‘This movie ain’t for you’ becomes a dark ‘Black Panther’ meme
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‘This movie ain’t for you’ becomes a dark ‘Black Panther’ meme

The fake attacks are being mocked.

Black Panther/Marvel

Jay Hathaway— | Last updated

A handful of people attempted to sabotage the premiere of Marvel’s Black Panther by falsely claiming they were attacked by black moviegoers when they tried to see the film. It hasn’t gone well for these fakers. First, they were called out in the media, and now they’re being gleefully mocked all over Twitter.

In a slew of parody posts, jokesters are trying to one-up each other with comically unbelievable tales of being attacked at Black Panther showings. The idea is to take the original tweets, which already beggared belief, and crank the absurdity level up even higher.

Many have seized on a phrase that stuck out in one of the fake tweets—”this movie ain’t for you, whitey”—as a particularly ludicrous white-people assumption about the way black people talk, and that phrase now forms the core of the joke.

For example:

Some of the jokes flip the races in the original fake tweets, replacing Black Panther with the whitest movie they can think of:

This meme is darkly funny if you can forget the stupid reason it even exists: because of a few people who hated the idea of a popular black Marvel superhero so much, they faked injuries to discredit it. Remember Ashley Todd, the 2008 John McCain supporter who carved a “B” into her own forehead and blamed it on the Obama campaign? The fake Black Panther attacks are basically the same thing, but with a superhero instead of a future president. This isn’t the first fraudulent race scare, and it won’t be the last. At least social media is more equipped to call out and castigate the perpetrators (and to find some humor in a dumb situation) than it was 10 years ago.

Jay Hathaway

Jay Hathaway

Jay Hathaway is a former senior writer who specialized in internet memes and weird online culture. He previously served as the Daily Dot’s news editor, was a staff writer at Gawker, and edited the classic websites Urlesque and Download Squad. His work has also appeared on nymag.com, suicidegirls.com, and the Morning News.

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