Not Forgetting Black Lives Matter: Memory, Protest and Counterpublics

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between social networks, protest and memory. It begins by focusing on activists’ attempts to supplement official narratives before going on to explore the way the digital offers mechanisms that both ameliorate and heighten the fear of forgetting. It goes beyond an investigation of the role played by “activists” in these dynamics and reflects upon the memory work undertaken by “ordinary people.” These arguments are underpinned by an analysis of Black Lives Matter hashtags such as #SayHisName. It argues that the ubiquitous and repetitious sharing of tweets in which the names of those who have died at the hands of the police are hashtagged should be understood as an online commemorative practice similar to that undertaken at in real world vigils. Finally, it highlights the way in which the hashtag #SayHerName draws the public’s attention to persistent intersectional inequalities and so expands activist and ordinary people’s understandings of police violence in America and beyond. This article concludes by suggesting that the hashtag #SayTheirNames both recalls the individuals who have already died and anticipates the deaths that are yet to come in an effortful and ritualised moment of not forgetting that Black Lives Matter.

KEYWORDS:

• memory
• protest
• counterpublics
• digital archives
• Black Lives Matter

Introduction

His name was George Floyd. Say his name. Pray for his family. Demand Justice

#BlackLivesMatter #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd

@Blklivesmatter

This piece of research was prompted, in part, by an article in The New York Times published in 2022. It can also be read as a companion piece to an article I wrote on Black Lives Matter for Javnost towards the end of the COVID Pandemic (Ruiz 2022). The New York Times’ article marked the passing of George Floyd¹ who had died at the hands of the police in Minneapolis two years previously. The article is headlined “The Great Erasure” and encapsulates many of the anxieties about remembering and forgetting that we experience as a society. In the piece, Charles M. Blow worries about the erosion of the street art which had sprung up in cities right across America in response to Floyd’s murder. In particular, he worries that young people’s faith in their ability to produce social and political change will be undermined by the way in which the murals are fading before their eyes. The implication here is that America’s failure to preserve the murals is indicative of its failure to change racist dynamics in wider society. Thus, he says:

I worry about young people in all of this. It is their faith that’s the most vulnerable to damage. They were the ones who most believed that change was not only possible but imminent, only to have America retreat and retrench. (Blow 2022, The New York Times)

The article is accompanied by paired photographs of street art which appeared in the days and weeks following George Floyd’s untimely death on the pavement in Minneapolis. In the first of each pair the murals can be seen as they first appeared. This image can be slid away to reveal a photograph of the location as it exists today. There is something fascinating about swiping back and forth between the vividly present as it was then and the almost erased mural as it is now. The contrast between the two images invites us to marvel at the way in which the BLM protests sprung into the streets, interrupting the flow of daily life and demanding that proper attention be paid to the ever-increasing number of black Americans dying as a result of police violence. The narrative of the article encourages us to look at the spaces where the murals were, see the return of cars and the disinterested bystanders wandering past and recognise that something important has been lost.

These photos (and the text that accompanies them) exemplifies what Huyssen has described as the “the public panic of oblivion” (2000, 28). They suggest that the relationship between time and memory is characterised by erosion and ultimately erasure. In this context it is easy to forget that “we do not read memory itself but its transformation through writing” (Burke 2011, 189). In this instance, memory is being externalised (Halbwachs 1950) and read not just through words but also through images. Those brightly coloured murals not only continue to exist in the city—albeit in a faded and embedded form—but also exist on the pages and screens which we hold in our hands even as we mourn their loss. Indeed, one could argue that The New York Times’ digitalisation of those murals is one of many successful attempts to capture and stretch out the peak of each activist wave, holding off the moment of inevitable decline.

The digitalisation of Black Lives Matter street art by The New York Times and the article which contextualises them, conflates memory and storage. Hui Kyong Chun argues that a process such as this “both underlies and undermines digital media’s archival promise” (2008, 148). In this article I want to explore the ways in which the fear of erasure is grounded in a conceptualisation of the media as the storage place of memory. I will reflect upon two models which equate memory with storage in different ways and argue that while these contribute to our understanding of the memory work of activists, they overlook the memory work of those who might not define themselves as activists, but as “ordinary people.” In doing so, I will suggest that a model which focuses on the rituals of remembering rather than the transmission of information helps us to better understand the relationship between “ordinary people,” protest, and memory. These arguments will be illustrated by focusing on the Twitter response to the death of George Floyd with particular reference to the retweeting of hashtags.

The Fear of Forgetting Black Lives

We stand with you and we love you.

