Stapleton 1

Matt Stapleton

Dr. Smith

English 8530

15 March 2019

Literature Review for “Ugandan Knuckles: Racist Redefinition of a Neutral Image”

Internet memes have been a vessel for both implicit and explicit racism since their

inception in the early 1990’s. With one of the first widely known image macros “All Your Base

Are Belong To Us” being spread as a thinly veiled example of discriminatory language barriers

in video game production, more recent memes such as Pepe the Frog and Spurdo have taken on

new meaning as alt-right and racist icons within the larger Internet community. Ugandan

Knuckles stands as an additional example of a meme that has taken on a more racially biased

identity throughout its time as a cultural icon, and is particularly interesting considering the

multimodality through which this discriminatory behavior emerged. Multiple scholars across a

variety of fields have discussed these online discourses through the portrayal of particular forum-

based sites such as Reddit and 4chan, with the rhetorics of racism often being displayed as one of

the key unifiers of their identity alongside toxic masculinity (Shifman 349; Nagle 76). As a

result, Ugandan Knuckles displays racism within memes in a very unique context due to the

various mediums that it appeared during its evolution as a concept.

Ugandan Knuckles is based on a character from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise: a red

echidna wearing gloves with spikes on the knuckles, with the name “Knuckles” deriving from

this. Within that context, Knuckles has no relevance to any racist discourse, as the character is
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both an anthropomorphic animal as well as a side protagonist in most games. On March 6, 2017,

an animator on YouTube known as Gregzilla uploaded a 29 second clip of a humorously draw

Knuckles singing to the 1938 song by the Ink Spots, “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.”

The video became a viral hit for around the next month, amassing around half of its 5.4 million

views in this time period before being mostly forgotten by the Internet at large. Unrelatedly, a

virtual reality video game VRChat released in February of 2017, becoming steadily more popular

until an event occurred in September 2017 — DeviantArt user tidiestflyer created and released a

3D model of Knuckles based on Gregzilla’s video, which many players then downloaded and

used on VRChat as a virtual representation of themselves. According to KnowYourMeme, these

two events coincided with the popular streamer Forsen using a racially-derived accent imitating a

Ugandan individual, ultimately leading to the YouTube Stahlsby creating a video in late

December of 2017 in which he and a group of other VRChat players all downloaded

tidiestflyer’s model and proceeded to sexually and verbally harass both other players in a swarm

by shouting many phrases in Forsen’s Ugandan accent, particularly “YOU DO NOT KNOW

THE WAY” as well as clicking their tongues. The video proceeded to viral, amassing over 15

million views rapidly.

An additional YouTuber Syrmor posted a video on January 1, 2018 that garnered

enormous attention across a wide range of forums such as Reddit, Twitter and 4chan, after which

people joked that the Ugandan Knuckles meme was the first meme of the year. The virality of

these memes encouraged other users to go onto VRChat using the 3D model and harass others,

leading to another surge in interest in Ugandan Knuckles. Companies and branding offices such

the official Sonic the Hedgehog Twitter began to post in reference to the meme, followed by a

discussion among the news communities about the potential racism of the meme because it
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perpetuated multiple African stereotypes to an unbeknownst public (USA Today; Daily Dot).

Ultimately, people began to see the Ugandan Knuckles meme as a detriment to many websites

and communities, leading to its ban in places such as the Overwatch League and on some meme-

related subreddits, which ultimately could be considered the end to the lifecycle of a meme

(Dennett 133).

Memetic research has been one of the primary subjects within the field of new media

studies due to the variety of cultural phenomena that comprises their evolutions within an

Internet community. Typically, one of the first approaches is to look into the actual infrastructure

of a website to see how the underlying algorithms accomplish the distribution of materials and

information on said site, with particular interest in how these formulas can actually manipulate

discussions within communities or propagate issues (Daniels 696). Additional considerations can

be made towards the actual categorization of how something goes viral, which Prier describes as

three methods: “trend distribution, trend hijacking, and trend creation” (54). With these bases as

foundation, new media rhetoricians can then select specific dilemmas through which to use as a

terministic screen to see the effects of how these communities actually react to viral memes and

events. Racial issues often present themselves as they become a common force to rally behind

for racist individuals, or may even exploit the implicit biases such as in the case of Ugandan

Knuckles; Milner describes memes as a way to dehumanize a subject, and in that sense,

“racism…is itself memetic, and memetic logics underpin its prevalence” (Ch. 4, location 2307,

par. 1).

