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Notes
1 Ahmaud Arbery’s death, like Trayvon Martin’s death, at the hands of white vigilantes, demonstrates how the mob is authorized and legitimized as an (un)official extension of police power. In both cases, both murderers were acting on behalf of society, doing their “duty” as citizens to protect and serve. In the particular case of Arbery, his death came at the hands of a father/son duo who were extended protection and cover given that the father is a former police officer; therefore, Arbery’s premature death, while not at the hands of on-duty police officers, is an active demonstration/confirmation of the police power afforded to “the mob” (white vigilantes).
2 BIPOC is an acronym that means Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities. QTBIPOC is an acronym that extends our understanding of LGBTQ + communities’ existing “at the intersections of gendered cis-heteronormative colonial-racist capitalist matrix” (contemporary.org/qtbipocs-spaces/, 2017). Within this forum, the contributing authors use this language in different ways to address a variety of intersectional concerns.
3 Describing how her attempt to use the term “murder” to describe Trayvon Martin’s death was disallowed by editorial restrictions given that George Zimmerman was not convicted, she explains: “I sought to use murder not in the legal sense, but rather to denote the killing of black people by the state. … I was not speaking of individual intent only, but also naming a system that devalues and destroys black citizens through homicide. I made this rhetorical choice because there is no justice for people already presumed to be disposable, and my use of the term murder sought to signify the value of their lives … to [make visible] the systemic nature of state-sanctioned antiblack violence, the precariousness of blackness, and the ways legally-sanctioned racial injustice sustains a racial worldview that belies the claims of an America beyond race” (xiii-xv).
4 These celebrations were not only to celebrate Harris’s historic feat but also to celebrate Black womxn and our ancestral heritage that has inspired and empowered future generations to continue the work of Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and countless others. For instance, Fair Fight founder Stacey Abrams’s grassroots activism was pivotal in turning Georgia “blue,” clenching crucial electoral votes for Biden and Harris. Likewise, Black Voters Matter co-founder Latosha Brown, alongside 1,000 other womxn, requested that Joe Biden select a Black womxn for his VP candidate. The celebration of Vice Presidential-Elect Harris is symbolic as it serves as a nod and reminder to all Black womxn that our lives, voices, and labor matter. These celebrations are examples of how Black womxn show up for each other by creating and holding space for each other and our magic.
5 It affords us critical spaces to not only symbolically celebrate our agentive lives but to hold space for others to do the same. The tensions among celebration, critique, and critique-as-celebration continue to signal/call attention to the importance of listening to a diversity of voices offering an array of lived experiences and perspectives aimed at reimagining U.S. American institutions beyond anti-Black exclusionary logics of possession, capital, and violence.
6 The ways these systems manifest in microaggressions in academia have been addressed by communication scholars, including contributors to this forum (Houston & Kramarae, Citation1991; Houston, 1994; Desnoyers-Colas, Citation2019; Harris & Moffitt, Citation2019).