Wait a Minute, I'm White!

Submission 3,465

Part of a series on The Boondocks. [View Related Entries]

About

Wait a Minute, I'm White! refers to a scene from the satirical animated series The Boondocks in which a white character steps away from a potential conflict with a Black individual after remembering that he is white. The scene, which continues with the Black character telling the man to turn back as this is "a perfectly good moment to throw your life away," has been used as the source material for memes since early 2022, with users altering the dialogue to indicate that they are not falling for rage bait.

Origin

On November 27th, 2005, episode four "Granddad's Fight" of the American television series The Boondocks premiered.^[1] The episode opens with protagonist Huey Freeman bringing up two examples of a random street conflict, first between two Black men, which ends in a shootout, and then between a Black man and a white man, with the white man simply walking away (scene shown below).

- Prick.
- Watch where you walking, bitch!
- What did you- Wait a minute, I'm white!
- Where are you going? Don't you ignore me! This is a perfectly good moment to throw your life away!

On March 19th, 2022, Redditor P0wer0fL0ve posted the earliest found meme based on the scene, recontextualizing it to make a joke about chess. The post (shown below) garnered over 7,700 upvotes in the /r/AnarchyChess^[2] subreddit and was widely circulated^[3]^[4] online in the following years.

Spread

The scene did not see active use in memes until August 2024. On August 16th, 2024, X^[5] user @Pogling2 used the scene to react to Armored Walls getting added back to Fortnite, gaining over 9,500 reposts and 135,000 likes in three months.

On August 17th, X^[6] user @lazt_puns responded with a follow-up meme based on a frame from the next shot, which received over 420 reposts and 14,000 likes in the same period (exchange shown below). On August 17th, iFunny^[7] user ijace reposted the exchange, with the post gaining over 20,000 smiles in three months.

On October 25th, 2024, an anonymous 4chan user posted the image in a /v/^[8] thread in a humorous post about online arguments over modern video games. In the same thread, an anonymous user replied with a meme based on the follow-up frame (shown below). Screenshots of the exchange went viral online, with multiple reposts being shared on Reddit^[9] and X^[10] in the following days.

In late October and early November, the meme format saw further spread online, primarily on 4chan and X.