Due to the timespan of the Ugandan Knuckles meme only encompassing around a month

and a half, from the very end of December to the beginning of February of the 2017-2018 years,

I have limited the scope of my discussion to that period of time, with the addition of the listed
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videos and pictures having to do with the genesis of Ugandan Knuckles (Gregzilla, tidiestflyer).

That one month period has been divided into two sections of how the meme evolved: the rise of

the meme in VRChat, and the subsequent fallout within media that was seen within various news

sources such as Kotaku and USA Today. For the former period of time, I have identified two key

visuals: a clip of a Knuckles variant in a Russian tank spouting racist Russian gibberish that

implies the second coming of the USSR, and an image of a Ugandan Knuckles brandishing an

African spear with generic tribal facepaint. The dialogue surrounding these visuals is more

important in the second half of the meme’s lifespan, and I have identified a key Tweet from the

RAZOR gaming keyboard company in which they apologize for insensitivity, and a photo of

Ugandan Knuckles literally on the side of a children’s school building in Africa. Additional

important measures in the popularity of the Ugandan Knuckles meme include the metrics that

specific organizations use (for instance, upvotes on Reddit or retweets on Twitter), as well as

Google Search interest statistics to display actual community buzz around the meme.

With those parameters in mind, scholars within visual rhetoric have discussed similar

methods used to properly model descriptions of viral images within social media. Gries points

towards new materialism as a potential method used to describe such images as a way to “rethink

our underlying beliefs about existence and…our attitudes toward and our relationships with

matter” due to the incorporeal nature of these online images (5). They still affect offline behavior

and as a result can utilize many of the descriptive methods previously used within visual rhetoric,

as detailed in an earlier piece by Gries wherein the archival nature of visual culture allows for the

an extension of research within a digital space towards a “contemporary composing process”

(447). Additionally, McComiskey discusses the merits of visual rhetoric in describing

multimodal images with particular reference to “modern popular culture,” and how the
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utilization of such existing models of discourse that are used in visual rhetoric are helpful when

describing digital objects that are visual with textual connotations (190). There are three

important factors that are further defined by Hocks, being the “audience stance, transparency,

and hybridity” that can be transferred into digital writing environments as a result of the already-

present multimodal nature of visual rhetoric, the modes being both the visual and the written

(632). Huntington also offers additional factors to these, being the “semiotics” and “discursive

representations” of memes that aren’t written in text, and rather much be derived from the

discourse surrounding an image that is being rhetorically analyzed (2).

In the following discussion, I aim to describe and rationalize the various factors that led

to the Ugandan Knuckles meme both appearing in the public sphere, but also becoming such a

radicalized form of implicit and casual racism for so many players of an online game such as

VRChat. With the inclusion of companies even falling into the trap of discussing Ugandan

Knuckles without understanding the ramifications for entering such a dialogue, I will further

look into how Internet communities propagate such widespread racism without it being truly

detectable by even major corporations with dedicated social media teams. With the

understanding that many discussions of memes across multiple disciplines utilize

“memesplaining”1 to communicate broad ideas about a picture without mature discussion, I will

also conclude this dialogue with a discussion on the merits of looking into specific memes rather

than specific communities, with the main example being the plethora of Pepe literature and

1 “Memesplaining” is a recent term in cultural studies that functions as a parallel to “mansplaining” in feminist theory. Memetic
rhetoricians often “memesplain” by posting pictures of memes without much description, or will devote vast amounts of space
within a piece to describe what is already known by the reader, as in the case of “mansplaining.” Several publications within
economics and linguistics have rejected pieces that “memesplain” due to it being used as a tool to have a piece with some sort
of pseudo-statistical connection.
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image macro discussion rather than other popular meme formats that have become more relevant

in recent years in most discussions.

