#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

On 25 May 2020, video of George Floyd’s murder circulated online. Throughout the summer, names of other victims of police brutality, including Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Dominique Fells, and Tony McDade, turned into viral hashtags. As protesters flooded streets, the resurgence of #BlackLivesMatter raised questions about systemic anti-Black racism in all facets of US public culture, including public memory.

In the US South, protesters pressured leaders to reimagine or remove monuments to the Civil War and Jim Crow eras.¹ Many demonstrators who targeted southern universities were successful. Before the fall semester began, officials announced plans to address monuments at the University of Alabama, University of Florida, Western Kentucky University, University of Mississippi, University of Virginia, and Washington and Lee University.

In mid-June 2020, the University of Arkansas (hereafter UARK) became embroiled in controversy over its memorialization of former university president J. William Fulbright (1939–41). Critics noted that during his tenure as US senator (1945–74) Fulbright voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1968 Civil Rights Bill. Fulbright was also one of ninety-nine congressional signatories of the Southern Manifesto, a document that opposed public school desegregation, sought to preserve Jim Crow laws, and remains “the single worst episode of racial demagoguery in the era of postwar America (1948–1973)” (Day 3).

Former and current Black UARK students, faculty, and staff (hereafter Black UARK affiliates) unified via Twitter using #BlackatUARK to oppose dominant public memories of Fulbright and share their experiences of anti-Black racism on campus.² The hashtag was precipitated by an earlier deluge of tweets decrying the lack of a swift administrative response to a video of Sigma Chi fraternity members mocking George Floyd’s death (Duby and Komar). When then chancellor Joseph E. Steinmetz abruptly deleted his Twitter account amid backlash, #BlackatUARK surfaced alongside a new organization called the Black Student Caucus. An anonymous group representative tweeted fifteen demands, one being the removal of the Fulbright namesake from all university property. Other Black UARK affiliates agreed that commemorating Fulbright’s legacy contradicted the university’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusivity. Before long, non-Black allies joined the growing hashtag. They expressed empathy and promised to help end anti-Black racism at UARK.

Under pressure, Steinmetz reactivated his account and tweeted #BlackatUARK in mid-June 2020. He indicated support for an inclusive campus and agreed to meet with the Black Student Caucus. Steinmetz appointed a committee of students, faculty, staff, and alumni to evaluate the future of the Fulbright brand throughout the 2020–21 academic year. The committee recommended moving a prominent statue of Fulbright to an off-campus location where it could be restoried to address Fulbright’s white supremacy, in addition to renaming the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and the Fulbright Dining Hall (“Recommendations”).

Steinmetz endorsed the committee’s proposals, but almost immediately the state legislature outlawed the removal of historical monuments on public property. Making matters more complicated, the Fulbright family published a letter advocating for the statue and namesake to stay intact (Adame). Steinmetz then resigned as chancellor due to “challenges found trying to manage a university in today’s polarized society” (Brence and Fergeson). In July 2021, the UARK system Board of Trustees announced that all Fulbright memorials would remain but with added context to address his complicated legacy.

In this essay, we trace the circulation of #BlackatUARK from its inception on Twitter to its ongoing consequentiality on campus. Because the hashtag enables ordinary people to assemble into a network based in shared memory, it illustrates what rhetorical scholars claim is the distinctiveness of online memorializing. Online memorialization practices entail immediate vernacular memory expression in response to current events (Hess), the involvement of private individuals who become authenticated as public subjects in interactive acts of deliberation and remembering (Hartelius), the dissolution of the modern divide between living memories and archives (Haskins), and the facilitation of public pedagogy (VanHaitsma). To this list, we add that the hashtag exemplifies how people can harness the affordances of digital social media platforms to challenge dominant narratives of the past embedded within geographically situated places of public memory like university campuses.

More specifically, we show how Black UARK affiliates use the hashtag to mobilize digital counterpublic memories of UARK. The hashtag derives its counterpublicity, in large part, from users who share their own memories of campus life and critique the normative racial dimensions (i.e., the unquestioned whiteness) of the public constituted by existing campus memorials. In this way, the hashtag confirms Makeba Lavan’s observation that Black Twitter “has become a site of counter-narratives and counter-memory, assembling supplementary information that challenges the dominant narrative propagated in traditional media” (57). Hashtag users recontextualize the materiality of campus public memory from the vantage of a collective Black perspective, inviting audiences to tour the multigenerational, everyday lived reality of anti-Black racism at UARK. The hashtag exceeds its containment by digital media technologies, transforming dominant memorials to Fulbright into sites of contested meaning through a process that imbricates the digital and nondigital worlds while altering UARK’s memoryscape and the subjectivities of its constituents.

As a digital counterpublic memorial, #BlackatUARK does not reproduce a logic of monumentality that strives to preserve a singular vision of the past; rather, the hashtag threatens the conservative impulse of institutionalized public memory altogether by seeking a less centralized and more pluralistic culture of public memorialization. Due to its fugitivity against official gatekeepers of UARK’s memoryscape, #BlackatUARK is best understood as a deep rhetorical ecology. Louis M. Maraj defines deep rhetorical ecologies as entangled relational networks consisting of an “evolving series of rhetorical situations in which communication occurs, which are interrelated through bodies, spaces, cultures, and contexts with specific regard to power dynamics and race relations” (7, emphasis in original). Deep rhetorical ecologies are ever-growing, futural assemblages composed of texts, technologies, bodies, memories, and layers of affect. When deep rhetorical ecologies rise to public view, insurgent racial histories, spatiotemporalities, and meanings are made visible and become loci of struggle.

