Covid Publics and Black Lives Matter: Posts, Placards and Posters

Abstract

This article will examine the ways in which COVID has reconfigured the boundaries between online and offline, as well as public and private spaces. The threat posed by the global pandemic meant that public spaces quickly emptied, work zoomed into the home, and windows became notice boards filled with moraleboosting messages. Every Thursday, UK doorsteps became the space in which private individuals emerged from their own homes to express their gratitude to key workers in general and the NHS in particular. Whilst posters calling for better provision of PPE occasionally appeared in people’s windows, online talk about Booing for Boris never fully materialised into offline action, and the doorstep continued to function as the threshold between public and private space. However, the killing of George Floyd radically disrupted these threshold spaces. Information about Black Lives Matter demonstrations leapt from activists’ digital networks into the hyper-local and granular chains of communication established by COVID mutual aid groups, grassroots communities of care and small clusters of neighbours. Similarly, the slogans which had been circulating within activist networks for years quickly appeared on the placards of protesters as they moved through city spaces, before finally settling in people’s windows alongside rainbow posters urging neighbours to “stay safe.” When—on the first Thursday after the final NHS clap—many individuals chose to relinquish the comforting anonymity afforded by mass demonstrations and take the knee on their doorstep, they called their neighbours, as well as their government, into a dialogue about race. In this way, the windowpane and the doorstep finally became a dynamic space which both separated and connected online and offline as well as public and private spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Protest
• digital networks
• public spaces
• COVID-19
• Black Lives Matter

Introduction

This article will examine the ways in which COVID has reconfigured the boundaries between online and offline, as well as public and private spaces. It will do so by focusing on the windowpane and the doorstep. These thresholds became spaces in which households came together to express their appreciation of the NHS by putting up posters urging the public to “stay safe” and “take care” in their windows and by clapping on their doorsteps every Thursday to recognise the efforts of key workers. This article will go on to explore the way in which the killing of George Floyd radically disrupted both the window and the doorstep. In doing so, it will focus on the way in which slogans which had circulated through activist networks for many years appeared on the placards of protesters moving through city spaces before finally settling in people’s windows alongside rainbow posters. It will conclude by focusing on the way in which Black Lives Matter placards turned the window and the doorstep into a space of dialogue about race. In this way, it will argue that the windowpane and the doorstep finally became a dynamic space which separated and connected both online and offline as well as public and private spaces.

Before going onto to explore these dynamics in detail it is necessary to pause for moment and reflect upon what it means to be an ethnographic researcher in the middle of a global pandemic. At root, ethnography is about “time spent on a particular project, in a particular place among particular people” (Goralskaa 2020, 50). This approach to projects, places and people produces thick accounts (Geertz 1973 Ryle 2009), full of explanatory potential (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995) and is a way of conducting research which has been the subject of “fierce debates” for many years (Selm 2021). However, this approach has inevitably been tested by the COVID pandemic, forcing academics to ask questions about the ways in which we engage in ethnographic fieldwork during a period in which research projects are abruptly suspended, places are suddenly inaccessible and the people have all been sent home.

Traditionally, ethnography is based on a distinction between “field and home” which requires the researcher to spend “a year or longer in a faraway place” (Gunel, Varma, and Watanabe 2020, 2). This understanding has been challenged by both feminist and decolonial perspectives which advocate a “kinder” and “gentler” way of “being there” (Gunel, Varma, and Watanabe 2020, 3). The methodological reworking aims to reconsider both “anthropology’s proclivities towards suffering subjects” and “neoliberal labour conditions” (Gunel, Varma, and Watanabe 2020, 2), and has been further speeded up and intensified by the global pandemic. The ethnographic fieldwork underpinning the arguments in this article are not rooted in an extended period away from home, nor do they rest upon visits to faraway places. Instead, they are constituted by an analysis of the streets I encountered while taking my government-approved daily exercise a short distance from my home in Brighton, and of the threads I encountered while scrolling through the various WhatsApp networks of friends, neighbours and strangers that I joined between work zooms.

