Successful Black Man - How it Started

This is one of the many "Successful Black Man" memes that have been circulating the internet lately. This meme follows the typical patterns of the Advice Animals series, with a top and bottom line. Within this series the top line usually sets up the punch line that is said at the bottom. The main feature of the "Successful Black Man" meme is that it utilizes the point at which the sentence is broken, to make the top line say a stereotypical phrase that is associated with young Africa-American men. The bottom line then continues that sentence by completely changing the negative stereotype to a phrase or action associated with a “Successful Black Man.”

According to an e-mail sent from the creator of the series, he first came up with the idea while talking about reverse-discrimination issues at work. He searched Google images for the perfect picture to go along with this. He then cropped it, put a couple witty lines on the picture, and tried it out as a reply to a couple of threads on 4chan.org, where it gained great popularity. 4chan.org is a website where anybody can post a picture followed by text, and users can comment on the posts. The website is divided into a few dozen sections, with the random section, also known as /b/, (the random section in 4chan.org is known to have many graphic images and vulgar remarks, so view that link at your own risk) being the most common place of appearance for this meme. He then decided to upload his idea to memegenerator.net because he was getting tired of having to redo the whole picture every time he wanted to use it for a reply on a thread. Memegenerator.net is a website where users can upload their own pictures they choose to a background and add a couple lines of simple text to form their own custom memes. Once on memegenerator.net the “Successful Black Man” spiked in popularity through 2011.