The deep rhetorical ecology constituted by #BlackatUARK gives insight into the temporal dimensions of digital counterpublic memorialization. We argue the hashtag depends on an interplay between the strategic use of opportune timing (kairos) and the shame that accompanies missed opportunities (metanoia) for addressing anti-Black racism. To the former point, the hashtag only exists because Black UARK affiliates seized the occasion for public advocacy following George Floyd’s murder and a localized instantiation of racial violence. In rhetorical studies, we dub such propitious apertures kairotic moments, which occur when shifts in context create exigent conditions for optimal influence. Recent rhetorical scholarship has shown how the networked virality of a memory-based hashtag can cause a kairotic moment to spatiotemporally protract beyond its point of inception, so long as the hashtag is recognized as exigent and continually circulated across a range of rhetorical ecologies by intending human bodies (Hatfield). Our analysis of #BlackatUARK extends this work by demonstrating that hashtags may function as accelerators of a kairotic moment aimed toward the disruption of dominant memorial emplacements.

Moreover, we contend that a kairotic moment such as #BlackatUARK teems with the potential for solidarity and change because it harbors an endless supply of alternative spatiotemporal pathways. Kelly A. Myers asserts that with all kairotic opportunities for action come unrealized possibilities—or metanoic moments. Metanoic moments are pauses for reflecting on one’s shame and regret about missed opportunities, leading to self-transformation and a renewed orientation toward the future. Enfolded into the hashtag’s circulation is a metanoic moment for non-Black allies to contemplate the many missed chances for addressing white supremacy embedded within UARK’s memoryscape. By amplifying #BlackatUARK and encouraging systemic interruption, these hashtag users actualize and spatiotemporally elongate both the kairotic and metanoic moment made through its circulation.

In what follows, we validate and reinvigorate enduring conceptions of the kairos/metanoia pairing. We show how the ancient coupling can be leveraged to investigate contemporary phenomena, particularly deep ecological enactments of digital counterpublic memorialization and the concurrent reshaping of public memory, geography, and subjectivity. Simultaneously, we depersonalize the kairos/metanoia marriage, moving beyond its connotations as a theory of self-transformation and toward its latent value as a framework for explaining multisited acts of collective protest.

#BlackatUARK as a Digital Counterpublic Memorial

Rhetorical scholars of public memory scrutinize how and to what effect communities represent, store, and impart recollections of a supposedly shared past. Institutionally authorized public memory sites—including speeches, monuments, museums, photography, film, and websites—shape human perceptions of reality by selectively framing historical figures and events for specific cultural, political, and economic purposes (Houdek and Phillips). Counterpublic memories, on the other hand, oppose these dominant frames by offering views of the past from the perspective of marginalized publics. #BlackatUARK typifies how digital counterpublic memories may uncover inadequacies or omissions in memorial installations prominently located within a proto-public sphere such as the UARK campus.

Like other universities across the world, UARK is a robust place of institutionalized public memory. The names of famous Arkansan entrepreneurs and politicians adorn buildings, the likes of which range from Sam Walton to the Clintons. Historical markers sacralize significant areas on campus, with signage celebrating the founding of the Alpha chapter of Lambda Pi Eta in 1985. And more than one hundred thousand names of degree-earners are etched into sidewalks as part of the ever-growing “Senior Walk” tradition. Prominently fixed in this memoryscape is the life-size Fulbright statue, standing directly across from the Fulbright Peace Fountain, a forty-one-foot bronze sculpture rooted in the university’s original grounds.

Both memorial structures to Fulbright were dedicated on United Nations Day 1998 to commemorate his achievements as a peacemaker. UARK remembers Fulbright as a proponent of anti-interventionism, opposing both the Cold War and Vietnam War. He is also celebrated as an advocate for international diplomacy and founder of the exchange program bearing his name. Fay Jones, a codesigner of the memorial, hoped to convey Fulbright’s “ideal of world harmony through knowledge and cooperation among the nations and institutions of the world” (Bennetts 610). However, even from the time of its erection, commentators wondered if the memorial properly contextualized “the deeply flawed hero” whose voting record on race issues was inconsistent with his peacemaker ethos (611).

Fulbright is one part of the longer history of anti-Blackness baked into UARK’s memoryscape. The university retains a close tie to the origin of Lost Cause mythologies, which informed the postbellum politics espoused by Fulbright in the Southern Manifesto. Then and now, public memories of the Lost Cause downplay or erase slavery as the impetus for the Civil War, while repositioning southerners as heroes in an epic fight to preserve their agrarian lifestyle and economy against the violent aggression of northern elites. Lost Cause nostalgia bolsters white supremacy by portraying the antebellum US South as a harmonious system that benefited enslaved people, absolving white southerners of any wrongdoing (Domby; Ore, “The Lost Cause”; Towns). Stephen M. Monroe traces the emergence of Lost Cause ideology to institutions of higher education in the US South, citing Daniel H. Hill (1877–84), UARK’s third president, as one of its most notable proponents (174). Hill was an ex-Confederate general and founder of the revisionist periodical The Land We Love, which was “the magazine forum of choice for chronicling Confederate military action and rekindling a nation’s Lost Cause” following the Civil War (Diffley 63). Currently, Hill is revered by the official UARK website without mention of his involvement in popularizing Lost Cause lies (“Daniel H. Hill”).³

Hill is not the only racist figure embedded in UARK’s memory of itself. Only after the rise of #BlackatUARK did administrators rename a dining hall commemorating former Arkansan governor Charles Hillman Brough (1917–21). Brough was an instigator of the Elaine Massacre of 1919, in which white soldiers indiscriminately murdered over two hundred black sharecroppers protesting low wages (Stockley, Mitchell, and Lancaster). The massacre remains the deadliest anti-Black event to have ever been recorded in Arkansas.

UARK’s memoryscape is further stained by the plantation revival architecture washing over the fraternity and sorority mansions on campus. Stephen Clowney insists that Greek life housing aesthetics in the US South are literal memorials to an idealized confederate culture, offering evidence of architects who “showed slides of the Southern plantations that influenced their blueprints” when revealing plans for the Phi Mu house completed at UARK in 2019 (623). As stylizations of anti-Blackness, these home exteriors are compatible with the deep-rooted racial exclusivity of predominantly white fraternities and sororities at UARK that Black UARK affiliates have voiced their concerns about since the 1960s (Cole).