Walking through empty streets at the end of each working day, I looked through lit up windows and glimpsed the people inside “locked at home, their phones in hand” (Goralskaa 2020, 47). It was a position I recognised all too well. During this period my own phone became my field diary filled with “snap shots and notes” (Goralskaa 2020, 46); images of rainbows in windows and handwritten announcements in shopfronts collected for this article were interspersed with images of my children and my home collected for suddenly distant friends and relatives. In this way my phone became a professional and personal field diary, archiving my experience of the pandemic.

Windowpanes and Doorsteps

I, like many ethnographers, had begun doing “anthropology from home” (Goralskaa 2020, 46). During this period I was acutely aware of the boundaries which structure the research field such as the distinctions between “actual” and “digital” ethnography as well as my movements between inside and outside spaces. The way in which these boundaries shifted and flexed between the impostion of lockdown in March and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in June required me to think again about the ways in which the boundary both separates and connects online and offline as well as public and private spaces.

The boundary is central to Habermas’ understanding of the public sphere (Peters 1993); in many ways the public sphere is only bought into being by the existence of its boundaries (Hands 2011, 103). These “binary fault lines” (Goode 2005, 113) exist within an often-unacknowledged hierarchy which invariably places a greater value upon one half of the pairing. This is particularly true of the boundary described above which exists between public and private spaces. Attempts have been made to unsettle, reimagine and realign the relationship between the public and the private. For example, Dahlberg has described the way in which conversations in private space flow into public spaces (2007), Fraser describes the way in which “dual aspect activities” crisscross the “porous, outer-directed and open-ended boundaries” between private and public space (1987, 68), and Gal has posited the notion of the constantly oscillating boundaries between the private and the public which are called into being by “momentary gestures or utterances, voicings that are iconic of privacy and thus create[s] less institutionalised and more spontaneous spatial divisions during interactions” (2002, p. 82). These reworkings of the relationship between the public and the private exemplify what Garnham describes as the “deep unease” provoked by the distinction between these differently imagined spaces (2000, 174). And yet they persist.

The conceptual boundaries between public and private spaces were bought into sudden and unexpectedly material relief by the spread of COVID across the world in the spring of 2020. The threat posed by the global pandemic meant that workplaces rapidly emptied, work zoomed into the home, and hitherto domestic spaces became the site of professional activities. Beyond the home, once familiar streets and squares lay eerily quiet and empty. The homogeneity of these sparsely populated public spaces—for many imagined rather than experienced—contrasted sharply with the packed complexity of private space. Within the home, clutter was cleared and space was made on kitchen surfaces, coffee tables and sofa arms for the paraphernalia of the workplace. At the same time carefully placed monitors, virtual backgrounds and other “indexical gestures” (Gal 2002, 82) were deployed in an attempt to maintain some sort of distinction—however fragile—between public and private spaces.

Working from home in these new ways tested the “stability and instability in the boundaries that separate these regions of social life” (Landes 1998, 3). At the same time, communication across the newly-hardened boundary between the home and the rest of the world was limited by the imposition of lockdown. During this time, the glass windowpanes of peoples’ homes—the thin, fragile and transparent boundary between formerly public and private spaces—became community notice boards filled with morale-boosting messages from those on the inside to those on the outside. These posters were frequently produced by home-schooled children, often featured rainbows, and shared a cheerily bright domestic aesthetic. They thanked the NHS for their care, exhorted readers to “take care” of themselves, of others, and ultimately of the NHS. The NHS replied by photographing doctors and nurses in full PPE collectively spelling out the words; “We stay here for you. Please stay home for us,” on printer paper and then circulating these images thought the mainstream media and social networks. In this way individuals in both private and public spaces called back and forth across these newly created boundaries created by the pandemic.

