Black Lives Matter and Communications Technologies

Abstract

It has been often noted that the history of Black American activism from slavery to the present has been catalyzed by developments in communications technology. This has been especially true in moments of crisis when activists and intellectuals have moved quickly to take advantage of sudden shifts in the media environment to convey their message and organize themselves. The posters and pamphlets that detonated the British movement against the transatlantic slave trade were signal expressions of late eighteenth-century culture made possible by a new kind of printing plate produced from plaster molds. Likewise the abolitionist movement in the United States was amplified in mass-produced pamphlets and newspapers made possible by cheaper costs of steam-powered printing. The civil rights movement in the United States was expanded and strengthened by unprecedented and widely circulated photographic evidence of atrocities committed against Black Americans, including images of Emmett Till’s corpse published in Jet magazine and news broadcasts of protestors and bystanders attacked with police dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1991 the LA police roadside beating of Rodney King was filmed by George Holliday on a Sony Handycam, creating what many have called the first viral video, which set off an insurrection that remains a vital precedent for current activism against police brutality. The articles surveyed in this note take this story up to our present, considering how contemporary movements take advantage of the affordances of media and social network technologies to organize and advance their work. These movements have produced new kinds of political documentation, which are leading to new archives and new styles of analysis.Obviously there is nothing at all about these social movements that is reducible to the mediums through which they have been documented and expressed. These essays propose, however, the need to take into account how the success of these movements has been enabled in part by their ready adaptation not only to new platforms (such as Twitter and Instagram) but also to new styles of communication (such as hashtags and memes). In their wide-ranging essay “#StayWoke: The Language and Literacies of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” Elaine Richardson and Alice Ragland show that the “rhetorical practices” and “cultural literacies” of the Black Lives Matter movement build on the precedents of “prior liberation movements” in language (extending traditions of vernacular grammar and phonology in chants, taglines, and slogans), in live protest performance (from die-ins and hands-up gestures to Beyoncé’s instantaneously iconic Superbowl halftime “Formation”), and in self-organization through mass communication platforms (such as Black Twitter).1 The political imagination of Black Lives Matter, Richardson and Ragland argue, is both grounded in tradition and in every sense engaged in its own moment.These collective practices of representation and communication also raise important questions for activists, academics, and intellectuals seeking to document and interpret the Black Lives Matter movement as it unfolds. In “Clothed in Blue Flesh: Police Brutality and the Disciplining of Race, Gender, and the ‘Human,’” David Ponton carefully describes and analyzes a surreptitious recording made by Alex Bodilla as he and his acquaintance Leonardo Rosario were stopped and assaulted after saying hello to a hypothetical drug dealer. Ponton argues that the recorded exchange raises crucial questions about intimacy and violation (“Well, are you supposed to grab me up like this?”) as well as the right to privacy (“I value my privacy. Don’t you? Don’t you value your privacy? You don’t want me to know where you live at, do you? Or anybody in the streets?”), noting that the recording’s content as well as its medium challenges the existing terms through which a variety of critics have thought about policing, intersectionality, and anti-Blackness.2In their essay “Black Lives and Justice with the Archive: A Call to Action,” Angela J. Aguayo, Danette Pugh Patton, and Molly Bandonis explain their work with the Sandra Bland Digital Archive. The authors describe their work as one among many crucial projects that are helping preserve and organize the ephemeral, mostly digital culture of Black Lives Matter and associated movements like the People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland (archivingpoliceviolence.org), Documenting Ferguson (digital.wustl.edu/ferguson), and Preserve the Baltimore Uprising (baltimoreuprising2015.org).3 Their own Sandra Bland digital archive includes Bland’s own Facebook testimonial videos; grassroots digital productions such as looped and side-by-side videos; “If I Die in Police Custody” (IIDIPC) statements; and a variety of statements and memes collected under hashtags like #standystillspeaks and #sayhername. Noting both the political and historical importance of this ephemeral digital material, the essay considers the problems of cost and sustainability as key challenges to grassroots archiving.