#BlackLivesMatter #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd

@nickjonas

In her article “Plenitude, scarcity and the circulation of cultural memory,” Ann Rigney uses two similar but different metaphors to discuss the ways in which we both remember and forget. Firstly, she describes memory as water in a leaky bucket. In this model, memories constantly disappear as they are transmitted from generation to generation. She says that memories are like “water transported in a leaky bucket which slowly runs dry” and suggests that memories “are continuously being lost along the way” (2006, 12). According to this view, memory is something which must be tended, nurtured and conserved in an inevitably doomed attempt to counteract the many ways in which “the richness of experience fades and those who did the experiencing die out” (2006, 12). Through the lens of this diminishing plenitude metaphor, the sliding photographs in The New York Times article both illustrate the loss of memory while at the same time attempting to conserve memories and pass them on to the next generation of young activists.

Before going on to examine the role played by the memory work of ordinary people in the development of the Black Lives Matter movement, it is helpful to pause for a moment, and to reflect a little further upon the nature of forgetting. Connerton’s notion of Repressive Erasure refers to the way in which memories that do not coincide with those of the state are, at best, allowed to fall away, and are at worst brutally destroyed. Forgetting may be repressive and purposeful, as when the state erases the experience of particular communities from national narratives, or it may be more benignly prescriptive such as when forgetting is seen as a way of resolving civil conflict and securing the polis (Meier 1996). Consequently, the loss of memories as Rigney’s bucket passes from generation to generations is not only accidental, it is often also purposeful.

In the context of Black Lives Matter, the dynamics around forgetting are as significant as those of remembering. As Weedon and Jordan (2012, 145) argue, the process of placing memories within more general narratives depends upon “a large measure of selection and forgetting that represents interests in the present.” The American state has not gathered or maintained any statistics on the number of deaths through police violence in the US (Liebermann 2021). Individuals killed by the police are remembered by their loved ones in their immediate communities. In some instances, particularly those in which the moment of death has been recorded on a mobile phone and then circulated through social networks, these deaths momentarily become part of a national and even global narrative (Ruiz 2015, 2017, 2022). However, the lack of longitudinal data means that the collective experience of these deaths (and their subsequent representation to wider publics) has been allowed—inadvertently or deliberately—to drop out of official narratives extending over time, disallowing a sustained response.

In this context, forgetting can be seen as a top-down phenomenon which prevents the linking up of private experiences into a public understanding of police violence. As Ferrarotti (1990, 30) points out, “memory is not simply an individual question. It has a base, a link with the community. It is at bottom a community experience. It involves the group, the collective unconscious, a stream of unconscious which links everything.” Thus, these individualised—rather than collectivised—dynamics coalesce to create what Liebermann (2021, 715) describes as “sanctioned memory” characterised by a dissociation in the public mind between past and present. In this context, sites such as Campaign Zero stand as a direct corrective to the “perceived ungrievability of Black Lives” in the wider public sphere (Liebermann 2021, 715).

Connerton (2008, 59) argues that the debate on cultural memory has been shaped by a sense in which “remembering and commemorating is usually a virtue and that forgetting is necessarily a failing.” According to this view forgetting is a failure to remember. The fear that the current generation will somehow fail to stem, or at least to slow, the flow of memories out of the bucket and therefore have nothing to pass on to the next generation of “young people” runs through The New York Times article. The movement of memories from one generation to the next is key to the Black Lives Matter movement as it seeks to connect individual deaths across time in order to reveal and then challenge the dynamics which underpin racism in general and police violence in particular. As such, it can be understood as a form of political action which “is informed by memory that is aimed at changing society” (Rigney 2021, 299)

Remembering Black Lives

George Floyd did not deserve this. This was not an isolated incident and it must end.

#BlackLivesMatter

@leaMichele

Social movements have responded to these dynamics in a number of ways. In many instances they have worked hard to both produce and preserve their own narratives and to get those narratives recognised by and incorporated into mainstream accounts. For example, in the context of Black Lives Matter these dynamics are being countered by the creation of crowd-sourced digital maps which gather together, often in real time, these individualised experiences/memories into a shared or collective understanding of police violence and its consequences. For example, Campaign Zero, which was launched in August of 2015 in response to protests against the killing of civilians by police, is a research-based platform which aims to move to an understanding of public safety beyond policing. It has compiled the most comprehensive database on killings by police. This data includes victims’ demographics, the circumstances in which the killings took place, the weapons used and other relevant information which allows us to understand the impact on different American communities. When organisations such as Campaign Zero gathered together individual accounts into maps which reflect different communities’ experiences of police violence across America, they make such commonalities visible. This is key because, as Olick argues, “It’s not just that we remember as members of a group, but that we constitute those groups and their members simultaneously in the act of re-membering” (2011, 227).