The posters in the windows invariably foregrounded the notion of care. In their article on discursive explosions during COVID-19, Chatzidikis et al. identify “ ‘care’ as a keyword of our time” (2020, 2). In doing so they develop feminist debates about care which highlight the assumption that this work “somehow will get done, if not by oneself then by slaves, women or lower class or lower caste people” (Fisher and Tronto 1990, 36). While care has therefore often gone unrecognised, for example Chatzidikis et al point out that care does not appear in Raymond Williams’ Keywords, (2020, 2), the global pandemic has foregrounded and further blurred the boundaries between care work, essential work and crisis management (Branicki 2020). Nevertheless, the notion of care remains personal, domestic and private rather than collective, professional and public (Fisher and Tronto 1990; Chatzidakis et al. 2020; Branicki 2020). Thus, while the windows of homes across the nation—including those of 10 Downing Street—filled with crayoned rainbows, these notices’ public dimension rarely spilt over into a more politicised conception of “care.”

The use of the word care rather than solidarity throughout this period was important. In their article “Solidarity for ever? Performing mutual aid in Leipzig, Germany,” Fiedlschuter and Reichle (2020) review six mutual aid groups with differing political and organisational set-ups in order to develop an analytical and practical conceptualisation of solidarity. In doing so, they present three different types of solidarity. Firstly, solidarity as compassion and a moral duty, relying on the work of Durkheim. Secondly, solidarity as (or based on) shared identity, relying on perspectives offered by Richard Sennet (1973). Finally, solidarity as political practice, relying on the work of Featherstone (1973). In this article I will be following Fiedlschuter and Reichle by using this third conceptualisation of solidarity—in other words, the notion of solidarity as a relation of struggle against oppression.

Featherstone defines solidarity as “a relation forged through political struggle which seeks to challenge forms of oppression” (2012, 5). In doing so, he goes beyond social movement-based understandings of solidarity such as those proposed by Tilly and McAdams which, he argues, produce a limited account by emphasising “making connections between those who are already fundamentally similar” (2012, 22). Instead, he proposes a more “expansive” understanding of solidarity from below which is “open, configured in different, both productive and conflictual ways” (Radovic 2013, 460). These are themes which I will return to towards the end of this this article in my discussion of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations which took place in the summer of 2020.

As the pandemic stretched out through spring and early summer, Thursday evenings became a moment in which households gathered on the threshold between private and public space to demonstrate their care for and solidarity with the NHS. They gathered to applaud the NHS and other essential workers who were still venturing out into the public domain. While this expression of appreciation was—like the window posters—produced on a household-by-household basis, these weekly distanced gatherings also produced a sense of local and national community. Neighbours affirmed their intent to participate via WhatsApp before the clap, rare face-to-face greetings were exchanged during the clap, and video recordings circulated through community timelines after the clap. Indeed, the weekly clap became a national mediated event (Dayan and Katz 1992) in which the neighbours, celebrities, royalty, and politicians all came together on their doorsteps and reaffirmed a sense of the collective identity (Anderson 1991, Clap for carers: UK in emotional tribute to NHS and care workers 27^th March 2020).

Failure to participate in the clap, let alone any more active forms of dissent, risked being defined as acts of antagonism which endangered and jeopardised the well-being of the collective. As Chatzidikis et al point out, it was quickly understood that “acts of carelessness” literally cost lives (2020, 1), and rule-breaking in the public domain—with the notable exception of Dominic Cummings¹—was quickly and resolutely met with calls for fines and resignations (“Coronavirus: Prof Neil Ferguson Quits Government Role After ‘Undermining’ Lockdown,“ 6 May 2020 [BBC News 2020a]; “Coronavirus: Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer Resigns Over Lockdown Trips,” 6 April 2020 [BBC News 2020b]; “Coronavirus: Calls for Dominic Cummings to Resign After Lockdown Travel,” 23 May 2020 [BBC News 2020c]). Within this contest there was little or no room for individual members of the public to adopt more critical or agonistic positions. Indeed, during the early days of the pandemic, spaces in which opposition could exist without undermining a public health strategy predicated upon collective action, such as anti-mask, anti-lockdown or anti-vax discourses had yet to emerge into mainstream discourse.

