Woke R Kelly

About

After R Kelly’s 2019 interview with Gayle King, the singer was mocked because of his disgruntled attitude and trying to turn himself into a victim. The memes made about R Kelly’s interview then turned into the “R Kelly Woke meme” which essentially makes fun of “obnoxiously woke” tweets. The tweet was first seen in May 2019 by Twitter user @TevinsAGenius. Soon after the tweet started gaining traction through the black community on twitter and soon evolved to just a reaction picture for conspiracy theories or if someone explains something complicated. Although this meme started in May 2019, there have been many parodies of the meme using other iconic characters/celebrities such as Squidward from Spongebob Squarepants, Drake, and many more. This particular meme can be found throughout several platforms such as Twitter, where it originated, Reddit, and Tumblr. This meme is particularly noteworthy because it originally commented on the charges that R Kelly faced in 2019 which was very big news in pop culture. It also took a very influential turn when young African Americans utilized the meme in order to make social commentary about culture. By tweeting about the same themes of woke culture to an exaggerated degree allows young Twitter users to lampoon the self-serious social justice warriors on Twitter. Recently, people have been participating in the meme by editing the Kufi hat onto many other characters and celebrities and using it as a reaction picture.

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Origin

The earliest known instance of the meme was on May 8, 2019 on Twitter. This first tweet was captioned “ Hancock was a film about black men getting weaker once they let a white woman into their life”. The meme was first seen on Twitter created by @TevinsAGenius.

Spread

Since the original tweet was posted on Twitter, it has gained 22.8K retweets and 70.2K likes on Twitter. Needless to say the original tweet went viral and which can only imply how viral the meme itself is along multiple platforms. Along with the original meme on Twitter, Reddit was also responsible for several variations of the R Kelly meme. The DankMemes community on Reddit with 3.4 million followers has contributed heavily to the spread of this meme. One very popular reddit post using the R Kelly woke meme was captioned, “Y’all watch One Piece but won’t REALIZE the multiple pieces of your culture that’s missing due to the WHITES who enslaved us”. This was originally tweeted by @starrboyyq on Twitter and received 98 retweets and 102 likes on Twitter. The tweet was then posted on reddit and received 406 views and 56 comments on the post. Most examples of this meme are image based and do not have text. Another spin off of the meme was by @yolopallison_ on Twitter. The caption was “instead of worrying about your HEIGHT work on yourself so you can reach new HEIGHTS”. This is a good example of how the meme transformed into other forms straying from the original purpose which critiqued woke Twitter.

Various Examples

Search Interest

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External References