Black Guy in Suit Drawing

Successful Black Man

About

Successful Black Man is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photo of a black man dressed in business attire superimposed in front of a brown and beige color wheel background. The jokes typically employ a bait-and-switch format with the top caption appearing to set-up a stereotype about African Americans followed by a bottom caption rendering the phrase innocuous, in similar vein to the Ordinary Muslim Man advice animal character.

Origin

The original photograph of the suit-wearing black man (shown below, left) can be found on the stock photo website ShutterStock^[2] under the title "Handsome African American business man dressed in a black suit." According to an anonymous e-mail sent to Know Your Meme staff from the creator of the image macro series, the idea was first inspired by reverse-discrimination discussions at work. Both the template (shown below, right) and original instances were first submitted in several threads on the imageboard 4chan before a page was made on the image macro creation website Meme Generator^[1] in 2010.

suit standing professional gentleman business executive formal wear businessperson white collar worker business

Richard Dawkins Viruses of the Mind suit professional official business executive chin businessperson forehead

I am the creator of Successful negro and thought I would fill you in on the exact details. This email address and name are made up as I wish to remain Anonymous, but you may call me Michelle Gellar.
It originated on 4chan and THEN spread to memegenerator.net. I put it on memegenerator only because I grew tired of manually editing the image for each macro or request. I tested the idea in several threads on 4chan and posted the template on several occasions. When memegenerator.net updated their website, I lost access for editing the entry so I just left it to be. (You can still see some white pixels around the man and his suit where I cropped it from the original image, since I wasn't able to upload a corrected version).

By far, the biggest challenge was finding an appropriate character. It took several tries to find the right "negro" but eventually I settled on what now exists. Thanks Google!

Spread

The meme initially continued to spread primarily on Meme Generator and 4chan's /b/ (random) board. On February 25th, 2010, a compilation of notable examples from the series were submitted to the Internet humor site FunnyJunk^[9] by user SamuelOak, receiving over 39,000 views and 448 up votes within the next three years. On September 14th, the "Successful Black Man" Tumblr^[10] blog was launched, which continued highlighting image macros from the series until November of 2011. On November 5th, a slideshow of "Successful Negro" image macros were published on the Internet humor site Ebaumsworld.^[5] On December 28th, BodyBuilding Forums^[3] member aaandrew submitted a thread inviting other members to post their favorite examples from the series. On August 31st, the Internet news blog UpRoxx^[8] published an article about the series, calling it "borderline offensive, but hilarious." On October 6th, an anonymous 4chan^[6] user started a "Successful Black Guy" thread on the site's /b/ board, where it received over 115 responses prior to being archived.