Juxtaposed against this backdrop, #BlackatUARK confronts various anti-Black memories across the UARK campus. Dominant public memories have never been immune from such criticism; in fact, contestation is a hallmark of US public memory traditions. As Tasha N. Dubriwny and Kristan Poirot contend, official modes of memorialization sanctioned by institutional leaders tend to “promote historical narratives that are inherently conservative in nature” (199). In general, dominant public memories preserve an established status quo by glorifying normative authorities, traditions, and values. However, as times and communities change, the taken-for-granted ideologies that underlie public memory structures like the Fulbright statue become more pronounced and less widely acceptable (Kretsinger-Harries; Na’puti and Dionne). In response, #BlackatUARK users contribute their memories as a method of Black-centered critical engagement for challenging the too often unquestioned racialized meanings attached to Fulbright’s public memory.

Because it troubles the racial homogeneity of the public interpellated by Fulbright memorials specifically and UARK’s memoryscape more broadly, #BlackatUARK qualifies as a counterpublic memorial. Black counterpublics, Guy-Uriel Charles and Luis Fuentes-Rohwer claim, materialize when “exclusion leads to the creation of alternative deliberative spaces for critical engagement” (7). Black Twitter, a dispersed network of Twitter users unified by a set of similar interests and a sense of common racial identity, is one example of a Black counterpublic that has operationalized the affordances of the digital social media platform to “reflect the experiences and needs of a marginalized community and call on mainstream politics to listen and respond” (Jackson 378). Riffing on the work of Catherine R. Squires, André Brock, Jr. specifies that Black Twitter is a “satellite counterpublic” because it oscillates in and out of the dominant public sphere while maintaining its cultural idiosyncrasies (86–87, emphasis in original). #BlackatUARK comports with Brock’s description of Black Twitter. Although the hashtag may have begun as a relatively enclaved forum for only Black UARK affiliates to recollect past experiences and air grievances, it quickly became a trending topic when both Black and non-Black Twitter users increased its circulation and promoted its visibility online and off.

#BlackatUARK falls into a lineage of Black counterpublic-led hashtag movements that confront racialized systems of forgetting. Because official public memory structures are often heavily surveilled and uneasily moved, counterpublics must be inventive when opposing exclusionary public memories, at times having to resist via digital communication channels. For example, #BlackLivesMatter has functioned as a tool for both archiving and direct action (Liebermann). And #GirlsLikeUs, #BlackGirlMagic, #YouOKSis, and #SayHerName, among others, have remembered and responded to ongoing injustices along intersecting axes of race, gender, and class (Florini, Beyond Hashtags; Jackson, Bailey, and Welles; Steele).

By archiving racial injustice within higher education, #BlackatUARK also recalls #BlackonCampus, a hashtag movement first formed during the antiracist protests at the University of Missouri in 2015. Black university affiliates across the United States have since sporadically adapted #BlackonCampus to chronicle their experiences within predominantly white institutions (Thomason). Variations of #BlackonCampus verify Maraj’s judgment that hashtagging is a “marginalized literacy” for Black rhetors in academe to harness an “epistemic rupture” within predominantly white institutions (PWIs) that tend to do little more than pay lip service to their own self-imposed diversity requirements (18–19).

Epistemic ruptures catalyze kairotic moments. In shedding light on how UARK’s memoryscape is haunted by anti-Black racism, #BlackatUARK triggers a kairotic moment for recognizing the exigence of and responding to this social ill. Originating in sophistic thought, a kairotic moment elicits a sensual experience detected at the level of the body shared by rhetors and audience members (Davis, Breaking Up [at] Totality; Hawhee; Poulakos). When contextual elements shift and the timing is just right, kairotic moments pull disparate bodies into relational networks, and, by virtue of their capacity to loosen spatiotemporal and corporeal boundaries, create possibilities for metistic acts of rhetorical invention (Trapani and Maldonado). As they galvanize bodies into action, kairotic moments like #BlackatUARK may protract beyond their point of inception. The viral networking capabilities of digital social media platforms simplify the process of spatiotemporally extending a kairotic moment, especially in situations where people come together to publicly share their embodied experiences and memories (Hatfield). Kairotic moments stretch into the future when intimate rhetoric goes viral, and rhetorical agency is distributed as it is realized.

Beyond just an expanded kairotic moment, #BlackatUARK is an ecologically diffuse assemblage that cultivates feelings of metanoia, or the affective thrusts of shame and regret that emerge when one realizes they missed an opportunity. Like kairos, metanoia is a figure with roots in ancient rhetorical texts (Ellwanger; Leff). Metanoia names an experience of self-awareness in which rhetors pause when they are rhetorically ineffective and adjust accordingly. As Myers elucidates, every kairotic moment comes with possibilities or potentials that are inevitably deferred. The shame of regret that marks a missed occasion is felt as metanoia, a pang requiring “a person look back on past decisions in order to move in a new direction. It calls for a larger process of re-vision in which a person is constantly revising and revitalizing understanding” (11). Rather than dwelling in the shameful overwhelm of missed opportunities etched into an inherited past, non-Black allies channel their regrets about the institution’s racism into a display of collective solidarity with Black UARK affiliates. Amplifying the digital counterpublic memories spread through the hashtag, they meld the digital and the analog realms in a struggle over history that has since compelled university leaders to express regret for—and physically modify—the institution’s uncritical maintenance of anti-Black public memories.