Black Lives Matter activists’ creation of maps recording the total number of deaths as a result of police violence can be read as an attempt to correct an incomplete archive by stopping the leaks in the bucket. Tech in general, and the internet in particular, is playing a familiar role within these dynamics. This is not in itself a new phenomenon. Benedict Anderson maintains that “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact … are imagined” (1983, 6). He goes onto suggest that the technologies used by a community to communicate that collective sense of self are of primary significance. In this way, the invention of the printing press played a key role in the creation of the modern nation state and, by extension, the advent of the internet can be read as having been central to the unfolding process of globalisation. The shift from an industrial to an informational economy and the centrality of mediation has inevitably impacted upon memory work around the construction of political action and collective identities (Cammaerts 2012; Castells 2007).

Memory Activism and Counterpublics

How many more times must this happen for us to matter? How many more lives must we lose?

BLACK LIVES MATTER #AltonSterling²

@Zendaya

Technologically mediated spaces can constitute public spheres in which ordinary people come together and agree a consensus as to what constitutes the common good. The role played by specific mediums within these dynamics has been the subject of sustained academic attention (Anderson 1983; Castells 2007; Dayan and Katz 1992; Papacharissi 2002). Negt and Klunge developed Habermas' notion of the public sphere (Habermas 1974) by proposing the notion of the counterpublic. A counterpublic can be understood as the organisation of experience in a space characterised by process rather than state (Negt, Kluge, and Labanyi 1988). As such, they argue that counterpublics are articulated through “intellectual practices” such as the production of books (Negt 2006, 120). In the arguments that follow I suggest that the production and circulation of hashtags remembering the dead are a form of “memory activism” (Rigney 2021, 299) which brings digital counterpublics into being.

Nancy Fraser (1990, 69) argues that counterpublics have two functions: “On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed towards wider publics.” Squires (2002, 459) refines this model further in the context of African American public spheres by making a distinction between enclave, counter and satellite publics. This model separates out Fraser’s dual functions into two distinct and bounded spaces. Enclave publics enable marginalised groups to maintain “culture and group memory” in response to the experience of intense oppression while counterpublics seek to increase communication between marginal and dominant public sphere. Satellite publics are not (usually) bought into being by the dynamics of oppression and therefore fall beyond the scope of this article. The creation of independent archives such as those produced by Campaign Zero calls state-managed archives into dialogue about the exclusion of certain groups’ experiences and memories. The memory work undertaken by these activists in online counterpublics seeks to address the gap created by the memory work not being undertaken by officials in the public sphere. Thus, their memory activism enables memories to move from counter to official spaces and become part of a nationally “sanctioned” past, thus combatting the erasure being experienced by African American communities in the United States.

In contrast the role of memory work in counterpublics such as Twitter is more ambiguous. Looked at over an extended period of time, Black Twitter can be read as a space which enables “opinions, ideas, tactics for survival” to be funnelled back into the mainstream (Squires 2002, 458). However, I would argue that it can also be read as a more distinct and bounded enclave space in which memories can be formulated away from “unwanted publicity” and in direct opposition to the mainstream (Squires 2002, 458). In 2011, 25% of the black population in the US were on Twitter in comparison to 9% of the white population (Smith cited in Brock 2012, 529) Whilst Twitter is a public forum, the use of hashtags to create threads which are specifically black spaces “unconcerned with the mainstream gaze” (Brock 2012, 534) has been widely documented (Brown et al. 2017; Crenshaw et al. 2015; Ince, Rojas, and Davis 2017; Liebermann 2021; Wu et al. 2023). This use of the hashtag to call black spaces into being recalls Gal’s account of the ways in which a gesture or a change in tone can create a distinction between public and private spaces in the offline world (2002). At times one could therefore argue that Black Twitter has acted as an enclave as well as a counterpublic.

The formation of differently orientated digital counterpublics creates spaces in which counter-memories can be formed. As Weedon and Jordan point out, memory is constituted through the “terrain of cultural politics” and is therefore always “shaped by specific interests and power relations” (2012, 144). These cultural and political struggles over voice give rise to “forms of counter-memory that challenge hegemonic constructions of memory and history” (Weedon and Jordan 2012, 149). However, the existence of multiply orientated publics means that different groupings within a more broadly defined counterpublic may also struggle over “the one legitimate story” that represents a movement to wider publics (Doerr 2014, 216). In this context, I would argue that the creation and circulation of hashtags is a form of “memory activism” (Rigney 2021, 299) which produces digital spaces in which the dead can be remembered across different generations of publics as well as across enclave, counter and official publics.

