#BlackatUARK: Digital Counterpublic Memories of Anti-Black Racism on Campus

ABSTRACT

After #BlackLivesMatter protests in summer 2020, many leaders in the US South reevaluated monuments dedicated to the confederate and segregation eras. Black affiliates of the University of Arkansas used the Twitter hashtag #BlackatUARK to demand the removal of memorials commemorating a segregationist senator and share their experiences of anti-Black racism on campus. We argue that #BlackatUARK provides a counterpublic memorial of campus life that opposes and transforms dominant public memories, geographies, and subjectivities. Our analysis of the hashtag expands the conceptual boundaries of the kairos/metanoia partnership to show how digital counterpublic memories gain momentum and produce tangible rhetorical effects across both digital and nondigital contexts. During its circulation, the hashtag opens and sustains a kairotic moment fueled by the exigent flow of memories of anti-Black racism on campus. Simultaneously, the hashtag ignites a metanoic moment whereby allies mobilize their regret about a shameful past to plan a more just future.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital rhetoric
• hashtag activism
• kairos
• metanoia
• social movement
• Twitter

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the University of Arkansas Humanities Center for providing grant funding to facilitate the purchase of webscraping software and the financial compensation of participants in this research. The authors also thank University of Arkansas Libraries and the Department of Communication for generous support in making this article open access.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

¹ By the close of summer, every southern state saw its memoryscape transformed. The Wikipedia entry “List of monuments and memorials removed during the George Floyd protests” provides a database of eliminated structures. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monuments_and_memorials_removed_during_the_George_Floyd_protests#Virgini

² In this essay, we use the broad category “Black UARK affiliate” to describe users of the hashtag who claimed to have been a past or present student, faculty member, or staff member at the university. Of course, we could not definitively verify everyone’s identity within the hashtag except for those whom we contacted for permission to use their tweet in this research.

³ The link provided in the citation is the original. For a view of the website as it looked while we wrote this essay, see: https://web.archive.org/web/20210924125744/https://chancellor.uark.edu/about/presidents-chancellors/daniel-h-hill.php