The Racial Rhetorical Criticism of Digital Social Media Data

Prior to Twitter launching its Academic Research product track in early 2021, hashtags such as #BlackatUARK were challenging to study because Twitter’s interface did not provide academic researchers free or complete access to historical data on the platform. To analyze the hashtag, we relied on a webscraping company, ScrapeHero, to collect all publicly available #BlackatUARK tweets circulated throughout 2020. We received a dataset consisting of 1,489 tweets from June 15 to December 31, 2020. We “scrubbed” this dataset by removing duplicate tweets, tweets containing only the hashtag, and irrelevant tweets, such as algorithmically generated product advertisements.

Next, we examined the remaining dataset. Our initial reading employed principles of recursive “open” and “in vivo” coding to inductively produce thematic categories that captured primary trends (Lindlof and Taylor 322). Our coding process was informed by a “deconstructive” outlook that conceptualized data as polysemous symbols subject to the politics of competing interpretations (Poirier 3). While deconstructing the dataset, we integrated values of racial rhetorical criticism, attending to dynamics of “multiplicity, (in)coherence, and intersectionality” in enactments of vernacular rhetorical expression (Flores 12). Ultimately, we decided that the final coding scheme should reflect what we discerned as a recurrent focus on memories of anti-Black racism enacted by individuals and institutions.

We formulated more thematic categories based on the primary object of concern within the content of each tweet. We started by identifying tweets of remembrance written by those who articulated their experiences as Black UARK affiliates. We coded these tweets into two primary categories: memories of interpersonal racism and memories of institutional racism. We then produced two additional primary themes, coding expressions of allyship as individual acts of allyship and institutional acts of allyship. Within the themes, we identified several subthemes based on the agent specified in the content of the tweet.

Not all tweets easily fit within these themes. We observed a marginal number of rebuttals from Black UARK affiliates who felt that others had not taken sufficient personal responsibility for deciding to attend a PWI. A common refrain was that hashtag users should have enrolled in a historically Black college or university.

Finally, we also coded relevant but unsortable tweets that did not represent a clear memory of racism or a clear act of allyship. Included in this category were tweets from Black parents about whether to send their children to UARK and tweets from Black UARK affiliates who conveyed a lack of surprise about the experiences reported in the hashtag (see Table 1).

Table 1. Data themes.

Primary theme	Subtheme	Tweet count
1. Memories of interpersonal racism		463
	1a. Student racism	219
	1b. Faculty racism	119
	1c. Administrator racism	50
	1d. Staff racism	75
2. Memories of institutional racism		224
	2a. Student organization racism	99
	2b. Faculty organization racism	42
	2c. Administrator organization racism	43
	2d. Other campus organization racism	40
3. Individual acts of allyship		185
	3a. Allyship from students	127
	3b. Allyship from faculty	46
	3c. Allyship from staff	12
4. Institutional acts of allyship		47
	4a. Allyship from student organizations	10
	4b. Allyship from faculty organizations	21
	4c. Allyship from administrators	9
	4d. Allyship from elected officials	7
5. Rebuttals		38
	5a. Rebuttals of memory	7
	5b. Rebuttals of allyship	31
6. Unsortable		78

All information within the dataset was publicly accessible when we scraped #BlackatUARK. Whether digital social media data are public and acceptable to freely reprint in academic research is a controversial topic (Possler, Bruns, and Niemann-Lenz). Members of our Institutional Review Board suggested that any text accessible online is fair to use in our research.

But as part of our methodological ethics, we asked #BlackatUARK tweeters for consent before reprinting their tweets verbatim herein. We obtained a grant to pay all private individuals who authorized us to use their tweets anonymously. We also allowed them to respond to drafts of this essay. Some chose to offer feedback that impacted our analysis. We did not pay for tweets issued by public figures, organizations, and self-identified white allies who agreed to donate their tweets. As the field of digital rhetorical studies further evolves, we recommend rhetorical scholars implement best practices of informed consent and financial compensation in their research, particularly when engaging with data produced by marginalized communities.

A Kairotic Moment for Memorializing Anti-Black Racism

When browsing #BlackatUARK, one notices a slew of memories of racial microaggressions in interpersonal interactions between students. One recollected, “#BlackatUark having a frat boy call you and ask to borrow ‘black girl hair’ for show and tell.” Another wrote, “#BlackatUark is having your fellow classmates call you sensitive when you RESPECTFULLY ask them not to call everything ‘ghetto/ratchet’ when they’re around you.” A final person recalled, “I was asked to observe a fellow grad student’s teaching, and when her sole Black student presented on racism in America, she responded: ‘but America is still a much better country than Africa, right?’”

Some Black UARK affiliates remembered their non-Black peers using racial slurs. As one expressed, “#BlackAtUARK is when you are at a party with ‘friends’ and while Kendrick’s To Pimp a Butterfly is playing some one asks if they can say the N word.” Two others tweeted:

Being in a program that was created to help minority students become affiliated with the honors college only to get harrassed my freshman year by a white student saying the “N” word around me who was let in to create “equal opportunity” for all people #BlackatUark

#BlackatUark is going to a Razorback basketball game with your parents and while we’re walking to the gym hearing “You f’ing n*ggers” screamed from a passing truck. We were the only black ppl in a crowd of white ppl. My parents were shocked and horrified.

Black UARK affiliates also remembered faculty and staff as culprits in cultivating an anti-Black campus climate. In the case of faculty, an alum disclosed that a professor stated, “‘I use the word n*****. Faulkner wrote it so I say we talk about it.’ this was not a class on fiction or Faulkner, and in fact it was a workshop without reading assignments. #BlackatUark.” A student wrote, “#BlackatUark is having your professor point his finger at you to simulate someone shooting another when you’re the only black student in the classroom.” Someone else invoked a time when a professor confused her name with that of a Black woman in a fictional film, explaining in dialogue format, “Teacher: Precious, can you— Me: It’s Patience, my name is Patience. Teacher: Oh so sorry! Idk why I keep wanting to call you precious, like the movie lol CORRECT YOUR NAME EVERYTIME #BlackatUark.”

