Memes as Vigilantism: The Multi-Racial Right and Anti-Black Racism
Welcome back to Meme War Weekly. We took a short break in August to get situated and finish up some on-going projects. During the pandemic, we considered ‘weekly’ to be a state of mind. We are pleased to introduce you to one of our fellows, Jonathan Corpus Ong, a Professor at UMass Amherst and scholar of Global Digital Media, who took the lead on this week’s MWW.
For this issue, we are exploring the memes related to vigilantism, the multi-racial right, and anti-Black racism by looking in depth at the memetic use of “Rooftop Koreans,” a slogan and set of images depicting armed Korean store owners perched on the roofs of businesses in South LA during the 1992 LA uprisings. This meme’s popularity waxes and wanes, but is often revived in reaction to Black Lives Matter protests.
Anti-blackness has a deep history within Asian-American communities. As Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Than Nguyen writes, “Asian-Americans are caught between the perception that we are inevitably foreign and the temptation that we can be allied with white people in a country built on white supremacy.” The meme of “rooftop Koreans” is not simply speaking to Asian Americans, but acts as a fulcrum to draw together a multi-racial right united by anti-Black racism.
Vigilantism and the Multi-racial Right
Following the fatal shooting of two Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Kenosha, Wisconsin, some notable politicians and journalists refused to condemn armed vigilantism. The 17-year-old shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse, is now facing homicide charges. Spinning a narrative of lawlessness in the recent racial justice protests, Trump said that Rittenhouse “probably would have been killed” had he not acted. Over at Fox News, Tucker Carlson had described Rittenhouse as a “well-meaning kid” aiming to maintain order in the Democrat-run state because “no one else would.”
In far-right online circles, armed vigilantism isn’t just justified — it’s celebrated. In the face of powerful, progressive social movements, recent memes referencing “rooftop Koreans” celebrate the so-called “heroism” and “patriotism” of militias and gun owners. What explains this?
A typical rooftop Korean meme includes photographs from the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when Korean-American store-owners brandished rifles atop rooftops and shot at protestors. Many in Los Angeles were outraged by the acquittal of the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King — but Black community members in South LA were also seeking justice over a different incident in the same month when a Korean shop owner shot an African-American girl over an orange juice.
The contemporary memefication of “rooftop Koreans” exacerbates the long-running inter-ethnic conflicts between African- and Asian-American communities. Since the onset of the pandemic, Asian-Americans continue to be harassed and scapegoated as carriers of the “China virus,” but in the wake of racial justice protests, the “roof Korean” meme repurposes images of Asians as a model minority citizens upholding law and order. The meme is often shared as a reaction to racial justice protests, where vigilantism is now a point of convergence for this multi-racial right.
In order to be sticky and memorable, memes create in-groups and out groups, i.e. when you see a meme you either get it or you don’t. The meme of “rooftop Koreans” brings together a set of interest groups including: white supremacists, gun enthusiasts, savvy campaign operators, with right-wing Asian people. The coalescing of a multi-racial right around an issue such as “law and order” is not about unifying groups under a political platform. Instead “rooftop Koreans” symbolically functions as a unifier for anti-Black racism.
For instance, many “rooftop Korean” memes are often captioned praising the courage and industriousness of middle-class business owners protecting private property against protestors, who are framed only as looters.
There are three distinct styles of the “rooftop Korean” meme set. In the first style, The “rooftop Koreans” meme favorably depicts everyday folks becoming first responders and embracing the 2nd amendment when police are absent. The far-right website Town Hall encourages their readers to “Be A Rooftop Korean” in an increasingly lawless America: “It’s your duty to be prepared to defend our community. Your duty. Yes, being a citizen of a free country is sometimes hard. Too bad. Tighten up and be ready and able to pick up a weapon.” Similarly, The Libertarian Institute stated “The Roof Koreans provide a perfect, real-life counter argument to the idiotic question of gun grabbers that free men justify why they “need” certain arms to defend themselves. If ever anyone “needed” a fully automatic rifle with a 100-round magazine, it was the Korean community of Los Angeles.”
A second style only textually references rooftop Koreans, while visually depicting the “looters” who would be frightened away. Social class differences are encoded across these memes separating out the “respectable Asian” versus the low-income “looter,” often pictured as a Black man.
In the third style, different ethnicities and races are given memorable nicknames, which is a favorite technique of meme-makers who want their creations to be sticky. Photographed on their front lawn with their guns aimed at protestors passing by their Saint Louis home, the McCloskeys recently became far-right symbols for white people who take extrajudicial action in the wake of George Floyd protests.
These collages tell a universalized story of vigialnstism that crosses races and ethnicities, where rifle-wielding “rooftop Koreans” and “Storefront Sikhs” are juxtaposed with the McCloskeys labeled “Cul De Sac Commandos.” Brittany Wong, reporting for Huffington Post, explains how this meme both functions for white supremacists as a way to further anti-Black resentment, while in Asian American communities, these memes are used to divide and amplify racial tension across Black and Asian American communities.
Asian Americans Online
On Twitter and Instagram, co-occurring hashtags with “rooftop Koreans” include ‘2ndamendment’, ‘factsdontcareaboutyourfeelings’,‘trueamericans’, and ‘guns’–common hashtags of far-right online communities. The popularity of ‘rooftop Koreans’ among white people is evident on TikTok, where it’s mostly young white men celebrating them as model citizens.
Meanwhile, among Asian online communities “Rooftop Koreans” has become a wedge issue. The right wing Asian website Asian Dawn and its Facebook group praise “rooftop Koreans” and reference other allied militias of “Curbside Cambodians” and “Vengeful Viets.” This right-wing website has also extensively documented property damage incurred by Asian businesses in the recent waves of Black Lives Matter protests, stoking fears of the “quiet, hardworking Asian-American.”
In contrast, the left-leaning and youth-centric Facebook page “The Love Life of an Asian Guy” wrote an explainer about “rooftop Koreans” outlining the ways in which the meme cultivates anti-Black racism. His post on Facebook openly calls out the multi-racial right as a “growing community of Asians who view violence against Black folks and an alliance with white supremacy as a necessary step towards Asian advancement.” This post also points to the “toxic masculinity” underpinning the meme’s meaning, where those celebrating “rooftop Koreans” have created a stereotype of an “imaginary Black criminal in their minds so they can project it onto other Black folks.”
Subreddits devoted to positive depictions of Asian American life, identity and masculinity have also debated the nature of Roof Korean memes and in some cases called out its far-right origins. Critical journalism from Huffington Post and Mel Magazine have also attempted to shine light on how this old meme spread again during this last summer of unrest in the United States. Many critiques by Asian communities online point out how this meme, while using the images of Korean people, is primarily shared amongst the white far-right.
Conclusion
While analyzing memes can help to elucidate how culture moves politics, the wide circulation of particular memes is not necessarily reflective of the political beliefs of any racial or ethnic group. A survey of Asian-American voters in the 2016 election shows that only 18% of Asian-Americans voted for Donald Trump while an overwhelming 79% voted for Hillary Clinton. The Trump campaign has made new efforts to gain traction among Asian-American voters, but this seems to be tempered by his insistence on calling COVID-19, the “China virus.” To be sure, the growth of a multi-racial right depends on coalitions forming around issues that demonized a common enemy. Just as the “immigrant” filled this void during Trump’s 2016 campaign where his supporters chanted “Build the wall,” now the spectres of “Black Lives Matter,” “antifa,” and “looters” motivate calls for vigilantes to carry out racial terror in small towns with deadly consequences.
