Carving Out Joy: Carlton Mackey on the Space Black Men Smile Was Built to Fill
ATLANTA — In 2014, Carlton Mackey typed three words into Instagram and got nothing back. That absence became the foundation for Black Men Smile, a movement now a decade deep into changing what the internet associates with Black men. GZTV's Behind The Lens, Episode 5, sponsored by Hollyland, tells the story of how it started.
Mackey is the director of the Ethics & the Arts program at Emory University's Center for Ethics, an award-winning photographer and filmmaker, and the creator of several socially engaged art platforms, including Beautiful in Every Shade and the book 50 Shades of Black. But Black Men Smile began not in a classroom or a gallery, but in the aftermath of a killing.
The movement traces back to 2014, a year Mackey remembers as a string of Black men killed and hashtagged into public memory: Trayvon Martin, then Mike Brown. Brown's death hit differently. Mackey saw images of his body lying in the street, and the weight of that moment sat heavy on him, a mix of fear, anger, and helplessness he needed somewhere to put. He watched people turn to social media to voice their outcry, and he watched, at the same time, how casually Black men were being treated as disposable.
So he ran an experiment. He searched hashtags associated with Black men and watched what populated: sex symbols, physiques, athletes, celebrities. Mackey was a father, an educated man, deeply involved in his community, and none of that showed up. What did show up, reliably, was the negative. Then he tried something more specific: #BlackMenSmile. Zero results. Not one image on Instagram had ever paired those three words together, despite plenty of photos existing of Black men smiling. He'd have gotten more results searching bubble gum on a shoe. Nowhere was anyone documenting Black male joy as its own category.
He couldn't accept that. The gap became the opening: a space he realized needed to be carved out on purpose, a place to rest from the negativity and damaging imagery saturating that moment. Mackey, who had already been working as a photographer, shooting weddings among other things, posted the first image under #BlackMenSmile using a photo from a friend's wedding: Black men laughing, genuinely enjoying each other's company. That single post became the beginning of a movement that has since grown into a national platform, drawing collaborations that in 2024 included a run of Black Men Smile apparel sold in Target stores nationwide for Black History Month.
Watch Episode 5 of Behind The Lens, sponsored by Hollyland, and hear Carlton Mackey's full story behind Black Men Smile, now on the GZTV app.
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