Where dissent did exist, it tended to be cautiously expressed and community-based. For example, activist groups such as Demands from a Pandemic organised virtual banner drops through Facebook (Demands from a Pandemic, Facebook), a street in Bristol transformed their weekly tribute to the NHS into a weekly critique of the government’s handling of the crisis, which was covered by the local news (Entire Street protests About Lack of PPE in Bristol 21st of April 2020 B24/7, n.d.), and a small number of overtly political posters appeared in windows on the streets of Brighton calling for better provision of PPE. However, online talk about Booing for Boris never fully materialised into offline action and both the windowpane and the doorstep continued to function as the threshold between public and private space..

Thus, March turned into April, and despite the sense of escalating crisis, the political terrain remained in many ways becalmed. Divisions over Brexit, which had both energised and exhausted political discourse since the referendum in 2016, were finally silenced by the Conservative Party’s emphatic General Election win in December 2019. The long and drawn-out leadership races being held by both the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party meant the opposition’s response to the government’s handling of the pandemic was muted. In the following section I will analyse the ways in which socially-networked communities filled the void created by the temporary suspension of politics as usual.

Social Networks, Sourdough and Seedlings

The requirement to remain in the home ruled out face-to-face communication beyond the household, consequently social networks which were already an important site for the sharing of everyday life with distant friends and relatives became a platform through which households could communicate with other households in their immediate vicinity. Thus, social networks became more than a space in which images of sourdough and seedlings could be shared, they become a vital site of community care. This dynamic is exemplified by the rise of mutual aid groups. Mutual aid groups initially emerged on Facebook and quickly established a model of communications which could be repeated in different locations. The government initially attempted to formalise these networks through GoodSAM, its NHS volunteer responders programme. However, despite the surge in volunteers signing up, it quickly became clear that much of this work could be done more quickly and efficiently on a more ad hoc, grassroots level.

Both GoodSam and Facebook were however quickly superseded by WhatsApp groups. These groups covered the “defined, limited and specific geographies of the neighbourhood” and quickly became the “site of the most active conversations and mobilisations” (Georgiou 2020, LSE Blogs). Unlike public groups on Facebook, WhatsApp requires an administrator to add individuals’ mobile numbers to a group’s members’ list. Consequently, these groups tended to be brought into being by clusters of neighbours who often already knew each other before being expanded one number at a time and “by hand’ to include neighbours who had been, up until the pandemic, never-the-less strangers. These networks could be described as closed but ever-expanding digital spaces of “people-whom-one-does-not-yet-know” (Warner 2002, 417).

Jun and Lance point out that movements such as the mutual aid movement “arise not utterly spontaneously out of nothing, but by way of existing networks, systems of contacts and established organisations” (2020, LSE Blogs). As Gerogiou points out, this truism applied to mutual aid groups which sprung from pre-established pre-pandemic activist groups (2020). Thus, for example the DC Mutual Aid Facebook page was underpinned by the work of Black Lives Matter activists in Washington (Georgiou 2020, LSE Blogs), while the mutual aid network in the UK was initiated by activists with a history of LGBQT activism within and beyond the Higher Education sector. The WhatsApp group on my own road had been set up several years previously to oppose the redevelopment of a piece of nearby land.

One can identify many already familiar activist dynamics in the development of mutual aid groups. For example, unlike the government’s first responder programme, these digital communications facilitated horizontal communications rather than those that were “hierarchical, limiting and bounded by authority” (Eglin 1987, 245). They were also leaderless organisations (Atton 2002; Downing 1984), thereby facilitating the move from spectating to participating (Benjamin 1982) and enabling neighbours to reach out and respond to each other by shopping, fetching and carrying for each other. Finally, they facilitated the polyvocal communications of communities in way that enabled participants to express a multitude of different and uncoordinated responses to the experience of being locked down (Ruiz 2014).

