Humanizing Black lives in protest: emotion, embodiment, and interracial witnessing

Abstract

ABSTRACT The video of Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd sparked a wave of protests and civil unrest, leading white support of Black Lives Matter to reach an all-time high in 2020. During this time, the heightened visibility of Black death by police and public conversations about anti-racism prompted conversations about institutionalized whiteness, interracial solidarity, and meaningful social justice action. This participatory rhetorical study, based on our analysis of twenty-six interviews with protest participants, investigated how racially diverse participants narrated their experiences of attending and/or organizing protests. We argue that the protests produced rhetorically impactful instances of witnessing through embodied experiences of relationality and collective feeling. Considering the protests’ impacts along with critiques of white witnessing and performative allyship, we explore the rhetorical potentialities of protest for humanizing Black lives by increasing anti-racist emotions and contributing to coalitional interracial subjectivities. Our theorization of interracial witnessing extends rhetorical witnessing to specifically address how spatial reconfigurations of racialized materialities and emotions during protest create new forms of recognition. In addition, the use of participatory approaches also extends media witnessing through the use of interviewing as an inventive space for deepening the witnessing process.