About

Successful Black Man is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photo of a black man dressed in business attire superimposed in front of a brown and beige color wheel background. The jokes typically employ a bait-and-switch format with the top caption appearing to set-up a stereotype about African Americans followed by a bottom caption rendering the phrase innocuous, in similar vein to the Ordinary Muslim Man advice animal character.

Origin

The original photograph of the suit-wearing black man (shown below, left) can be found on the stock photo website ShutterStock^[2] under the title "Handsome African American business man dressed in a black suit." According to an anonymous e-mail sent to Know Your Meme staff from the creator of the image macro series, the idea was first inspired by reverse-discrimination discussions at work. Both the template (shown below, right) and original instances were first submitted in several threads on the imageboard 4chan before a page was made on the image macro creation website Meme Generator^[1] in 2010.

Spread

The meme initially continued to spread primarily on Meme Generator and 4chan's /b/ (random) board. On February 25th, 2010, a compilation of notable examples from the series were submitted to the Internet humor site FunnyJunk^[9] by user SamuelOak, receiving over 39,000 views and 448 up votes within the next three years. On September 14th, the "Successful Black Man" Tumblr^[10] blog was launched, which continued highlighting image macros from the series until November of 2011. On November 5th, a slideshow of "Successful Negro" image macros were published on the Internet humor site Ebaumsworld.^[5] On December 28th, BodyBuilding Forums^[3] member aaandrew submitted a thread inviting other members to post their favorite examples from the series. On August 31st, the Internet news blog UpRoxx^[8] published an article about the series, calling it "borderline offensive, but hilarious." On October 6th, an anonymous 4chan^[6] user started a "Successful Black Guy" thread on the site's /b/ board, where it received over 115 responses prior to being archived.

Notable Examples

As of January 2013, the "Successful Black Man" Meme Generator page has received over 26,000 items and the "Successful Black Man" Quickmeme^[4] page has accumulated over 40,000 submissions.

Video Adaptation

On January 15th, 2012, YouTuber TheWordsmithjr began uploading videos of himself acting out examples from the image macro series (shown below).

Search Interest

External Referenes