Successful Black Man

About

Successful Black Man, also known as “Successful Negro”, is an image macro series featuring a black man dressed in business attire and a witty one-liner satirizing the stereotype of young African American male as street hustlers or gangsters who only care about cars, moneys and hos. The humor is mostly derived from the intentional line break in mid-sentence, with the top line impersonating a black male stereotype (EX: I Got the Best Hos’) and the bottom line suddenly falling flat in character (EX: Out in My Tool Shed).

Origin

Both the template and original instances were first tested in several 4chan threads and then spread over to Memegenerator.net, where it spawned a mixed batch of chuckle-worthy derivatives, as well as a whole bunch completely invalid ones.

According to an e-mail sent from the creator of the series (who wishes to remain anonymous), the idea first came up while talking about reverse-discrimination issues at work.

I am the creator of Successful negro and thought I would fill you in on the exact details. This email address and name are made up as I wish to remain Anonymous, but you may call me Michelle Gellar.

It originated on 4chan and THEN spread to memegenerator.net. I put it on memegenerator only because I grew tired of manually editing the image for each macro or request. I tested the idea in several threads on 4chan and posted the template on several occasions. When memegenerator.net updated their website, I lost access for editing the entry so I just left it to be. (You can still see some white pixels around the man and his suit where I cropped it from the original image, since I wasn’t able to upload a corrected version).

By far, the biggest challenge was finding an appropriate character. It took several tries to find the right “negro” but eventually I settled on what now exists. Thanks Google!

Spread

The meme spread primarily through anonymous hubsites like Memegenereator and 4chan’s ever-popular random board /b/, where blatantly racist comments prevail from time to time. An interesting hybrid of both American black and white male stereotypes, there are many notable examples of this meme, but there are also tons of “erroneous” instances that solely consist of witless racist remarks.