Apparently I missed all the racist versions of him. I have literally never seen an even mildly racist Pepe, rare or not. This has always been such a pure meme. Personally, I don't think it's okay to label such a generalized meme as inherently racist. A meme made exclusively to talk about something racist you did, maybe, but Pepe has always had so little focus and meaning that I don't think you can give it any one tone and decide that's what it's for. To me, memes have always been a form of art, and each individual meme is like a different form of art. I think of it like those Andy Warhol prints that everyone likes to do versions of, you know the ones, with four color shifted versions of the same picture. If a group started doing those with nothing but various pictures of Hitler we wouldn't label the art style as racist or fascist. There's nothing about Pepe himself that has anything to do with a negative stereotype about any race. People are using the meme negatively, and that's shitty, but it doesn't make it a negative meme. Tl;dr: Some people are using a meme poorly and it's ruining it for the rest of us.
When the Clinton campaign started up that crap was when I decided, "Nope, I'm out," on the whole Presidential race.
How frequently did you hang around 4chan and the seedier parts of Reddit back... three years ago, maybe? edit: Also ftr, there is a Pepe thread in FiD.
The ADL (Anti Defamation League) put Pepe in the same categories as the swastika and the confederate flag in terms of racist symbols. However their statement said: "In recent years, the growth of the "alt right" segment of the white supremacist movement, a segment that draws some of it's support from the above-mentioned internet sites (that includes 4chan and reddit), the number of "alt right" Pepe memes has grown, a tendency exacerbated by the controversial and contentious 2016 presidential election. [...] However, because so many Pepe the Frog memes are not bigoted in nature, it is important to examine the use of the meme only in context." So. Yeah. That's the bare bone facts of the case and the question at hand LOL.
