About

Racists on 4chan, also known as "Niggerwalks", is a four-pane comic series that parodies the drastic discrepancies between how a typical bigot interacts with minorities in real-life, and the racist comments that run rampant on sites like 4chan. Most instances usually begin with a brief exchange between two pedestrians of different ethnicity, and ends with one of them posting a hateful message about the encounter on 4chan. Other variations have drifted from the subject of race to wide variety of different rivalries.

Origin

The first "niggerwalk" comics were first spotted on /new/ (news) board in November of 2010. After the discontinuation of /new/ on January 18th, 2011, the comics disappeared for several weeks before returning on the /b/ (random) board in February.

The original instances of the series depict a street encounter between white and black pedestrians where the black guy intimidates the white guy by taunting him, inspiring the white guy to post a message on /new/ about how much he despises black people in revenge. The purpose of the comic is to illustrate the differences between the actions and words of a typical 4chan user.

Spread

While the scope of the joke was initially limited to various encounters between whites and blacks, it quickly spawned derivatives providing commentaries on other inter-ethnic or intercultural tensions. Some of the notable expansions involve similar encounters between Israelis and Palestinians, Asian and African Americans, Europeans and Americans, as well as men and women. On the Body Building Forums^[3], the comics were posted in a thread responding to a question asking if racists on the Internet act the same way in real life. Comics also began referencing rivalries that had nothing to do with ethnicity including a variety of fandoms, fictional characters and even animals. An archived 4chan thread^[1] from December 30th, 2010 and another^[2] from December 31st, 2010, show many instances illustrating how the comic expanded in reach.

Various Examples

Blank Templates

For the comics, there are two versions of templates in common usage: one for the original White vs. Black encounter, the other for user-customized encounters.

Characters

External References

^[1] Chanarchive – life of a butthurt new poster

^[2] Chanarchive – OC Comics

^[3] Body Building Forums – People that are directly racist/prejudice on the internet, how are they in real life?