Moreover, and perhaps more significantly in this context, the notion of “prosthetic memories” is no longer simply about “providing storage space outside of the brain” (Olick 2011, 228), storing memories in stories (Polletta 2005) or even about correcting an incomplete archive—it is about creating shared spaces in which differently formulated “we” groupings struggle over meaning. In this way, the memory work undertaken by activists and ordinary people goes beyond educating wider publics about forgotten histories and creates spaces in which oppositional “identities, interests and needs” (Fraser 1990, 67) as well as “goals and strategies” (Rigney 2021, 300) can be shaped. In the following sections, I will examine the ways in which enclave and counterpublics do the work of not forgetting black lives in a more ritualised way.

The Fear of Being Unable to Forget

It has come to my attention that many allies are using #BlackLivesMatter hashtag w black images on insta. We know that’s no intent to harm but to be frank this essentially does harm the message. We use hashtag to keep ppl updated. PLS stop using the hashtag for black images.

@KenidraRWoods_

Of course, this emancipatory understanding of the relationship between memory and technology is not undiluted. As with notions of the counterpublic, counter memories are both constructed through and undermined by tech. Indeed, the fear of forgetting is often paradoxically accompanied by the fear of being unable to forget. Here the anxiety is often about being overwhelmed by too much information, an excess of memory (Ricoeur 1996, 13). When one looks online there is now a bewildering amount of information circulating quickly and repetitiously across our screens. Moreover, the move from analogue to digital removes the ability to track down the source of much of the information we find online, making it difficult, if not impossible, to verify the accuracy of what we encounter (Hui Kyong Chun 2008). In this context there often seems to be too much to remember and we are left troubled by our inability to forget.

The confusion caused by #BlackoutTuesday is an example of the confusion which can be caused by the seemingly endless proliferation of tweets and posts. #TheShowMustBePaused was a hashtag instigated by Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemangto in an attempt to hold the music industry accountable for benefiting from the “effort, struggles and successes of Black people” (Haylock cited by Wellman 2022, 1). This hashtag morphed into #BlackoutTuesday which was understood by many as an invitation to signal their support for Black Lives Matter on Instagram. The action required users to post a blank tile on the first Tuesday of June using the hashtag #BlackOutTuesday. However, many well-intentioned but uninformed allies posted under the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, making it harder for activists to disseminate educational materials and mobilise concurrent actions. Kalina (2020) argues that this is an example of performative allyship which hinders rather than helps marginalised groups.

The temptation is to try and create order out of chaos by making a distinction between the serious and the trivial. For example, one could try to make a distinction between the serious work of activists calling for data on deaths caused by police violence in order to correct an incomplete archive, and the trivial blizzard of tweets and retweets circulated by ordinary people which repetitiously fatten up our timelines. This impetus underpins the second of the two metaphors used by Rigney which sees memories as being stored not in a leaky bucket but in a wine cellar. According to this metaphor, memories are carefully gathered and then curated enabling them, like a bottle of good quality wine, to be set aside and stored for future generations. Thus, the archive becomes “a site of temporal and spatial preservation” (Huyssen 2000, 35), while the repetitious, the unverified, the apparently inconsequential can, presumably be left to fend for themselves.

The wine cellar model curates cohesion out of chaos. It acknowledges the leakiness of the bucket and attempts to guarantee the quality of memory left for those without direct experience of events. However, even if this sort of categorisation were desirable, it is no longer achievable as the diffused nature of memory in a socially networked world makes it difficult to contain. Thus, Huyssen argues, even if memory could be bottled up in this way,

The problem is not solved by simply opposing serious memory to trivial memory, the way historians sometimes oppose history to memory tout court, memory as the subjective and trivial stuff out of which the historian makes the real thing. (Huyssen 2000, 29)

Such an approach would inevitably risk the erasure of “the clashing and ever more fragmented memory politics of specific social and ethnic groups” (Huyssen 2000, 28). Furthermore, in the context of protest, any attempt to make such distinctions would be particularly problematic because amplification is a key activist practice. Retweeting hashtags allows messages crafted by activist communities to be amplified and therefore increases the chances of them being heard by wider publics (Kuo 2018).

