https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-sciences/article/memeing-scientific-racism-the-digital-reframing-of-racialist-ideologies/AB2FF34C7F0DB14E9C23E6713668E797

Memeing Scientific Racism: The Digital Reframing of
Racialist Ideologies
Sarah Rodriguez-Louette
CREW Sorbonne Nouvelle University Paris 3
Abstract
This article examines how racialised memes circulating on revive scientific racism,
demonstrating
that
hybrid formats
reconfigure
biological
essentialisation within
contemporary digital culture. Using a corpus of 68 viral items and four case studies, our
analysis applies Shifman’s content-form-stance model, informed cognitive psychology.
We show that these memes adopt common scientific conventions while relying on visual
polarisation, whereby rapid perceptual contrasts stand in for argument. Familiar templates,
reinforced selective algorithmic amplification, create a sense of perceptual legitimacy
through fast categorisation and pre-attentive processing. We also trace how these cognitive
shortcuts provide the basis for a regime of racialisation tailored to digitally immersed male
audiences, producing gendered behavioural stereotypes and disappearance anxieties. A
further pattern is the recoding of older racial hierarchies into neutral-sounding language of
competence, allowing these ideas to travel across racialist, masculinist, techno-elitist, and
anti-DEI communities. In this environment, memes work as micro-infrastructures of
classification that align claims to objectivity with affect and platform incentives, making
inequality appear natural and necessary. We conclude that effective critique must meet these
images on their own terrain, with a pedagogy of the gaze that teaches publics how to
recognise and challenge persuasion in meme-driven spaces.