It’s just a meme, so it’s not hurting anyone, right? Okay, but my friend making a joke about how they love iced coffee isn’t a Nazi. These images are easy to push off as “just a joke,” which is what allows white supremacist rhetoric to stay safely hidden there’s always plausible deniability when the tools you use look cartoonish and exaggerated. “White-nationalist and alt-right groups use jokes and memes as a way to normalize bigotry while still maintaining plausible deniability, and it works very well as a recruitment strategy for young people,” Lindsay Schubiner, program director at the Western States Center, told The Washington Post. The original tradwife meme thread is filled with racist, misogynist, and antisemitic comments it takes reading through about five of them to find someone blaming the “Jewish media” for their problems.Īccording to a report done by the Data & Society Research Institute, “Far-right movements exploit young men’s rebellion and dislike of ‘political correctness’ to spread white supremacist thought, Islamophobia, and misogyny through irony and knowledge of internet culture.” Boards like “politically incorrect,” better known as /pol/, are filled with memes like tradwife girl - images that mask violent Nazi ideas, but are passed around as ironic and edgy. 4chan, in particular, has a long history of alt-right, neo-Nazi activity - often expressed through meme formats. This meme, known as “ tradwife girl ,” originated on 4chan’s politics board, titled “politically incorrect” in 2019, as a variant of similar characters like “Nordic gamer,” an Aryan man usually compared to a Mediterranean, often Jewish-coded man. Circling the tradwife are traits implied to be better than those of the feminist caricature, like how she “has knowledge about her European roots” and “loves her family, race, country, in that order.” In one meme, she is positioned side by side with a caricature of a “liberated feminist” - the feminist being the one mocked, and the tradwife being celebrated. That way you would avoid conflating whiteness with 'racelessness' (I made up a word).The blue-eyed, blonde-haired girl is supposed to represent a “tradwife,” or traditional wife: a group of real conservative women who celebrate holding traditionally feminine roles, following their husbands, and being white. If it is important to the comic to indicate the race of the characters, you could either indicate that somehow with words (which is how PFSC did it), or, if you must, you can fill in the white characters as well with a pinkish-beige color. It makes it seem like non-white races are a variation from the 'standard' race and as such have to be indicated with special non-standard drawing techniques.

If you use a 'default' stick figure to indicate white people / people of unspecified race but you portray people who are specifically non-white with filled-in or shaded stick figures, that seems to perpetuate the idea that white people are the default race. I think it is a problem if you ONLY indicate race when the character is non-white. In such a minimalistic style, I don't think that the white background should be taken to indicate that the character is white (as if white people were actually blank-paper white). The lines are just a vague, stylized outline of human features.

In PFSC, for instance, one of the main characters is Asian, but that isn't brought up until much later in the comic, and his race is not apparent from the way the stick figure is drawn. It seems like if the comic is of the minimalistic, black-on-white stick figure style (see xkcd, Pictures for Sad Children, and, to a lesser extent, rage comics) then there is nothing inherent about the standard stick figure character (i.e., not colored in MS Paint-stye) to indicate race. I have wondered about portraying race in comics.

Racist rage comics