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Abstract
This essay analyzes the Black Twitter hashtags #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and #AliveWhileBlack to develop a revisionary theory of anti-racist activism that reveals how certain socially mediated protest movements, in insisting on the ability of the Black body and human to “matter,” encourage the recognition of alternative forms of humanity and embodiment to those offered by humanist, economic, and juridical models. I argue that the embedded, distributed modes of collectivity on Twitter can create critical posthuman coalitions and affirmative bonds (Braidotti, Chavez), not only by decentering hegemonic models of human value that often depend on the dehumanization of Black bodies, but also by disidentifying with the hypercapitalist composing practices of digital spaces. Ultimately, I argue that an epistemological framework for recognizing social protest that moves beyond a discourse of rights allows us to witness how activists build alternative rhetorical imaginaries and possibilities, even if they might sometimes draw from both inclusionary and utopian politics to cultivate new forms of recognition and possibilities for coalition.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Wendy Hesford, Zachary Harvat, and J. Brendan Shaw for their support and feedback on early versions of this essay.
Notes
1. On 9 August 2014, white police officer of Ferguson, Missouri Darren Wilson fatally shot and killed 18 year old Black man Michael Brown, whom he believed to be one of two men who had shoplifted cigarillos from a nearby convenience store earlier that same day. Wilson presented evidence to a St. Louis grand jury starting on 20 August 2014 to prove that he had not committed a crime and had simply acted out of self-defense when he shot Michael Brown. Despite sufficient witness evidence that challenged Wilson’s own recollection of the altercation, the grand jury eventually decided on 24 November 2014 not to indict Wilson for murder (Clarke). Similarly, on 2 November 2013, almost a year before the death of Michael Brown, 19 year-old Black woman Renisha McBride was shot and killed by Theodore Wafer, a suburban homeowner in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. Having crashed her car in Detroit, McBride walked to a nearby neighborhood for help where she knocked on the windows and doors of Wafer’s house. Although Wafer argued in his testimony that the shooting was accidental, activists, scholars, and popular media sources have argued that Wafer’s shooting of McBride was primarily a result of racial profiling (“Renisha McBride, 19, Was Shot”). Although the murders of Brown and McBride are just two of many other such deaths (some others include Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, and Freddie Gray), I argue that Brown’s death in particular has given rise to expansive mainstream dialog in the US about the institutional nature of racism (cultural, political, and legal). Not only has this mainstream dialog led to polarizing beliefs about the nature of racism in the US through an increased public awareness and critique of white privilege, but it has also meant greater visibility for national protest movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and Black Twitter. As such, I consider these movements as widespread and geographically dispersed activist groups that are spatially and temporally constructed by and through the cases of racialized violence I name in this paper. In this way, movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and Black Twitter, even as they intersect, overlap, and work together, are not just activist groups, but also spatial and temporal moments.
2. On 26 February 2012, 17 year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida. That evening, Martin was walking home alone after having purchased a drink and some candy from a nearby convenience store when Zimmerman called the police to report Martin for suspicious behavior. Zimmerman then had a brief altercation with Martin which eventually ended with Zimmerman shooting Martin in the chest. Although Zimmerman was eventually charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter for having killed Martin, the jury ultimately acquitted him. Like in the case of Brown and McBride, Martin’s murder was not the first of its kind. Many activists and scholars, however, have argued that Martin’s death, like Brown’s, became an iconic turning point in the public’s awareness of racialized violence. #BlackLivesMatter in fact emerged as a result of Martin’s death, first as a hashtag and then as a formal protest movement (Garza).
3. By normative rhetorics of vulnerability, I am referring most specifically to post-identitarian theories of vulnerability that stress the universality or shared nature of vulnerability such as legal scholar Martha Fineman’s “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition” (2008) without taking into account issues of identity. Fineman in fact argues against an identity politics perspective in understanding vulnerability because of the ways in which she believes it erects hierarchies among identities and oppressions rather than focusing on systemic manifestations of inequality (Selberg and Wegerstad 6). As many others since Fineman have argued, however, considering vulnerability through a post-identitarian lens not only obscures an understanding of the ways in which implicit biases, stereotypes, and perceptual discrimination produce the racialized nature of cultural, political, and legal institutions themselves (Dowd 59), but it also may prevent certain groups from making visible their specific vulnerability in a particular space and time (Kim 146). As Eunjung Kim rightfully argues, then, to speak of the vulnerability of an individual or group requires that we maintain a focus on identity by making “specific claims about differential power” and acknowledging a speaker’s own capacity “to be wounded by others and to wound other bodies” (146). My usage and understanding of vulnerability most closely aligns with that of Kim.