Bearing Witness to Black Lives

In memory of #AltonSterling, #PhilandoCastile³ and those before them, we are bringing back our custom [fist] emoji from #BHM #BlackLivesMatter

@blackbirds

Both of the metaphors which I have referenced so far in this article equate the media with a form of storage: a leaky bucket or a wine cellar. In both instances the media is understood as a thing or a place which stores memory and then transfers it more or less successfully from one generation to the next. Consequently, both are underpinned by a transmission rather than ritual models of the media (Carey 2009). In the second half of this article, I want to explore a more ritual orientated approach to understanding the memory work that goes into inheriting and bequeathing memories. In order to better understand the dynamics of memory activism, I will focus in particular on the tweeting and retweeting of the hashtagged names of the dead as well as the circulation of hashtags such as #SayHisName, #SayHerName and #SayTheirName.

The relationship between new communications technologies and bearing witness functions on many levels which have been the focus of much academic attention in the field of both media and communication and social movement studies. Firstly, it has been pointed out that “taking out a camera-phone or a similar device and recording what is seen on the spot transforms ordinary people into important actors in the news making processes” (Smit, Heinrich, and Broerma 2017, 292). Secondly, there has been discussion of the way in which “smartphones and other highly portable digital devices act as prosthetic nodes that extend the self across an array of communication and consumption networks, personal and political” (Hoskins 2011, 26), allowing prosumers (Jenkins 2006) to circulate and amplify information across multiple publics. This article is focused on a third function—that of remembering, or perhaps more accurately that of not forgetting, by ordinary people through social media networks such as Twitter.

Videos produced and circulated online can be understood as “authoritative traces of a past reality” (Smit, Heinrich, and Broerma 2017, 292). However, as previously discussed, mediated memory has broken out “of traditionally organized categories and institutional contexts” (Hoskins 2009, 148). Despite the “voluminous and sprawling” (Hoskins 2016, 353) nature of (collective) memory in the digital age, it is relatively rare for scholarship to explore how the millions of people who observe a movement, accept, reject or otherwise interact with the rhetorical and discursive actions of a movement (Ince, Rojas, and Davis 2017, 1816). This is a curious omission because ordinariness remains “a powerful position from which to resist and challenge authority, to assert rights and to make demands” (Langhamer 2018, 189). In the paragraphs to follow I wish to focus on the memory work of those who have been described as “ordinary people” (Allan 2013, 3), “the average citizen” (Ince, Rojas, and Davis 2017, 1817), “the multitude” (Gainous and Wagner 2014, 1) or “the general public” (Liebermann 2021, 717) in the work of not forgetting black deaths caused by police violence. I will begin by pulling out the connections between bearing witness in the streets and bearing witness online and then go on to conceptualise remembering black lives not as preserving or clarifying of information to ensure its safe passage from one generation to the next but as a ritualised process of not forgetting, which runs across both generations and publics.

The hashtagged naming of the dead is rooted in the real-world commemorative practices of vigils. According to Sabak (2017, 350), a vigil “gathers a community together to stand as one in a moment of intense soul searching and the desire for answers in conditions that appear insurmountable … not alone but together.” During the vigil, the names of those who were once alive are spoken aloud and in publicly shared space to ensure that these deaths are not forgotten. Vigil attendees listen with attention, registering the moment and committing to the continued remembrance of those lives lost (Purbrick 2023). The point here is that we read and listen to the names of those who we fear will be forgotten and not the names of those who are likely to be remembered in city spaces through plaques or statues. During a vigil, participants’ experience of the city briefly stills, the flow of daily life is interrupted and the lives of those who have gone “stretch a little longer” (Purbrick 2023, 92) even as we know that the daily flow of wider life will inevitably resume once the moment has passed. This form of memory activism is doing more than correcting an incomplete archive, it is creating an effortful moment of public reflection in which counter memory can be formed and momentarily held.

The dynamics around the formation of these counterpublics are particularly complex when communities are remembering “painful and controversial part[s] of the past” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991, 417) which are often underpinned by racialised dynamics. For example, when the names of those who died in “inglorious wars” (such as Vietnam or Iraq) or as a result of the state’s “neglect and unaccountability” (such as Grenfell) are read in public spaces, participants stand quietly and absorb the “hushed havoc” of those experiences (Nixon cited by Launchbury 2021, 22). These are moments which are both “perpetually latent and permanently to come” (DeLappe and Simpson 2011, 617) and it is in many ways their contingent and open-ended nature which makes them so powerful.