Referencing staff, tweets contained memories of anti-Blackness in a wide range of areas on campus, including student affairs, media, athletics, and health care. A particularly common and egregious pattern of tweets contained grievances lodged by Black UARK affiliates experiencing difficulties while seeking mental health treatment. One remembered, “#BlackatUark is also being told that you cannot request the only black therapist.” Another lamented, “#blackatuark is having a white counselor mistake you for another black student and sharing her private information.” These tweets provide insight into how Black UARK affiliates face discrimination in settings supposedly designated to promote the well-being of all community members.

#BlackatUARK exhibits how racial microaggressions tax the minds and bodies of Black UARK affiliates in interactions with other students, faculty, and staff. These testimonials attest to how historical patterns of exclusion embedded in PWIs enframe daily interpersonal exchanges, creating lasting collective experiences of “racial battle fatigue” (Smith 180). Racial battle fatigue is a form of burnout—a psycho-somatic response caused by the constant defense of oneself from micro- and macro-instantiations of anti-Black racism. Although often rendered invisible, the hashtag highlights the chronic interactions that cause and sustain racial battle fatigue. Through the hashtag, Black users process collective trauma and build a counterpublic memorial that both reveals and resists the perpetuation of racial battle fatigue at UARK.

Beyond memories of anti-Black racism in interpersonal contexts, memories of anti-Black racism in institutional contexts pervade the #BlackatUARK dataset (i.e., student and faculty organizations, academic departments and colleges, administrative divisions). Fraternities and sororities were recounted as particularly potent incubators for racist language and behavior. One person wrote, “BlackatUark means walking past dozens of plantation style homes just to get to class.” Another claimed, “#BlackatUark is walking to your dorm right beside frat row only to have a pickup truck full of white boys otw to a party pull up and yell ‘y’all ni&&ers better run!!!!!’. Nice freshman introduction to campus. Thanks ‘YOU of A.’”

The on-campus police force was also a frequent target of criticism by Black UARK affiliates. One asserted, “#BlackatUark is getting a heinously expensive ticket for driving through a crosswalk where no one was crossing but seeing white students drive through the same crosswalk and almost hit pedestrians w/UAPD watching.” Another tweeted, “#BlackatUark is having the police follow you on a Saturday night from Dickson, to on campus, all the way to your dorm room hallway bc [because] they thought you looked suspicious and wasn’t a student there.” More ominously, someone detailed, “BlackatUark is being in a car with a coworker and getting stopped by campus police for no reason and having the cop tell my friend ‘why are y’all scared? it’s not like we are going to shoot you.’”

Another focus of critique was student and faculty recruitment. To the former, one individual elucidated, “Being #blackatuark means continually being the only one or one of two black students in my honors classes. I’ve never had a black male classmate in my honors classes, and apparently that’s ok?” Another wrote, “#BlackAtUARK when cohort after cohort there’s only 1–5 black/nursing students of color, so there’s extremely little to absolutely no education on providing care for any patients other than white.” One person even used the university’s own publicly available data to quantitatively verify the qualitative experiences of others, stating:

As of Fall 2019, the undergraduate black percentage was sitting at 4.4%, which is exactly 1,202 students out of the entire 27,559 student body. What makes it so bad is that that number has decreased from 1,268 in Fall 2017. That’s still a crappy number, BTW. … And the University is not hiding it and DEFINITELY not addressing it. All of that info is online and public. The black student population has been decreasing for years, and we’re tired of not being heard about it. https://oir.uark.edu/students/enrollment-reports/2019-fall-summary.pdf

To the latter, one person stated, “#BlackatUark is having only one black professor in the entire Chemical Engineering Department.” Similarly, someone tweeted that they had to rely on enrolling in courses in African American Studies to study with Black professors: “Having my only black instructors teaching African American Studies courses (with the exception of Dr Lofton and Dr Esper) #BlackatUark.”

A final focus of Black UARK affiliates’ ire was university administration. One student contended, “#BlackatUark is creating a hashtag because the administration refuses to listen to the demands of black students.” So as not to allow #BlackatUARK users to mistake representation for equity, another tweeted, “#BlackatUARK is having black administrators who are not willing to stand in solidarity with their black student body.” These tweets bluntly specified administrators as accountable for the widespread perpetuation of anti-Blackness at UARK.

In this vein, Black UARK affiliates were quick to point out flaws in the administration’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusivity. One individual brought up a historical example: “#BlackatUark is knowing that the U of A ‘willingly’ integrated because they couldn’t financially afford not to admit Silas Hunt in case he took them to court & won. our history here is rooted in positive changes for us being made only if it benefits white people simultaneously.” Referencing the more recent event involving fraternity members who parodied George Floyd’s death in video, another person observed, “#BlackatUark is seeing white students post racist videos and pictures and expecting them to get away with it because the university does not care if black students feel safe on campus.”

Absent a clear system of accountability and given the ubiquity of anti-Black racism on campus, confronting racist behavior is a difficult, if not an impossible, task. As a self-identified Black woman tweeted:

BlackatUark is only being able to discuss the racism/micro aggressions you face to your other black peers and not any of your white peers out of fear of being labeled as the ‘angry black woman’ of the class and being ostracized by them.

In the tweet above, the individual makes clear her concern that her identity as a Black woman makes her an easy target for stereotyping by white students. Fearing retaliation, Black students such as herself are left to dialogue about their experiences among one another, leaving the exigence of anti-Black racism largely concealed and unregulated.

When circulated publicly, however, these intimate memories make a deep rhetorical ecology of racist interpersonal and institutional exchanges an exigence available for all to witness and feel. Occurring in tandem with the post-George Floyd wave of #BlackLivesMatter protests, #BlackatUARK is endowed with a felt urgency that still, to this day, saturates the dataset and gives it a particular kairotic charge. As a digital counterpublic sphere that anyone can enter and alter, the hashtag’s exigence is constantly regenerated as it changes, circulates, and grows in virality (Hatfield). Over the course of its embodied transformation and expansion, the kairotic moment of #BlackatUARK is stretched into the future by people who recognize its gravity and contribute to the momentum of its movement.

