Peter Griffin’s Journey From Immigration to Racism
The source image for the meme of focus, as shown above, derives from a specific episode of Family Guy in 2013, where one of the main characters, Peter Griffin, is about to unknowingly do an act of terror on behalf of a Muslim terrorist group and manages to pass through a toll stop thanks to his lighter skin unlike his Muslim friends. This somewhat humorous demonstration of how people are treated differently based on the color of their skin has managed to pop up and be composed into memes in recent years bringing awareness and attention to America’s discriminatory problems. Most recently, it has been used to shed light and bring attention to the recent Capitol Hill breach and how the white protesters or rioters depending on your perspective were given much more freedom in terms of both mobility and the ability to act violently in comparison to the recent black protests.
ORIGINS
Although it is difficult to pinpoint when the first meme derived from this specific Family Guy image popped up, based on some apparent observation, the first big noticeable surge in such a meme appeared about nearly five years ago (aka 2016). This was around the time when Trump and his supporters brought a renewed focus on immigrants. Although the problem of how immigrants should be treated has long been on the political agenda, Trump intensified the issue to a heightened level of attention. Ever since then until about a year ago, there were memes, alike to the ones shown to the left, composed and recomposed to gain traction against the discriminatory policies and attitudes immigrants suffered from.
Nearly 8 months ago (May 25, 2020), though, the nature of this meme changed as the agenda switched from a focus on battling for immigrants to battling for the Black Lives Matter movement. This change in how such memes were recomposed was brought about by the death of George Floyd and the subsequent protests. These specific changes and recompositions in the meme was fueled by both the protesters as well as by sympathizers. As mentioned in the beginning, though, there was again a new surge for the recomposition of this meme due to the recent Capitol Hill Breach. This event renewed the attention on how unequal white and black protesters were being treated as the police were far less militant to the more aggressive white protesters. Since then, this Family Guy meme has been recomposed multiple times to specifically describe how white protesters were almost given a free entry through Capitol Hill.
DISSEMINAITON
The meme of focus, shown once again, was presented within the Twitter discourse community, specifically within its #civilwar2021 forum. This same meme has also managed to up on this forum multiple times after it was initially tweeted. Some of these forums also managed to spread across other discourse communities such as Reddit, Tumblr, etc. and back into Twitter. After a bit of searching around on the internet, one can even find this meme in other obscure discourse communities with very big to very little recomposition if at all. Overall, this meme has been refined with little additions within a short period of time to represent the same thing, the Capitol Hill breach.
This meme is full of intertextuality and underlying connections in the meaning that not only has it been refined throughout various discourse communities but also by the fact that it presupposes that the audience knows what Family Guy is, the intricacies of the Capitol Hill Breach, and at least a general notion of racism in America along with its subsequent outreach into police discrimination. In other words, the meme presupposes that the audience understands the rhetorical situation in which this meme was placed such as what happened at Capitol Hill and how differently the police reacted to these white demonstrators in comparison to black demonstrators. These presupposions are emphasized by how the meme shows how white protesters, represented by Peter Griffin with a MAGA hat, are almost given free access and mobility through Capitol Hill despite being much more aggressive than black demonstrators which are again presupposed by the creator or creators of the meme. The iterability of the meme is demonstrated by the meme in almost all its parts as this meme only exists as an accumulation of different additions in a web of alike memes such as the MAGA hat, the targeted spot on Peter Griffin’s arm, and even the source image itself. Basically, this meme is just another derivative that has and will continue to contribute to more derivatives of alike memes that will either be aimed again towards the current context of the Capitol Hill Breach or towards another likely notable event within the distant future. Still, the only way it can continue to disseminate and change for more additional derivative like memes is through the complex network within and across discourse communities.
PRESENT TO FUTURE
Right now, the momentum of the meme of focus and its derivatives towards addressing discriminatory practices does not seem like its going to stop anytime soon. This is seen from the fact that civil right issues have gained traction in a way that allows for the aforementioned meme to effectively stick to it. Its ease of continuous dissemination into the future is founded on the fact that this meme has already proven to be very representational of many of the discriminatory situations at hand but also due to its humorous and unique appeal.
Despite the fact that the meme and its alike derivatives will likely continue to be mainly focused on issues of racism and discriminatory treatment, this does not mean that it cannot focus on the more lighthearted issues as demonstrated with the meme on the left. These memes, although still dealing with the color of one’s skin, they are much more lighthearted in terms of sensitivity, and they do not, at least directly deal with the discriminatory facets of society. Be this as it may, such lighthearted memes are still in the minority and are unlikely to replicate the popularity of the memes that invoke issues of race and discriminatory practices.