Echoes of this more activist-orientated rhetoric can be heard in the DC Mutual Aid Facebook announcement that this group is about solidarity, not charity. Protecting each other, not policing each other. Replacing oppressive systems and practices not replicating them (cited in Georgiou 2020, LSE Blogs).

The use of the word solidarity rather than care is significant here as it blurs the boundary between neighbourly care and solidarity with strangers. I will therefore also be drawing upon Silverstone’s notion of proper distances in order to pull out these mediated dimensions of this dynamic more distinctly. Silverstone argues that proper distance “preserves the other through difference as well as shared identity. Proper distance involves both imagination, understanding and a duty of care” (Silverstone 2006, 47). These are themes which I will return to explicitly in the final section of this article. Before doing so however, I would like to address the protests which spread across the UK in response to the killing of George Floyd in the spring of 2020.

The Killing of George Floyd

The killing of George Floyd on the 25th of May coincided with the lifting of lockdown in the UK, and his violent and untimely death radically disrupted newly public spaces such as the windowpane and the doorstep. In many ways, the mobile phone footage of George Floyd being killed by four policemen in Minneapolis was—depressingly—no different to the dashcam footage showing Philando Castille being killed by a police officer in Falcon Heights (Kumanyika 2016) or to the video footage showing Rodney King getting beaten by four police officers in Los Angeles (Lawrence 2000). In all of these instances the affordances of new communications technologies challenged the “authority of those in positions of institutional power” by capturing and then circulating images which directly contradicted police narratives (Ruiz 2016, 204). In all of these instances the response from the black community and their allies in the United States of America was swift and strong.

However, the global impact of the footage of the killing of George Floyd was different in that it spread via the Black Lives Matter hashtag beyond the confines of the United States of America. In the USA, the combination of a long history of slavery, an equally long struggle over gun control and the tendency to invest heavily in the police has led to a very specific set of dynamics which has produced a discourse rooted in issues around policing, the law, and the penal system. However, as Ince et al argue, “the basic framing of the movement, Black Lives Matter, invites the audience to further consider a number of issues that affect Black Americans ranging from inequality to police violence to healthcare” (2017, 1815).

The existence of different policing structures in locales beyond the United States caused the parameters of the debate to shift more noticeably as it moved across the globe. For example, the debate in the UK was framed not by BAME deaths in police custody but by the disproportionate number of COVID deaths in BAME communities. George Floyd’s death coincided with the gradual realisation that—despite Johnson’s unifying claim that “each and every one of us” is in this “together” (Johnson, 24^th March 2020)—some communities were being hit harder by the pandemic than others. The fact that members of the BAME community experience poor health outcomes is sadly neither new nor surprising (Gaicfe and Sharif 2015; Chatzidakis et al. 2020). Indeed, considerable research into the way in which the dynamics of race play out in medical fields as diverse as maternal health, mental health as well as COVID, has already been undertaken (Christie-Mizell, Steelman, and Jennifer 2003; McGuire and Miranda, 2008; Abuelgasim et al. 2020). Consequently, scholars such as Gaicfe and Sharif assert that “racism as a social condition is a fundamental cause of health illness” (2015, 27).

The lack of knowledge in relation to COVID created a context in which longstanding but previously unnoticed racist dynamics were freshly constructed in front of an unusually attentive audience. As answers to questions such as “How does COVID spread?,” “What are the symptoms of COVID?,” “ Who is at greater risk of serious illness from COVID” and “Who is most likely to die from COVID?,” the relationship between race, health and death became the focus of medical, governmental and public scrutiny. In the UK, these dynamics were made visible by mainstream news outlet coverage of the pandemic (Coronavirus: academic’s concerns over BAME deaths data, 23 April 2020, BBC; Coronavirus: BAME coronavirus deaths: what’s the risk for ethnic minorities?, 12th June 2020, BBC; Coronavirus: “Lack of action on race equality” shown by pandemic, 22 June 2020, BBC). In the very early days of the pandemic, when the deaths could still be registered individually, news organisations read or listed the names of the dead with accompanying photographs (Coronavirus: remembering 100 NHS and healthcare workers who have died, 28 April 2020, BBC). In this way the disproportionate number of BAME deaths (particularly as a result of working in the NHS) was immediately made visible to a public hungry for information.

