About

Racist Jim Halpert refers to a series of memes which mispresent The Office character Jim Halpert as holding alt-right, nationalistic or racist beliefs. Stemming from an image that describes Halpert as "King of the Whites," the memes gained significant popularity on iFunny in early August 2020, particularly in the form of GIF Captions.

Origin

On December 5th, 2017, PatriotHole, a subsection of the satirical news website ClickHole, posted an edited image of Jim Halpert wearing an "Aryan Prince" crown to its social media accounts. The image is captioned "Down to earth. Lives with Pam. Goofs off at work. There is no question: Jim Halpert is King of the Whites! Share if you agree." The post received over 940 retweets and 3,700 likes on Twitter^[1] and 2,800 reactions and 1,500 shares on Facebook^[2] in three years.

Spread

Starting on July 31st, 2020, iFunny user Amerikaner^[3][4] started posting GIF Captions presenting Jim Halpert as a racist. For example, two GIF Captions posted by Amerikaner on that day received over 1,200 smiles and 1,000 smiles in six days, respectively (shown below).

On August 1st, 2020, iFunny^[5] user Oldowan2 reposted the original meme, with the post gaining over 1,400 smiles in five days.

Starting on August 1st, the GIF Captions trend of presenting Jim Halpert as a racist gained a significant presence on iFunny. The posts utilized various GIFs from The Office and other films starring John Krasinski combined with unrelated captions to give the impression that Halpert is racist. For example, on August 1st, 2020, iFunny^[6] user Dronom posted a meme that received over 2,000 smiles in five days (shown below, left). On August 1st, 2020, iFunny^[7] user Trad_Hates_Modernism posted a GIF Caption that received 210 smiles in five days (shown below, center). On August 2nd, 2020, iFunny^[8] user cumshitter posted another meme that gained over 370 smiles in four days (shown below, right).

The trend maintained notable popularity on iFunny in early August with GIF Captions and other types of memes. On August 2nd, 2020, an unlogged Wikipedia^[9] user added "King of the Whites" in the "Occupation" section on the Wikipedia page for Jim Halpert.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References