The Form of Black Lives Matter

Abstract

On Friday, 20 January 2017, Inauguration Day for the Forty-Fifth President of the United States, I Spent Several Hours walking around downtown Washington, DC, just north of the National Mall, holding a handmade sign reading “Black Lives Matter.” A day later, the Women's March would pack the city's downtown tight with bodies marching, chanting, and singing in a strange mix of camaraderie and despondency, but on Inauguration Day the streets were unusually quiet. The fear of violence was palpable (and, in the event, fully justified), even as I knew that my whiteness would work as a shield that nonwhite protesters lacked; it was because of this “drastically unequal distribution of bodily vulnerabilities,” as Sarah Ahmed has put it (238), that I carried the “Black Lives Matter” sign in the first place. Over the course of a few hours, the sign provoked a range of responses. A group of attendees greeted me with a “Sieg Heil,” a Nazi salute, and a shout of “white power.” Two men circled behind me to whisper “Blue lives matter” in my ears. But the steady refrain, shouted by dozens of inauguration attendees, was “All lives matter.”The responses to my “Black Lives Matter” sign were hardly unique to that day. Similar exchanges have unfolded before and since, between other protestors on other streets, in other spaces real and virtual. Taken together, these utterances offer a partial, highly mediated linguistic map of the current political battlefield in the United States and beyond. Through them, factions have taken shape and become legible—become real—to one another and to themselves. In Louis Althusser's famous phrase, they are a part of the current system of representations by which we “live the imaginary relation” to “the real conditions of existence” (223-24) and alter those conditions in the process. Might new digital tools help us understand how these utterances came to serve their peculiar role in our current political moment?