Bearing witness online extends these dynamics. In this context, the act of tweeting and retweeting hashtags could be read as the digital version of attending a mass demonstration. This is a view supported by Kuo who argues that in addition to “elevating and circulating discourse,” hashtags “help establish grounds for participation” (2018, 496). Indeed, I would suggest that the shift from reflection to participation, from responding to calling is a form of memory work which calls an explicitly counter public into being. For example, Facebook pages such as those which called for justice for Mike Brown⁴ acted as commemorative spaces which both contextualised and legitimised Black Lives Matter protests (Smit, Heinrich, and Broerma 2018), while Tumbler posts and YouTube provided those remembering Trayvon Martin⁵ with affordances denied to them by established archives (Liebermann 2021). In this context, the relationship “between speakers and hearers” during street vigils are both reproduced and reconfigured significantly by the digital (Loney-Howes et al. 2022, 1348, citing Alcoff and Gray 1993, 4).

George Floyd’s death prompted a huge surge in activity on Twitter with the hashtag George Floyd becoming the 7th most used and retweeted two-word tweet on Twitter on 29 May 2020. This historic volume of tweets was driven almost entirely by retweets. Wu et al.’s analysis of Twitter’s response to the death of George Floyd found that “attention was not given only to George Floyd nor to the protests sparked by his murder … there was also a resurgence in attention to past instances of police violence against Black Americans” (Wu et al. 2023, 2). In these cases, the hashtag is performing a series of different functions. It’s informing people of an instance of deadly police violence, it’s bearing witness to the death of an individual and it’s connecting that death to deaths that have happened before. As such I would suggest that these tweets became “sites of memory” (Nora 1989, 7) in which “later events are superimposed on earlier ones to form memorial layers as it were” (Rigney 2006, 19). Here, tweets (and especially retweets) are doing more than stopping the gaps in a leaky bucket or being gathered into good quality bottles of wine for the next generation. They are “converging,” “coalescing” and “conflating” (Rigney 2006, 19) memories in order to perform a significantly different type of cultural work.

The circulation of tweets and retweets listing the names of the dead is doing more than maintaining a flow of information. They are making connections across generations, recalling the many black deaths which preceded this particular black death, and looking to a future in which those deaths will continue to be not forgotten. Brock (2012, 573) argues that a tweet can be understood as a “call waiting a response.” As such, I suggest that a liturgy is a more useful metaphor for understanding the memory work being undertaken in these instances. A liturgy is a ritualised set of practices between speakers and hearers in which participants call and repeat a formulaic set of phrases. It is tedious and repetitive but also resonant and reflective, it renders the ordinary extraordinary (Flanagan 1985, 195) and has the capacity to turn mourners into protesters (Stott et al. 2021). I would argue that the retweeting of information can be read as a liturgical call and response which temporarily interrupts the everyday flow of tweets that constitute a timeline, creating an online moment of public reflection in which counter memories can be called and recalled, voiced and heard. Like the Black Lives Matter murals which sprung up across American cities and the vigils which materialised in streets across the world, these tweets and retweets interrupt the flow of the everyday and demand that mainstream attention must be paid.

Remembering Intersectional Black Lives

I don’t have the words. #BreonnaTaylor⁶ and her family deserve justice

@TheMandyMoore

In this article I have looked at the ways in which the work of Campaign Zero activists completes incomplete public archives by recording deaths resulting from police brutality in America. I have also argued that the retweeting of hashtags naming the dead alongside hashtags such as #SayHisName is a form of memory work undertaken by ordinary people. I have suggested that these tweets created digital spaces which stretched out a moment of public reflection allowing black bodies to be collectively grieved. In these digital moments the memories of the dead are briefly sanctioned before the flow of people’s lives and timelines resumes. In the final section of this article, I wish to look at the ways in which hashtagging the names of the dead has not only bought official and counterpublics into dialogue, but has also created dialogue within and between differently orientated counterpublics.

Rigney’s leaky bucket depends upon the notion of memories being saved for future generations, as those who remember die out. As Rigney points out, “cultural memory is a product of representations and not of direct experience,” consequently this metaphor can be understood as a generational model that attempts to understand the way in which memory becomes “a matter of vicarious recollection” (Rigney 2006, 15). However, the existence of multiple publics (enclave, counter and satellite publics (Squires 2002)) suggests that memory is not held evenly in the present either. Consequently, I would argue that it is necessary to look at memory between differently orientated publics in the here and now, as well as between different generations over time. This is especially so when there are asymmetric power relations between those groupings, such as those found between a subaltern and official public and, indeed, within differently orientated publics.

