this page pertain to UT life and common experiences shared by UT students, such as seeing a raccoon on campus, the speedy service of the “Wendy’s guy,” and fountains perpetually without water.
Some memes appearing on UTexas Memes are more sinister.

Racial and ethnic stereotypes are often reinforced through several meme templates. Memes such as “High Expectations Asian Father,” which stereotypes Asians and Asian Americans as overachievers, and “Successful Black Man,” which uses a play-on-words to highlight common myths about African-American males have flooded the sites page.

The “Successful Black Man” meme shows a picture of a black male wearing a business suit with a racist stereotype in bold letters above his head and the remainder of the sentence below that reveals the rest of the statement. Loving chicken and watermelon, not knowing their father, shooting people and drug dealing are the vicious stereotypes displayed in these memes.

There are also similar racial-based memes that use the format of the "Successful Black Man" meme. A man who appears to be Latino is characterized in one meme as a gardener, and a man who appears to be Middle-Eastern is characterized as a murderer.

But it’s just a harmless joke, right? Wrong.

Let's start with the name of the most common racially-based meme, "Successful Black Man." Even the name of this meme implies that it is not the norm for a black man to be successful. The stereotypes at the top of the meme serve as a reminder that this particular black man escaped what is "expected" of black males: failure.

Another meme trivializes the achievements of iconic black politician and civil-rights leader Barbara Jordan, comparing her statue to a “Tyler Perry tribute.”

You have to look at what group created these racially-charged memes. If a member of the same racial group created these memes it is what is called colluding. Colluding is thinking or acting in ways that indirectly supports a system of racism, such as racially-charged memes being “just a joke.”

If a member of a different racial group created these memes then they too are contributing to a system of racism and the group being portrayed in the memes has no say in how they are characterized.

There are also positive stereotypes. One could argue that the stereotypes expressed in the "High Expectations Asians Father” are positive stereotypes.

The notion that Asians or Asian Americans are overachieving puts an unjust expectation on an entire group of people. The stereotype that all Asians or Asian Americans must be doctors or engineers places the group in a pair of shoes that may be hard to fill for some.

The “High Expectations Asian Father” is also portrayed as other-worldly and seems to be out of touch with the mainstream. Asians and Asian Americans are a diverse group of people with different professions, levels of education, abilities and way to interpret their own social groups.

Thankfully when certain memes cross the line UT students do stand up for what is right. Comments I have seen show that many students do care about the way social group are being characterized and they vehemently combat such actions of other students.

In an email from the anonymous creator of UTexas Memes, they said that since the site has grown so fast it is nearly impossible for them to manage the appropriateness of the site themselves.

“Due to the extremely rapid growth of the site it is impossible for me to verify all of them [memes] so that's why I asked the subscribers to email any offensive memes they might find. Also, Facebook users can report content as spam, and if they do the posts will disappear,” anonymous said.

This leaves the responsibility to us. Memes may make everyday life at UT seem a little more humorous, but we all need to be aware of how different social groups are being portrayed. Keep making memes about Jester showers, flyers on the West Mall and odd professors, but take the racial stereotypes somewhere else.
Even though racially-insensitive meme templates have been on the internet for years, when they start representing the dialogue at UT, it is our responsibility as students to ask ourselves, “Is this what we want our culture to reflect?”

P.S. My panties are not in a wad.