As it ebbs and flows into the future, the kairotic moment of #BlackatUARK exceeds its digital origins. When Black UARK affiliates use the hashtag to connect their personal memories to the built environment of the UARK campus, they offer a constructive remapping of the campus that overlays official public memory structures like the Fulbright statue without any physical disturbance to its architecture. In so doing, hashtag users create a digital counterpublic memorial in a context where dissent is often suppressed or, at most, contained to an enclosed area, such as a designated “free speech” zone. The hashtag thus becomes what Katherine McKittrick names an “alterable site of struggle,” or a traumatic location of unresolved grief in the Black public cultural imaginary that can be rhetorically re-remembered to show how the past places a palpable burden on present social-geographical arrangements (69).

Temporally, the kairotic moment of #BlackatUARK is not unidirectionally futuristic but also purposefully incorporates elements of the past as a reminder of the systemic injustices it seeks to consistently bring into the open. By targeting the Fulbright statue specifically, hashtag users urge all UARK affiliates to reinterpret their relationship to UARK’s memoryscape through the lens of what Ersula J. Ore calls “a past not yet passed,” or a past that is clearly not over (Lynching 96). The hashtag, then, resists the “temporal containment” of white violence against Black lives by not allowing one to mistake anti-Black events as exclusive to a bygone past or somehow an anomaly in the present (Gomez 182). A recontextualization of the past in pursuit of better futures, the hashtag epitomizes Thomas R. Dunn’s assertion that “ … counterpublic memories explicitly call into being alternative ways of living through the past distinct from those of official memory markers” (615). Indeed, the hashtag allows contemporary Twitter users to reaccess the past from a Black-centered viewpoint, inducing a metanoic moment to repair the long ongoing exigence of anti-Black racism on campus in pursuit of a more just future.

A Metanoic Moment for Dismantling Anti-Black Racism

As Black UARK affiliates advanced #BlackatUARK, non-Black students, faculty, staff, and alumni used the hashtag to tweet messages of support for ending legacies of anti-Black racism on campus. For the most part, these allies agreed with the Black Student Caucus’s fifteen demands, including, among other things, implementing a hate speech policy, hiring additional Black faculty and staff, and removing the Fulbright statue. In supporting these causes, allies commonly recommended that other non-Black UARK affiliates complete three courses of action.

First, non-Black allies called for other allies to read and reflect on #BlackatUARK. Students encouraged their peers to commit every testimony within the hashtag to memory. Faculty and staff encouraged each other to listen to Black affiliates rather than just hear them. Alumni encouraged each other to rethink their alma mater’s relationship with anti-Black racism, as in the case of this tweet:

[I] encourage every graduate at the “You of A” to read the stories under #BlackatUARK. Great perspective and great learning experience for those of us who had the privilege of being White at an institute of higher learning. Not everyone had a great time on The Hill.

Second, allies compelled their followers to amplify #BlackatUARK and the memories found within. Students, faculty, staff, and alumni called their followers to retweet #BlackatUARK to raise awareness about the hashtag. Allies from across demographics also asked their followers to retweet specific testimonies and demands for accountability. A few even went so far as to use their business accounts to circulate #BlackatUARK, increasing the hashtag’s reach.

Third, non-Black allies called for others to take direct action against anti-Black racism, thus expressing a willingness to personally wield their privilege to support Black UARK affiliates. Students, for instance, tweeted about disrupting the smooth flow of anti-Black racism on campus, as in the case of these two tweets:

I am not #BlackatUARK, but I support you 100%. Please let me know what I can do to help. I am a PhD student and TA [teaching assistant] in the Department of Biology. If you ever need someone to walk you to your car or are having trouble with a prof/TA/etc, I would be happy to help. I know there’s not much I can offer, but I want you to know the offer stands.

#BlackatUark I’m a white, female student and I support every word black students on our campus are saying. I can’t MAKE the administration do anything, but I will definitely keep irritating the crap out of them until they act. I will unleash my inner Karen for the greater good!

Comparably, faculty and staff tweeted #BlackatUARK to acknowledge that their doors were always open, noting that their offices were safe spaces and promising that they would take steps to lead their departments in the direction of an antiracist future.

In concert with individual allies, institutional allies also helped publicize #BlackatUARK. Leaders from student and faculty organizations, administrative offices, the Arkansas government, and the community more generally joined individual allies in tweeting the hashtag. They also recommended people engage with #BlackatUARK by reflecting, amplifying, and following Black UARK affiliates in direct action efforts.

For example, the UARK Young Democrats, the UARK chapter of the sorority Tri Delta, and the local chapter of Parents for Lesbians & Gays (PFLAG) framed #BlackatUARK as an opportunity to reflect on and gain awareness about the hidden mechanics of anti-Black racism on campus.

The Young Democrats tweeted:

The #BlackatUARK tweets are honest and much needed criticisms of our campus culture. We should all take them to heart and commit to anti-racist action. @BlackUark released a list of long overdue demands for change and we encourage everyone to read them.

Tri Delta tweeted:

Racism has no place in Tri Delta. In this pivotal moment in history we challenge you to be brave, bold and kind in the fight for racial equality and justice. Follow this link for a compilation of thought-starters and resources […].

PFLAG tweeted:

We can only move equality forward if we listen to Black voices. We encourage everyone in NWA [northwest Arkansas] to read the #BlackatUark posts. Racism can’t be defeated by just not being racist, we have to be actively anti-racist. […]

In all three instances, organizations understood #BlackatUARK as a moment for shifting regret into a change of heart and policy.