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Worked Cited

Daniels, Jessie. “Race and racism in Internet Studies: A review and critique.” new media

and society, vol. 15, no. 2, 2012, pp. 695-719.

Dennett, Daniel C. “Memes and the Exploitation of Imagination.” The Journal of

Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 48, no. 2, 1990, pp. 127-135.

Don. “Ugandan Knuckles.” Know Your Meme, Cheezburger Network, 3 Jan. 2018,

knowyourmeme.com/memes/ugandan-knuckles. Web. Accessed 10 Feb 2019.

Drekwiz. “Russian Knuckles.” twitch.tv. Jan. 2018. https://clips.twitch.tv/

AnnoyingDoubtfulRedpandaDuDudu. Accessed 12 Feb. 2019.

Gregzilla. “knuckles sings.” YouTube, 7 March 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=iu7SxzFbp-I. Accessed 12 March 2019.

Gries, Laurie E. “Emerging Methods of Visual Rhetorics.” JAC, vol. 29, no. 1/2, 2009, pp.

437-450.

Gries, Laurie E. Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics.

Bolder: University Press of Colorado, 2015, pp. 1-21.

Hathaway, Jay. “The Racist Ugandan Knuckles Meme Is Spreading to Competitive

Gaming.” The Daily Dot, 25 Jan. 2018, https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/

ugandan-knuckles-meme-overwatch/.

Hocks, Mary E. “Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments.”

College Composition and Communication, vol. 54, no. 4, pp. 629-656.

Huntington, Heidi E. “Subversive Memes: Internet Memes as a Form of Visual

Rhetoric.” Selected Papers of Internet Research, vol. 14, pp. 1-3.

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McComiskey, Bruce. “Visual Rhetoric and the New Public Discourse.” JAC, vol. 24, no.

1, 2004, pp. 187-206.

Milner, Ryan M. The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory

Media, Kindle ed. MIT Press, 2016.

Molina, Brett. “The Ugandan Knuckles, ‘do You Know de Wey’ Meme Explained.” USA

TODAY, 9 Feb. 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/02/09/

ugandan-knuckles-do-you-know-de-wey-meme-explained/307575002/.

Nagle, Angela. “The New Man of 4chan.” The Baffler, no. 30, 2016, pp. 64–76.

Prier, Jarred. “Commanding the Trend: Social Media as Information Warfare.” Strategic Studies

Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 4., 2017, pp. 50-85.

@Razer (R A Z E R). “We shared a tweet from a member of our community. It was

highlighted to us that the meme shared may have negative undertones. We

reached out to the user who clarified he was unaware of the connotations and had

no ill-will. Both parties decided it was best to remove the content.” Twitter, 27

Jan. 2018 11:04 p.m. https://twitter.com/Razer/status/957464373294854144.

Shifman, Limor. “The Cultural Logic of Photo-Based Meme Genres.” Journal of Visual Culture,

edited by Laine Nooney and Laura Portwood-Stacer, vol. 13, no. 3, Dec. 2014, pp. 340–

358. Crossref, doi:10.1177/1470412914546577.

@sonic_the_hedgehog (Sonic the Hedgehog). “Let us show you the way… to make the

world a better place. bit.ly/donateforuganda." Twitter, 11 Jan. 2018 1:23 p.m.

https://twitter.com/sonic_hedgehog/status/951519837351591936?.

Stahlsby. “YOU DO NOT KNOW THE WAY.” YouTube, 22 December 2017. https://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxjofn2bYE8. Accessed 12 March 2019.

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Syrmor. “DO YOU KNOW THE WAY | VRchat.” YouTube. 1 January 2018. https://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eix7fLsS058. Accessed 12 March 2019.

tidiestflyer. “The Knuckles meme as a 3D model.” DeviantArt. September 2017. https://

www.deviantart.com/tidiestflyer/art/The-Knuckles-meme-as-a-3d-model-704695335.

Accessed 13 March 2019.

“Ugandan Knuckles Holding a Spear.” Know Your Meme, Cheezburger Network, Jan.

2018, i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/mobile/000/025/067/ugandanknuck.jpg.