As had been the case in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower disaster (another fatal event underpinned by longstanding but all too often unnoticed racist dynamics), there was a sense that mainstream media spaces were suddenly (and briefly) populated by black and brown voices and faces. Again, there was a gradual realisation that “the cruel misguidedness of centralised government’s response” to a disaster being experienced by BAME communities was being mitigated by the “rationality, care and effectiveness of grassroots measures” (Alekseevsky 2011, 14). In this way, the insidiousness of racial inequality, its ubiquity across policing, health and housing began to be the topic of an explicitly political debate as evidence by a flurry of headlines such as Coronavirus: Racism “could play a part in BAME COVID deaths’ (13 June 20202, BBC) and Coronavirus: Report on BAME COVID-19 deaths sparks call for action (16 June 2020 BBC). These dynamics were then further highlighted by the government’s apparent reluctance to publish data illuminating the impact of COVID deaths on BAME communities due to “concerns” about the “potential for civil unrest linked of global anger over the death of American George Floyd” (Coronavirus: Risk of death is higher for ethnic minorities, 2 June 2020, BBC). Having briefly reflected upon the way in which public discourses about race and health were constructed int the wake of George Floyd’s death, I will now turn to my examination of protests as they were made manifest in the UK context.

Posts, Placards and Posters

The demonstrations which took place in the UK were an immediate and rapid manifestation of longstanding digital debates. They were initiated through social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but quickly leapt across into the mutual aid networks which had sprung up in response to the pandemic. In the weeks between George Floyd’s death and the final Thursday clap, information about Black Lives Matter demonstrations moved quickly from activists’ digital networks into the hyper-local and granular chains of communication established by COVID mutual aid groups, grassroots communities of care and small clusters of neighbours.

Black Lives Matter’s origin as a digital protest movement impacted the way in which the demonstrations in the summer of 2020 made themselves manifest on the ground. For example, these demonstrations were not led by any type of formal leadership, they were not constructed through any centralised organising systems nor did they call upon a pre-existing membership. Consequently, they did not feature the large and colourful banners proclaiming party or trade union affiliations which often break up mass demonstrations into easily readable segments or chapters (Ruiz 2014). Indeed, there were very few “mass produced’ placards. Even the placards commonly provided by organisations such as the Socialist Workers Party were absent having been difficult to produce under the restrictions imposed by COVID. Instead, Black Lives Matter protests were characterised by a sea of homemade placards made out of the cardboard packaging which the pandemic had made so abundant.

These placards drew upon the slogans which had been circulating through activist networks for years. Slogans such as #TheUKIsNotInnocent #DefundThePolice #DontShoot which had appeared as hashtags linking together individual social actors or clustering online debates began to appear in both mutual aid networks and offline social networks before appearing on protest placards calling the police and the government into a dialogue about race. This period also saw the emergence of hybrid slogans linking COVID and race explicitly, such as #RacismIsAVirus with even the slogan #ICantBreathe which suddenly began to function on multiple levels. Similarity a placard frequently seen across multiple protest sites which read “Treat racism like COVID: assume you have it, change your behaviour and don’t spread the disease” could now be read in multiple ways. In this way, Black Lives Matter posts and placards began to function in a way that was explicitly polysemic (Hall 1973).

Endelman describes protest placards as “condensation symbols” which express and evoke the emotion experienced by those participating in the demonstration (Endelman, 1964, 0.6). In their analysis of Tea Party placards, Mayer et al argue that these emotions are articulated through handwritten “changes in letter size or colour to indicate intensity of emotion” (2016, 240). These DIY signs contrast strongly with the “slick … message tested taglines” (Good 2011, 3) which characterise the signage produced by political parties or more professionalised protest movements. Whilst the banners at the Black Lives Matter marches in the UK appeared in many ways to be uniform—often hashtags painted in black upon bare cardboard—they remained thick with emotion. As with demonstrations such as the Tea Party protest in the USA, the fact that a small pool of shared symbols (hashtags, fists) were being repeatedly used did not seem to detract from the importance attached to having contributed to the message being delivered by the demonstration as a whole (Mayer et al. 2016).

