Introduction

This chapter introduces the central concept of Black virality. It discusses the core idea of Black virality through three examples: (1) the highly visible symbol and index called a hashtag; (2) key concepts related to Black virality, such as gender performativity and racial performativity; and (3) advertisements as visual ephemera that maintain and manipulate historic and contemporary Black mythologies. In these examples, the chapter narrates how Black people and their representations in popular culture advance certain products, like hashtags and brands, and concepts, like the “noniconic” and “things” that affect how, and how quickly, a public understands them. These products and concepts depend upon preexisting beneficial and detrimental ways of discursively and materially understanding Black people through their racialized gender and sexuality. The chapter argues that Black virality is a new way to see, understand, and intersectionally frame performances and discourses of Black people, which have become rapidly ubiquitous through popular media. I engage with how systems of oppression come to bear on various Black people’s racialized gender and sexuality from the eighteenth century to the present.