The UARK Associated Student Government, the UARK Library, and a local transgender advocacy organization tweeted #BlackatUARK to amplify testimonies of anti-Black racism and demands for accountability. The UARK Associated Student Government simply tweeted, “We encourage everyone to read the stories shared on the #blackatUARK hashtag.” Comparably, representatives for UARK Libraries and inTRANSitive tweeted:

The #BlackAtUARK posts are as infuriating as they are heartbreaking. The Libraries are assessing what further actions we can take to ensure that the Black community and all who walk through our doors are safe, seen and supported. You are always welcome here. We thank @BlackUark [the Black Student Caucus] for providing 15 thoughtful, actionable items to make #UARK a more inclusive and equitable campus. The Libraries’ plan of action is forthcoming. We’ve read your posts, but as always, you are welcome to contact us directly with input.

Follow the hashtag #BlackatUark. Retweet, retweet, retweet and tag the @UniversityOfArk, tag the racist faculty and staff, uplift Black voices, and expose your local racist. #BlackLivesMatter […]

Finally, institutional allies, including academic units and student services, used #BlackatUARK to tweet their support for taking direct action against anti-Black racism on campus. The Honors College, the College of Engineering, the School of Social Work, the Walton College of Business, and the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, among others, used #BlackatUARK to commit to actively being more antiracist for all people UARK serves. Other student services followed suit; the Business Communication Lab tweeted:

The Business Communication Lab is listening to #BlackatUARK & learning. While there is a lot to be done, we wanted to share where we plan on starting: 1) Revising content to ensure all materials are inclusive, 2) Researching antiracist best practices for our office, and 3) Implementing antiracist practices and training for returning staff in the Fall.

Individual and institutional allies responded to the kairotic moment made by the circulation of counterpublic memories within #BlackatUARK with expressions of regret about the past and promises to help end anti-Black racism on campus in the present and future. Their tweets infused the kairotic moment of #BlackatUARK with a metanoic moment for individuals to recognize their own complicity with a larger legacy of anti-Blackness at UARK and adjust their behavior and identities. Their tweets support Joshua DiCaglio, Kathryn M. Barlow, and Joseph S. Johnson’s argument that metanoia entails more than an adaption in individual perspective but of fundamental values held by an audience. More precisely, the tweets resemble a performance of what Adam Ellwanger deems “modern metanoia,” an experience whereby individuals reject “both earlier speech and prior ethos” in relation to changing audience values (7). As a metanoic moment, #BlackatUARK gives individual and institutional allies access to a counterpublic memorial and, by extension, a renewed, collectively performed subjectivity unified against the exigence of continued racial oppression at UARK.

As #BlackatUARK swelled in size, the silence of one leader was noted by those sharing the hashtag. Black UARK affiliates and their allies ordered Steinmetz to respond to #BlackatUARK and the Black Student Caucus’s demands. A student tweeted at Steinmetz to ask him why he thought keeping statues of Fulbright and naming places on campus after him was a good idea, arguing that something needed to change as soon as possible. A professor in an unnamed department tweeted at Steinmetz to let him know that #BlackatUARK was evidence that UARK had to do better. Meanwhile, a staff member tweeted Steinmetz to nudge him to develop a meaningful and consequential response to #BlackatUARK.

Facing a wave of criticism, Steinmetz tried joining the strengthening network of allyship within #BlackatUARK. Steinmetz added to the hashtag by parroting the deliveries of allies, offering his regret about UARK’s shameful past while acknowledging that #BlackatUARK was an opportunity to do better. In his first tweet on the subject, Steinmetz said,

Racist activities have no place at #uark or anywhere in our world. Immediate action was taken with social media posts depicting racial acts & discrimination. I am meeting weekly with black students to listen, learn and develop plans to make our campus more inclusive. #BlackatUARK

In the second tweet—sent only minutes after—Steinmetz wrote:

I have been reading #blackatUARK and I hear you. Your experiences as black students are powerful, painful testaments to the vital work we need to do to make our campus equitable and inclusive. These hard, real discussions are an important step to affect change together. #UARK

A minority of institutional allies were supportive of Steinmetz’s messages. Greg Leding, a UARK alumni and state senator for the district of which UARK is part, tweeted:

Glad to see Chancellor Steinmetz respond publicly to the stories shared through the #BlackatUARK hashtag. Racism, period, has no place at our state’s flagship university. I’ve reached out to students, students have reached out to me, and I promise to take meaningful action. […]

Leding’s message was not well-received by most #BlackatUARK users. Some of them took the chance to ask Leding what he was personally doing to remedy anti-Black racism in the district.

Responses to both Steinmetz and Leding indicate that the vast majority of #BlackatUARK users were unconvinced of Steinmetz’s seriousness about addressing anti-Black racism on campus. One ally tweeted:

@JoeSteinmetz @UArkansas I encourage you to read the #BlackatUark tweets/threads. You said you value equity and representation? Stop ignoring your Black students and putting out blanket statements and start making actual changes that uphold the words and promises you are using.

Representing the Graduate-Professional Student Congress, the then president of the organization tweeted:

I am a loss for words [sic] reading these #blackatuark tweets. The time for “conversations” is over. We can do better and we MUST do better. Anything less than direct and bold action that works to dramatically alter this culture will be unacceptable. […]

Many Black and allied tweeters responded in a similar fashion, blaming Steinmetz for responding too late and with words that felt hollow. For them, Steinmetz’s #BlackatUARK tweets were not authentically metanoic because they were delayed and therefore out of sync with the kairotic moment spurred by the hashtag’s circulation.

In the days after Steinmetz’s response, Black UARK affiliates and their allies continued to amplify #BlackatUARK, frame the hashtag as crucial for cultivating a collective antiracist consciousness, and call for all UARK affiliates to oppose anti-Black racism on campus. All the while, allies continued to express their regret for the campus’ shameful past. Many highlighted Steinmetz’s failure to appropriately seize the metanoic moment opened by #BlackatUARK, noting his apparent refusal to sufficiently address even one of the fifteen demands made by the Black Student Caucus. Despite his intentions, Steinmetz appeared unapologetic and thus inauthentically transformed by the collective experience of metanoia promulgated by hashtag users. For this reason, Steinmetz was unable to join the #BlackatUARK counterpublic, resulting in the diminishment of his ethos and alienation from the movement.