Following the mass demonstrations which took place across the UK, many Black Lives Matter protesters took their placards home with them and placed them in their windows, alongside the rainbow posters urging neighbours and passers-by to take care. The appearance of protest placards in windows was unusual. During election campaigns and referendums political signs do appear in people’s windows or front gardens. According to Siedman, the physicality of these signs “inserts the presence of party into the everyday life of a neighbourhood” (2008). As such it has been argued that the neighbourhood becomes a “site of potent, grassroots-orientated identity construction” (Shohamy 2015, 30). However, unlike the political signage that appears during elections and referenda, this response was not centrally coordinated through formally compiled membership lists and volunteer networks. Instead, the appearance of placards in people’s windows spread horizontally across neighbourhoods in multiple unexpected, viral acts of political participation.

In this way, messages “written to be viewed by fellow marchers as well as through the prism of the media” (Mayer et al. 2016, 240) travelled from city centres to more suburban communities. In doing so they passed through many public/private fractals; they moved from geographically centralised public spaces traditionally used as sites of protest to more residential areas more usually understood as being non-political. In other words, they moved into what Ben-Rafael and Ben-Rafael have described as a “buffer between the state and the private sphere” (2015, 29) which had until this moment in the pandemic been a public but non-political space. In doing so, posts became placards which in turn became posters calling neighbours and passers-by beyond the glass into a dialogue about race relations in the UK.

As such, the placards no longer addressed government or the police but addressed a group of people without legislative or operational power. This move turns posters into “anti slogans not stimulating actions but thought processes” (Reboul 1979, 128–129) in what were often predominantly white communities. Indeed, these placards could be read as an act of witnessing, creating the conditions in which “we cannot say we did not know” (Peters 2001, 708) and requiring further forms of political action. Thus, this constituted a collective recognition that racist dynamics structure life beyond institutional systems and structures and that more amorphous racist tendencies also need addressing. In this way, placards reading “white silence is violence” marked a moment similar to that in 1963 when Americans began to see civil rights as an issue which called them into dialogue rather than being a problem confined to black communities or southern states (Satell cited in Cayton 2018). The change of locale from moving through the streets to being propped up in windows created a new set of public/private dynamics. The window became “a space for speech and action, a space predicated on thought and radical doubt” (Silverstone 2006, 39).

These dynamics were further extending on the first Thursday after the final NHS clap when many individuals including those whose health had prevented them from attending Black Lives Matter demonstrations, chose to take the knee on their doorsteps. As Alekseevsky points out “it is considered that the main strengths of any mass protest is the crowd with its inherent anonymity, amorphousness and irregularity, since in a crowd each individual becomes part of a kind of plankton” (2011, 170). The doorstep as a site of protest strips participants of this comforting sense of anonymity and the reassurance offered by allyship, and required them to put their “body on the line” (Peters 2001, 713) through a public enactment of politics in a hitherto private space. This created a dynamic in which we “become capable of recognising ourselves as strangers even when we know each other!” (Warner 2002, 417)

Allies, Neighbours and Strangers

In this article, I have attempted to answer a question posed by Georgiou in an article published in the immediate aftermath of the COVID outbreak which was: how can the tools and ethos of mutual aid networks “expand beyond the familiar to include the stranger” (2020, LSE Blogs). In doing so I have examined the ways in which COVID has reconfigured the boundaries between online and offline, as well as public and private spaces. I have focused on the way in which the windowpane and the doorstep became spaces in which private individuals came together to demonstrate care for their neighbours, the wider community and the NHS. I went on to examine the way in which the killing of George Floyd prompted a renegotiation of these spaces in such a way as to foreground solidarity—rather than care—as a political practice and explored the way in which this reconfigured the relationship between neighbours especially those in predominately white communities.