4. Black Twitter has been used widely as a heuristic in mainstream media to describe a countercultural movement on Twitter among mostly Black users, other people of color, and allies. As Shani O. Hilton of Buzzfeed describes, users who might be considered members of Black Twitter are almost always interested in issues of race in the news and pop culture (“The Secret Power”).
5. Twitter and social media more broadly can be hypercapitalist spaces because of the ways in which social media platforms – especially those as public as Twitter – uniquely facilitate the invisibilization of market forces as users are often either unsure or unaware of the extent to which their information is sold and/or monitored. Twitter users are especially vulnerable to such exploitation due to both the quick pace of the platform and the volume of content most users produce on a daily basis. According to Twitter, there are as many as 500 million tweets sent per day and 288 million monthly active users (“About Twitter”).
6. On 12 April 2015, Freddie Gray was arrested for possession of an illegal switchblade in Baltimore, Maryland. After having been transported in a police van shortly after his arrest, Gray fell into a coma and died seven days later on 19 April 2015. The medical examination conducted after Gray’s death found that he had sustained the injuries while being transported in the van without wearing a seatbelt or proper protection, suggesting that the arresting police officers had deliberately planned to injure Gray. This practice of driving police vehicles in such a way as to deliberately injure arrested individuals is known as a “rough ride” (Payne, Almasy, and Pierson).
7. Richardson originally develops his notion of vernacular epistemology to theorize a Black queer archive that works against heternormative notions of Black memory and history by embracing affective and queer esthetic forms. In his book, he theorizes a queer archive of literature written by Black lesbian women whose work has been marginalized or elided in literary scholarship and African diaspora cultural criticism. I do not intend in this paper to follow Richardson in suggesting that Black Twitter constitutes a queer esthetic form, though I do believe such an argument could be made.
8. Hashtags appear on Twitter not just as text, but also as hyperlinks. Users may click on these hyperlinks in order to access a separate timeline that displays tweets utilizing that hashtag in an automatically updating and chronologically organized aggregation, the most recent tweets appearing at the top of the feed. One may also search for hashtagged content using keywords derived from the hashtags themselves. Doing so often generates a broader range of results that include alternative phrasings of the same hashtag or even strategic appropriations of the original. Hashtags may also be aggregated through users retweeting hashtagged tweets or responding to them in conversation. As such, hashtagged tweets can appear in a nearly infinite number of timelines and contexts, depending on how users choose to interact or converse with them.
9. In regards to the racial participatory politics of Black Twitter, Wendy Hesford questions what it might mean for non-Black protesters to mobilize protest rhetoric such as “We are Trayvon Martin.” Specifically, she wonders if this practice could permit the disavowal of White privilege (547). Although Hesford is right to point out these risks, it’s important to note that they are not contained only to digital forms of protest. These kinds of appropriations can – and often do – happen in analog contexts as well. Furthermore, for the purposes of this paper, I choose only to analyze the Black-specific hashtags of #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and #AliveWhileBlack that only invite participation from Black users.
10. On 17 July 2014, Eric Garner, a 43-year old Black man, was placed in an illegal chokehold by Staten Island, New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo for resisting arrest for illegally selling cigarettes. Garner was pronounced dead a short time later as a result of the chokehold. Pantaleo was not indicted (Eversley and James).
11. I acknowledge, however, that the near limitless reach of these tweets can also be ungovernable and risky, especially since the mere act of composing and posting a public tweet potentially exposes one to silencing, appropriation/co-optation, and even discursive violence. Consider, for instance, a situation in which a user retweets a tweet from #AliveWhileBlack in order to publicly refute it or attack it in another tweet that could easily be quickly retweeted and recirculated by others. Or, perhaps, the recreation of #BlackLivesMatter to #AllLivesMatter as a way to allow users to take part in discussions about racism under a guise of intersectionality. Although these are indeed valid risks, I argue that the ungovernability of composing and circulation in this space can also be radical in its ability to facilitate more democratic solidarities and coalitions.