While metanoic moments certainly entail evolutions of the self, allies who circulated #BlackatUARK demonstrate that a metanoic moment may also be collectively realized as a networked phenomenon. Just as a kairotic moment can be seized and virally extended, a metanoic moment can attract multiple intending bodies who reroute their shame into a public display of resistance to a harmful status quo. Digital social media platforms, such as Twitter, assist in the assemblage of a metanoic counterpublic by allowing hashtag users to engage in transformational processes of self-revision (Holmes and Lussos). #BlackatUARK illuminates how a memory-based metanoic moment can stretch beyond digital screens and inspire the reconfiguration of an oppressive memoryscape.

Conclusion

Today, #BlackatUARK has become nearly synonymous with the controversial Fulbright statue and namesake, and the hashtag continues to exert a force on campus (Burnam and Lidzy). The material rhetorical effects of the hashtag can be witnessed to the north of the Fulbright statue, where temporary signage explains the paradoxical nature of Fulbright’s politics and directs visitors to an accompanying website. Plans for permanent alterations to the statue are underway and are slated for completion in 2022.

Still, the question lingers as to whether it is possible for administrators to keep a figure like Fulbright at the center of UARK’s memoryscape and still uphold principles of diversity, equity, and inclusivity. For many Black UARK affiliates and their allies, there is no possibility of an antiracist UARK so long as Fulbright’s memory endures. Symbolic gestures are not actionable steps toward justice. Simply acknowledging one man’s racism and promising to eventually mark it with a plaque does not adequately address the weight of the traumatic testimonies circulated through #BlackatUARK. Sara Ahmed calls these empty signifiers “non-performatives,” which proliferate in university contexts, where buzzwords like “diversity” often do more to shield institutionalized whiteness from injury than compel the difficult, uncomfortable labor of substantively addressing racial inequities (117).

Social justice movements like #BlackatUARK expose the inadequacy of nonperformative approaches to diversity in the age of the neoliberal university, which is why they are worthy of our attention as rhetorical scholars. Despite histories of inequality and negligent leadership, people do still care about one another and the overall well-being of their communities, and we should be invested in seeking out these moments of togetherness and deepening our understanding of how they materialize and create glimmers of possibility for change. In this essay, we studied how Black UARK affiliates and their allies attempted to redress multiple forms of anti-Blackness at a southern university following the George Floyd protests. To do so, we attended to digital counterpublic memory construction as a rhetorical strategy for demanding racial justice. We conclude here with four key implications.

First, marginalized people can assemble into counterpublics via popular digital social media platforms and contest official public memories. While a growing body of rhetorical scholarship has documented how Black rhetors resist remnants of anti-Black memories embedded in US public culture, this important work has focused on monuments, museums, photography, and other well-analyzed rhetorical forms (Maxson; Ore, Lynching). Marking a departure in the field, we turned to hashtags as sites of insurgent public memory, following critical media studies scholars who have conducted similar analyses (Banks; Florini, “Recontextualizing the Racial Present”; Smit, Heinrich, and Broersma; Steele). In the absence of institutional support for mitigating anti-Black racism, digital tools are sure to continue to be viable methods for marginalized groups to resist their exclusion from official public memories.

Second, a more concerted turn toward digital contexts of memorialization can better diversify the demographics of identities represented in the public memory literature. We established how Black UARK affiliates share their personalized memories of anti-Black racism by curating counterpublic memories composed of “dissonant histories” that would otherwise be hidden from public view (Davis, Laying Claim 138–39). #BlackatUARK shores up a deep ecology of Black perspectives that counter legacies of white supremacy on campus, enriching the racial diversity of public memorials at UARK. Our choice to feature it prominently in this essay promotes the inclusion of Black-centered memories in the rhetorical study of public memory.

Third, studies of digital rhetoric in general necessitate experimental methodologies. Methodologically speaking, we modeled one path forward for rhetorical scholars invested in the intersection of digital social media culture and public memory. We merged digital techniques of data collection with the interpretive skillset of racial rhetorical criticism to qualitatively analyze a relatively large number of tweets. We implemented values of informed consent and financial compensation throughout our research process. Our study represents just the beginning of what is likely a much longer future of rhetorical scholarship on digital social media data. We hope our approach serves as a prototype for new innovations in this area.

Finally, ancient rhetorical concepts are still relevant theoretical analytics for investigating contemporary phenomena. We investigated how a hashtag like #BlackatUARK indexes networked acts of rhetorical invention and circulation oriented toward the spatiotemporal protraction of a kairotic moment. Within this amplified kairotic moment, we revealed a metanoic moment through which allies held themselves accountable to the past and channeled their regret into a vision for a less oppressive future. Our decision to summon and rethink the kairos/metanoia partnership further substantiates Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister’s claim, “The vocabulary of rhetoric provides a way to understand communicative practices in digital networks that enrich our appreciation of them” (10). We predict that more digital social movements can be assessed through a framework attuned to kairotic and metanoic moments, and we encourage other rhetorical scholars to test and build upon this hypothesis.

In conclusion, the kairotic and metanoic moments spurred by the circulation of #BlackatUARK are open and in-process, so long as the hashtag continues to move across bodies and digital and nondigital rhetorical ecologies. Although Fulbright may be forever embedded into UARK’s memoryscape, #BlackatUARK has significantly altered its materiality and meanings, evidencing the rhetorical power of counterpublic memories in an increasingly digital media culture. Rhetorical scholars should continue to invest in studies of digital memorials that transform our built environments and simultaneously make us question clear distinctions between the virtual and physical. We might then be able to create and sustain moments of our own for inventing new scholarly futures.

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