Rigney’s wine cellar metaphor depends upon the notion of selection. She says “in the very act of recollecting in public we consciously or unconsciously select those things from the totality of everything which might have been said, that are somehow relevant to the present” (2006, 7). In the discussion above, state sanctioned archives have chosen not to record or recollect deaths resulting from police violence. I have suggested that this constitutes an act of repressive erasure which Black Lives Matter has sought to remedy through the use of a number of digital platforms. However, it is important to remember that the lives remembered through the memory activism of Black Lives Matter have also been selected and curated. Moreover, in the attempt to create spaces in which black lives are not forgotten, it has been argued that other acts of erasure have taken place. In 2015, Crenshaw et al. highlighted the ways in which the lives of black women had been forgotten not only by the state but also by many of those advocating for racial equality. As they point out,

In New York – one of the jurisdictions with the most extensive data on police stops – the rates of disparities in stops, frisks and arrests are identical for black men and black women. However, the media, researchers and advocates tend to focus only on how profiling impacts black men. (Crenshaw et al. 2015, 4)

Consequently, her scholarly archive “Say Her Name; resisting police brutality against black women” seeks to correct the correction (as exemplified by the Campaign Zero in this article) of the incomplete archive by gathering together and remembering information which foregrounds the gender dynamics underpinning the Black Lives Matter movement.

In addition to this academic work, Crenshaw began tweeting with the hashtag #SayHerName in 2016. This hashtag expands the frame of the Black Lives Matter movement to include violence against black women such as Sandra Bland,⁷ Kayla Moore⁸ and Frankie Ann Perkins.⁹ These deaths demonstrate the different and often gendered ways in which police violence impacts upon black women’s bodies. These deaths often (but not always) took place in less public spaces such as police vans and prison cells. Consequently, they are often (but not always) less likely to be digitally recorded and circulated through wider social networks. As Crenshaw et al. point out,

The resurgent racial justice movement in the United States has developed a clear frame to understand the police killings of Black men and boys, theorizing the ways in which they are systematically criminalized and feared across disparate class backgrounds and irrespective of circumstance. Yet Black women who are profiled, beaten, sexually assaulted, and killed by law enforcement officials are conspicuously absent from this frame even when their experiences are identical. When their experiences with police violence are distinct—uniquely informed by race, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation—Black women remain invisible. (Crenshaw et al. 2015, 1)

By weaving more diverse stories together, counterpublics organised around hashtags transform more varied personal experiences into an even larger network of counter memories. As Wu et al. say, “the evocative nature of names as signifiers allow Black Lives Matter activists to tell complex, intersectional stories about police violence in the limited spaces of a tweet” (2023, 12). In this way, hashtagged names can be used to highlight the depressingly varied versions of racism experienced by the black community both in the United States of America and across the world. They create an archive of the dead which flexes in real time and where “traces are retrievable and also reconfigurable in a way that similarly problematises the relationship between the marginalized and the not marginalized as well as the relationship between the past and present” (Hand cited by Smit, Heinrich, and Broerma 2017, 292).

Rigney points out that forgetting must in fact precede remembering. For, as she puts it, “recollection involves overcoming oblivion and [that] forgetting precedes remembering rather than vice versa” (2006, 17). Della Porta argues that social movements are public spaces in which factions or subgroupings struggle over the legitimation of stories and memories, particularly those that come to represent the movement in more official publics. In this way timelines constructed through hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHisName and #SayHerName can be understood as counter spaces in which marginalised groups reflect upon constantly emerging oppositional identities, interests and needs. In this instance “memories of exclusion” can be seen to foster “the construction of new identities” (Doerr 2014, 218). Nevertheless, Dahlberg points out the “always existing relation of inside/outside is fundamentally political” and therefore the processes around consensus building will be “both precarious and haunted by those who continue to be not remembered” (2007, 835).

Not Forgetting Black Lives

#BlackLivesMatter – yesterday, today, tomorrow, always

@amandaadagreat

Liebermann analyses a meme in which Trayvon Martin and Emmet Till¹⁰ appear “arm in arm, signaling solidarity across the generations,” arguing that this image demonstrates the “pervasiveness of racial profiling in the history of United States of America” (2021, 720). I would argue that the spaces created by the hashtag #SayTheirName are characterised by dynamics which, as well as looking back across previous generations of death, look forwards to the deaths that will be experienced by future generations. Thus, tweets which include the hashtagged names of the dead are sites of memory that are not only held open by effortful not-forgetting, they are also held open in the grim knowledge that this is an ongoing struggle. Like the memorials to those who have died in the wars in Vietnam and in Iraq, Black Lives Matter hashtags are a form of memory activism which is “unfinished, constantly moving and expanding” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991, 417). As such, they do not “pass judgement on history as something purely of the past” (DeLappe and Simpson 2011, 617) but speak to the present and also to the future.