As Duvall and Heckemeyer et al point out, hashtags are “a catalyst for online conversation and an organising mechanism for offline protest” (2018, 393). In this way, hashtags have enabled conversations about the policing of black Americans since the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. Thus, social networks such as Twitter have operated as counter publics enabling activists to build “a community of likeminded people” (Ince, Rojas, and Davis 2017, 1818) whilst also understanding themselves to be “part of a potentially wider public” (Fraser 1990, 67). Warner, building upon Fraser’s view, goes on to point out that the “the expansive nature of public address will seek to keep moving that frontier … to seek more and more places to circulate” (2002, 424). In this instance, the frontier that Black Lives Matter hashtags moved across was the boundary between online and offline spaces. Thus, slogans such as # ICantBreathe, #Saytheirnames, #Don’tShoot moved from an online realm in which “people will recognise themselves in its address” (Warner 2002, 87) to offline spaces in which recognition was less certain.

In this way, spaces which had been predicated on consensus became open to more agonistic dynamics (Mouffe 2005). They did so because the audience of these messages extends beyond allies at a demonstration to include neighbours who are known privately as individuals but often remain politically opaque. Thus, hashtags transitioned from being online slogans which sought to provoke policy changes from the police and the government into being offline slogans which called neighbours and community members into dialogue about racial injustice. As Silverstone points out this sort of engagement, unlike an engagement with allies online or during a public demonstration, is private, solitary and involves risk (2006, 45). This is a view echoed by an activist with long experience of anti-fascist actions who said in interview “The state isn’t going to come and put a brick through your window, but some of these people will.” (Hicks, in interview, 2018)

Warner maintains that people are immediately and actively involved in a public through acts of “speaking, writing and thinking” (2002, 414). Following the killing of George Floyd, debates about race in the UK were conducted through posts and platforms, placards and protests but also and unexpectedly through posters and windowpanes. The almost viral spread of Black Lives Matter placards in windows extended previously existing online dynamics. According to Duvall and Heckemeyer, “a celebrity who participates in hashtag activism is engaging in the production of the self as an activist or social commentator, not just consuming the news” (2018, 395). A similar dynamic is flagged by Coombs et al in relation to Colin Kaepernick’s decision to take the knee during NFL games (Coombs et al. 2020). I would suggest that the private individuals placing a placard in the window of their home or stepping out of their front door to collectively take the knee were also engaged in the production of self as an activist or social commentator.

By turning placards into posters in this way, householders utilised “forms of intelligibility” (Warner 2002, 416) which had been made possible by the new status of the windowpane as public notice board. The movement of placards from the street to the window placed them in a new set of public/private dynamics. In this way, the emergence of Black Lives Matter posters in people’s windows built upon expressions of care articulated though the use of little words on rainbow posters (Billig 1995, 96): “take care [out there],” “stay safe [out there],” “We stay here for you. Please stay home for us.” In doing so, both sets of posters created a “a sense of there being an elsewhere” and of that “elsewhere being in some way relevant” to the people living in those houses. However, the Black Lives Matter posters alone turned suburban pavements into public spaces in which the stranger as well as the neighbour were made visible, and in which the presence of alternative views created the capacity for dialogue and potentially the manifestation of discord (Silverstone 2006). In this way the Black Lives Matter protests exemplified much of the “elusive strangeness” (Warner 2002, 52) which Warner attributes to the public sphere. This is significant because it extends the dynamics of care to include the potential for “risk and conflict” (Warner 2002, 424) created by co-presence of strangers (Silverstone 2006).

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pollyanna Ruiz

Pollyanna Ruiz (corresponding author) is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Sussex. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Dominic Cummings was a special advisor to the Prime Minister who travelled across the country when a member of his family tested positive for COVID but who retained his job.