You Aight White Boy

Submission 29,142

Part of a series on Reaction Images. [View Related Entries]

About

You Aight White Boy, sometimes spelled You Alright White Boy, is an exploitable reaction image based on a Gantz manga panel of four Black men hugging a Japanese person (Kei Kurono), recaptioned with the phrase "you aight white boy." Used as a reaction image since 2020, the recaptioned panel also typically includes various characters edited in over the top of Kei Kurono's head.

Origin

On May 19th, 2004, chapter 152 of the manga series Gantz by Hiroya Oku was published.^[1] At the beginning of the chapter, a group of civilian survivors are congratulating the primary protagonist Kei Kurono on defeating Raptor Aliens. One panel shows four Black men hugging Kei and recognizing him as their leader, with Kei appearing confused (shown below).

On February 1st, 2018, a 4chan user on the /tv/ board made a post^[2] that would become the He cute copypasta. The copypasta contained the line "You aight, white boy."

On June 16th, 2018, Redditor cubev10 posted the panel to the /r/anime_irl^[3] subreddit, with the speech bubble recaptioned, "You aight white boy." The post received over 2,600 upvotes in the subreddit in four years (authorship unconfirmed, shown below).

Spread

On September 24th, 2022, Twitter^[4] user @MakellRose posted the earliest found edit of the image, replacing Kei Kurono with basketball player Tyler Herro. The post gained over 15 retweets and 410 likes in two years (shown below, left). On October 16th, 2022, content creator kinofabino tweeted^[5] a Kirby edit of the image that received over 1,200 retweets and 6,600 likes in two years (shown below, right).

Through 2021 and 2022, the image achieved further virality online, particularly with sports fans who replaced Kei Kurono with various white sports players. On December 18th, 2021, YouTuber Demetrius Harmon tweeted^[6] a Tom Holland edit of the image that gained over 9,500 retweets and 89,400 likes in one year (shown below, left). In early January 2022, a version featuring football player Cooper Kupp gained virality on Twitter^[7] (shown below, right).

The panel, used both as a reaction and an exploitable, maintained its popularity throughout 2022.