Who Was in Paris?

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Part of a series on Kanye West / Ye. [View Related Entries]

About

Who Was in Paris? is a rhetorical question asked by users on social media, assumedly targeted towards non-POC, the answer to which is the n-word, making reference to Jay-Z and Kanye West's 2012 song "Niggas In Paris."^[1] The format is similar to Don't Say The N-Word memes.

Origin

On January 31st, 2020, mccoollin uploaded an image of rapper Lil Pump pointing a gun with the overlaid caption, "Oh you like Kanye West? Tell me who is in Paris then" to /r/okbuddyretard ^[6] garnering over 200 upvotes in 10 months (shown below). This is the earliest known instance of the question on the web.

Spread

On August 17th, 2020, firstnamerany posted a tweet^[2] reading, "Oh you a kanye fan huh? Who was in pairs?" garnering 1 like in 4 months. The next day on August 18th, GabeDontMiss tweeted^[3] a similar joke, "Oh, you're a Kanye west fan? Then who was in Paris?" garnering over 4,600 likes and 320 retweets (shown below). These are the earliest times the question was asked on Twitter. The joke was reworded and spread across Twitter over the months.^[4]^[5]

On August 21st, 2020, bbrandonbrown22 uploaded a video to TikTok ^[7] in which he asks his roommates, "If you're a Kanye fan, who was in Paris?" to which the roommates tell him they can't answer that (shown below). The video gained over 1.7 million views and 300,000 likes in just under 4 months.

Around December, a deep fried image of an animated Kanye West with a caption asking the question began circulating social media (shown below, left). It's unknown who created this meme, with one of the earliest uploads happening on December 5th by Instagram page ball_suckler.^[9] On December 9th, Twitter^[10] user ech0astral posted a re-labeled version of Pat Cross's comic "Under Duress"^[8] to Twitter with the speech bubble changed to, "who was in paris?" garnering over 74,000 likes and 5,400 retweets in 5 days (shown below, right).

Many Twitter users made posts reacting comically to the question. For example, on December 6th, roachswallower posted a photo of streamer Ninja next to the Eiffel Tower under the caption, "I finally found out who was in Paris" (shown below, left). On December 7th, KirklundTheKid posted an image of Kanye and Jay-Z photoshopped to look white with the overlaid caption "Gentlemen in Paris" and the tweet caption, "Oh ur a kanye fan? Who was in Paris?" Non-black people:" (shown below, right).