A Family Affair: The Trumps and Distributed Racism
The 2020 meme wars took an unexpected turn in late July after Trump featured the Goya Foods CEO Robert Unanue in a White House event. Reportedly, Unanue stated that the nation is “blessed” to have Trump as a leader. Almost immediately following this statement, a chorus of discontent erupted on Twitter amongst progressives, which was met in force by conservatives over-hyping their love of Goya foods.
Even though online conflict was initially sparked by Goya’s public support of Trump, white conservatives used this dustup to circulate memes trolling Black Lives Matter, AOC, and harassing Latinx activists and journalists. Particularly, slogans like “Black Beans Matter” and “Frijoles Negro Matter” were used to spur divides between Black and Latinx communities online, especially Trump-supporting Latinx groups on Facebook. The choice of black beans, instead of any number of Goya products, is telling of how deeply enmeshed anti-Black racism is amongst the right, and how memes can have double-meanings depending on the social context in which they were created. Even the word “Goya” which contains the word “Goy” (the Jewish name for a non-Jewish person) has been taken up in a set of memes by white supremacists (not pictured in this newsletter) to refer to the anti-semitic trope about Jewish control of government and media.
Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla Silva has researched the Latin Americanization of racial hierarchies in the US. This includes a notion of “color-blind racism,” where the US has developed policies that on their face appear to be agnostic to race, but in their application can account for systematic inequalities across wealth, health, education, political representation, and access to resources. Crucially, food often acts as a proxy for racialized discourse, where the sharing of some of these Goya memes provides cover for racist worldviews. In this case, it’s also important to think about these memes as fodder in larger brigading campaigns, where Latinx civil society groups who are urging to boycott Goya continue to be targeted by conservative and far-right social media accounts, who rely on the implicit meanings of these Goya memes to carry out acts of racist harassment.
As you read this week’s meme war weekly, we would like you to dwell on the images and try to interpret them through this particular “color-blind” framework. Ask yourself, why would the Trump family and campaign surrogates coordinate a response and participate in this meme war given everything else going on in this moment in history? What are the stakes of amplifying divides using race trolling as political communication?
Ivanka and Racetrolling
Without the support of influencers with large online audiences, meme campaigns can burn out after a day or two. Ivanka Trump revived the Goya meme war by tweeting a bespoke image of her holding up a can of the company’s Black Beans. This image was quickly turned into a meme template, where it was remixed both in support of Goya and as a critique of the administration’s racist policies on family separation.
Crucially, Ivanka seeks to be an influencer and uses her social media to promote herself as a brand with multiple tropes at play, including “the entrepreneur,” “the serious politician,” “the humanitarian,” “the happy homemaker,” “everyday woman” and “doting wife.” This strategic use of social media is becoming a staple of many world leaders seeking to cultivate well-branded online presences. Joyojeet Pal, a professor of Information Studies at the University of Michigan, analyzed the tweets of Modi, the Prime Minister of India, where he and colleagues concluded that “Thoughtful construction of messages on Twitter has helped Modi build a powerful online brand, allowing him to transcend a problematic past and emerge as a techno-savvy global leader who speaks directly to his electorate.” In many ways, Ivanka’s social media presence utilizes a similar strategy of meshing public and private photos that are, at times, very mundane, but illustrate a broad range of powerful roles in an attempt to shape public discourse about her.
Comments on Ivanka’s Twitter and Instagram are often a heavy mix of ardent supporters who find images like the one of her holding a can of beans to be funny or encouraging, which are starkly contrasted by those who see posts like this one as racial trolling. Racetrolling, gendertrolling, queertrolling, and transtrolling are different from generic trolling because these harassers “believe ardently, even obsessively, in the stances they take and act against their targets out of their sincerely held convictions” (Mantilla 2015). Because trolling is often carried out by men and relies heavily on racist, misogynistic, and misogynoir themes, this entrance into the meme wars over Goya is particularly telling of how the Trump family views race as a wedge issue to be exploited for political gain.
Eric Trump, who is not a frequent poster on social media compared to other members of the family, has an Instagram account that for years contained pictures of himself, his family, and golf courses. He kicked it into second gear in 2016 for the Trump campaign, but never received the kind of attention bestowed upon his siblings. Recently, he discovered memes and has chosen this one that brings together Goya foods, Biden, and race. He’s also starting to utilize his Instagram as a meme bank to push viral content that is pro-Trumpian, like jobs not mobs, and direct attacks on Black Lives Matter.
Of course, Trump himself jumped in quickly and posted this rather banal advertisement for Goya on Instagram, where the comments were overwhelmingly negative. Nevertheless, after Ivanka received significant backlash for her post, Trump then added another image of himself posing with a range of Goya products in the Oval office, giving the thumbs up. It was a near identical pose of his infamous “Cinco De Mayo” tweet in 2016, which he recently reposted to his instagram during the pandemic. That original tweet included the line “I love Hispanics!” and was quickly criticized by Latinx civil society groups as being racist, out of touch, and political pandering. This occurred amidst public outrage regarding Trump’s racist characterization of Mexicans during a campaign speech in 2015.
The New General in the Meme Wars
Lastly, Donald Trump Jr. (DTJ) has declared himself the “General of the Meme Wars” and looks to be organizing his family to participate more aggressively in memetic warfare. Recently, Kimberly Guilfoyle and DTJ hosted a livestream where they talked about the meme wars and discussed how the Goya memes are a response to Biden’s failure to promote businesses. DTJ says, “Response from the right has been great… it’s an important message… they [Goya] could have reiterated the woke talking points, but instead they stood by their convictions…”
He then goes on to mention a narrative trope active in pro-Trump Latinx online groups by raising the spectre of communism as part of the broader Democrat agenda. He stated, “Biden-Sanders plan to push to communism… it’s truly scary for the America we know and love.” We see this anti-communist theme repeated in Trump’s recent Instagram posts as well. This is a critical fissure in Latinx communities, where older generations can be more distrustful of communist and socialist politicians. Importantly, this mischaracterization of Biden’s political platform plays upon Biden’s reported difficulty securing the vote of certain Latinx demographics.
Is this our world?
As we learn more about the ways in which memes are used by brands, influencers, political activists, foreign operatives, and politicians, it is incumbent upon researchers to place these memes within the social and political context of the present. While it is clear that the Goya meme war is a political opportunity for the entire Trump family to push wedges on multiple fronts — particularly false claims that AOC and Biden are ushering in an era of socialism or exploiting racial unrest for the benefit of the Democratic Party — researchers and journalists should not ignore the multiple explicit and implicit meanings of memes and how they are used as political propaganda in a manufactured information war.
As Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Erica Licht argue in a recent oped, “Pursuing antiracist change isn’t easy or comfortable. Organizations must account for their own exclusionary histories and their ongoing policies and practices in perpetuating systemic racism. They must be held accountable to the public they serve.” And to that we would add we must demand the same accountability for technology companies who continue to provide the infrastructure for distributed racism.
