Blinking White Guy

Origin

‘Blinking White Guy’, also known as the Drew Scanlon Reaction, is a GIF of a man blinking twice in flat disbelief. The man is Drew Scanlon, then a video editor and podcaster at the video game site Giant Bomb.

It comes from an episode of Giant Bomb’s series Unprofessional Fridays that premiered on December 6th, 2013. While playing Starbound, his colleague Jeff Gerstmann said he was ‘farming with my hoe’ — hoe being both a garden tool and a slur — and Scanlon, beside him, paused and blinked twice. Those few seconds were cut out into a reaction GIF.

Spread

Nothing much happened for a while after the GIF existed. The earliest known use is a comment by NeoGAF user Tokubetsu on July 27th, 2015, attached to a comic about Kanye West and Future. So it took a year and seven months from the source to become a GIF in circulation, and another year and a half from there.

The explosion came on February 5th, 2017, when Twitter user @eksbl posted ‘me: ill take a biology class, im smart enough for this just watch me / teacher: cells / me:’ with the GIF. It drew close to 50,000 retweets and became the standard reaction image overnight. In August 2019 it mutated again into the multi-panel ‘First Guy To’ format, imagining the reaction of the first person ever to experience something.

Scanlon himself put his meme-famous face to public use, fundraising for multiple sclerosis research — an effort covered by NBC News.

Usage

The wordless reaction to hearing something absurd
The ‘me:’ slot after starting out confident and meeting reality
A situation not even worth arguing with, so you just stare

Because it captures a pause — something closer to processing than to anger or laughter — it fits bewilderment precisely. Having no dialogue, it also travels across every language, which is part of why it lasted.