These dynamics are exemplified by the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown. This hashtag was used to call out the media’s use of stereotypes which represented black men killed by the police as menacing or thuggish (Hall et al. 2013). The hashtag is predicated on the shared understanding that new names will join the roll call of the dead. This is a dynamic that puts everyone (even those with direct experience/memories of death as a result of police violence) in a vicarious relationship with the memory of lives lost to police violence. As such the hashtag becomes, in Hoskin’s words, “a patterned new moment that can be understood because of its similarity to previous moments and because of its space in the joint unfolding of biography and history” (2009, 95). In this way, the “perpetual fear” (Liebermann 2021, 720) that black people feel for their children morphs into a perpetually not-forgetting of the children who are yet to be lost. In this way, the future, as well as the past, can be understood “a source of deep collective anxiety and impending trauma” (Assmann cited in Doerr 2014, 216)

I began this article by looking at the photographs of street art produced by Black Lives Matter activists in the summer of 2020, which appeared in the New York Times. The accompanying article mourned the erosion of these murals and worried about the impact that their decline would have on young activists’ struggle for racial equality. Despite these concerns, the activists interviewed for the article are untroubled, calmly pointing out that “the movement actually is not waning … The movement from its inception has operated in waves.” (Frank Leon Roberts cited by Charles M. Blow, The Great Erasure, The New York Times, 2022). In this article I have reflected upon the ways in which activists and ordinary people have used hashtags to create online counter publics which effortfully stretch out the moment at the peak of the wave enabling the black lives lost to police violence to be not forgotten for a little longer by wider publics in the US and across the world.

This article has examined the relationship between social networks, protest and memory. It has suggested that forgetting should be seen as more than the accidental or purposeful loss of information. It has argued that memory work is not only about preserving an ever-diminishing resource or setting aside resources for future generations, but also about a far more ritualised set of practices which bring counterpublics into being. These arguments have been underpinned by an analysis of the Black Lives Matter hashtags. This analysis has suggested that the production and circulation of hashtags is a form of memory activism which connects activists and ordinary people across generations and across differently orientated publics. In doing so, this article allows one to go beyond understandings of memory as data and of communications technologies as prosthetics, and to focus instead on the ways in which experiences from the past are “modelled, invented, reinvented and reconstructed by the present” (Tamm 2013, 462) by the memory activism of those tweeting and retweeting in the present.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pollyanna Ruiz

Pollyanna Ruiz (corresponding author) is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the University of Sussex. She is interested in the media’s role in the construction of social and political change.

Notes

1 George Floyd was arrested on the 25 May 2020 for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 dollar note. He was killed when police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nine minutes while he was lying handcuffed in the street.

2 Alton Sterling was shot and killed in the street by police officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II on the 5 July 2016 in Baton Rouge. He was selling CDs.

3 Philando Castile was shot and killed on the 6 June 2016 returning from a shopping trip with his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter in Minnesota. Police office Jeronimo Yanez shot him five times at close range.

4 Mike Brown allegedly robbed a convenience store on the 9 August 2014. He was shot multiple times by police officer Darren Wilson while standing still with his hands raised above his head.

5 Trayvon Martin was visiting relatives in a gated community on the 26 February 2012. He was shot by

neighbourhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman 70 yards from the house where he was staying.

6 Breonna Taylor was shot and killed in her own home on the 13 March 2020. 32 shots were fired by three officers, Joshua Jaynes, Myles Cosgrove and Brett Hankinson, who had entered her home under a “no knock” search warrant.

7 Sandra Bland was pulled over for a failure to signal and then charged with assault on 10 July 2015. She was found dead in her cell three days later. Officials maintain her death was a suicide.

8 Kayla Moore suffered a mental health crisis on the 12 February 2013. The police were called and she was suffocated while they attempted to arrest her on a warrant for a man 20 years her senior.

9 Frankie Ann Perkins was stopped while walking home on 22 March 1997 by police officers who believed her to have swallowed drugs. She died on the street and the medical examiner’s report found bruising consistent with having been strangled to death.

10 Emmitt Till was accused of offending a white woman on the 28 August 1955. He was abducted, tortured and killed.