In which I feel some responsibility to point out that the phrase “the black pill” is not owned by incels

May 5, 2022

If you’re like me, you remember “Pepe the Frog” fondly. (“It’s dat boi!”). Not because of the Nazi connotations the meme later became associated with, but I remember it fondly just for it, as it was, before the scum settled onto it. Pepe the Frog, after all, was not originally anything to do with the alt-right nonsense. A cursory search on the ‘net will reveal that. I remember the days very fondly when Pepe was just Pepe, and not co-opted into a hate symbol. The alt-right doesn’t own dat boi Pepe. 

Isn’t it kind of pathetic that once again the arch-conservative meme is a blatant cooptation of another’s work? This time, I’m concerned with the phrase “the black pill” which is apparently now big in the incel “movement” - although what about that is a movement, I couldn’t tell ya. 

I’m a little tepid about this academic trend of studying the alt-right and extremists on the ‘net, because they really do it with terrible blinders on. If you search for papers with the phrase “black pill”, the academic consensus of those researchers of the alt-right is that it originated from a comment on an anti-feminist blog post from 2011. But, they must mean to say that it is only in the context of the alt-right that the phrase “started” there. Because “the black pill”, like Pepe, was co-opted from another source, and a completely opposite kind of meaning. The incels don’t own “the black pill”.

There are three major references to the phrase “the black pill” before 2010 - which is when the first publicly co-opted use of the term was posted - that even a public search engine found. 

The first reference overall is from 1895, and written maybe 1886, in a handwritten manuscript by Rudyard Kipling. It’s slightly racialized in that Kipling kind of way, and seems to portray a British colonial administrator who likes opium, and not only, perhaps, for the purpose of sedating horses. The reference “black pill” in the context of opium or painkillers is seen in some medical publications too, of more recent provenance. 

The second reference is to one of those “CIA rumors” you often hear about on the open ‘net. That comes in about the year 2000. It’s supposedly a truth serum, and the same article asserts that it is a rumor only. 

The third reference is the funniest nail in the coffin for this incel theory for the origin of the phrase “black pill”. In fact, if we set the scope to include only pop culture from the 2000’s, this is the origin of the phrase “the black pill”: the track “They Say”by Common, feat. Kanye West, on Common’s 2005 album Be. The direct quote is from Common’s opening verse: 

I’m the black pill in the Matrix, the saturated life

Now, not only is this the first post-millennium pop culture reference to “the black pill”, but we know that Common meant something entirely different when he wrote that. We know that because there is a website called RapGenius (now just called Genius) where artists can annotate their own verses, and Common annotated that exact phrase, in video form, on RapGenius. 

You can see his explanation for yourself. I think it’s fairly paraphrased that “the black pill” in the original formulation by Common shows you the need for diversity and multiculturalism to overcome the oppressive sameness and lack of originality of the modern world. 

You can see how clearly this phrase was co-opted to mean something in the exact opposite realm of what it used to mean - as a concept, i.e. not as a drug or medicine - and that this is, once again, a Pepe situation. The alt-right very clearly hasn’t a single item of cultural capital that’s original to them; we see that time and time again. 

I left out some other references like a 1981 movie that’s really about opium in the same but less enormous way that The Big Lebowski is about weed (and more!) and a Tibetan Buddhist practice of making black pills for spiritual medicine - all in the interest of getting to the point. 

It’s too bad we were too late in this to save Chris Orrick from having to rebrand his entire back catalog after performing under the name “Red Pill” for a long time. He was Red Pill before there was a toxic masculinity slogan called “red pilling”. But let’s draw a line, here.