Movement For Black Lives, Black Lives Matter, and the civic imagination
Popular movements, rhetorical moves
The civic imagination influences how communities build identity and consider the trajectory of society. In the reader Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination released earlier this year, media scholars Sangita Shresthova, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and Henry Jenkins explain that communities access the civic imagination through reflecting on tropes, narrating a frame that relates shared histories and futures with greater society, and having collective goals that inform civic action. Looking at framing narratives, the role of the storyteller and their relationship with audience seems especially important to elucidating — and increasing — the capacity to imagine alternatives to current social and political conditions.
When rhetoricians address the rhetorical situation, the focus is on identifying the purpose for, context around, and audience addressed in a text. A concept that arises around audience when looking at political texts in particular (such as speeches, manifestos, and mass media) is imagined communities. Imagined communities are static and have predisposed characteristics that make them more agreeable to what they already believe, usually a way of political and social organization that already exists and is currently occupied. In the Benedict Anderson example linked, that way is nationalism, something that has been built towards politically since the early 1900s and, without critical intervention in national conversations, the majority of the public will accept as natural and acceptable.
The reader asks us to challenge immutability by acquainting ourselves with a dreamer’s alternative: imagining communities. Imagining communities are dynamic; they are always considering, negotiating, challenging. They are treated by storytellers as having the capacity to imagine the relationship narrated as well as the agency to recognize tropes and narratives on their own. Storytellers work with imagining communities in order to form a collaborative understanding of a text.
In the case of Movement For Black Lives and Black Lives Matter, the “text” is the social text that prescribes violence towards Black people and attempts to make all of us who are not Black agreeable to Black death; as storytellers of these movements — their actions, goals, stories, civic imaginations — we are tapping into Black consciousness, the toll of fear, and the worn capacity for hope in the US. They don’t need to be influenced that change needs to happen.
In highlighting the examples of Black experiences that have been codified into liberatory civic action, my audience is not these organizations, and certainly not the Black lives they advocate for, although both are invited to provide comment and shape this story. Nor is my audience other people of color and their networks working toward a better future, although they are also invited.
My audience here is white people, particularly politicking white people such as politicians and organizers, with a basic consciousness of whiteness — as in, those with the will to challenge the acts and ideas that sustain white supremacy that are embedded in the social text of the US. I write to those with the capacity to, for the sake of this review and beyond, accept a shared history mired in oppression, recognize the tropes and narratives that permeate our relationship with Black people and greater society, and imagine the futures that Movement For Black Lives, Black Lives Matter, and the Black Rose Anarchist Federation propose without criticizing the tension between them. The goal of this review is to invoke collaboration between frames of Black civic imaginations and white conceptions of alternative futures to intervene in the eliding of race in order to inform a more robust civic action from white progressives and radicals.
Movement For Black Lives and ending the war
This review of Movement For Black Lives relies greatly on the work of Christopher Harris. In the case study “A Vision For Black Lives in the Black Radical Tradition” from the reader, Harris connects the organization Movement For Black Lives and their manifesto A Vision For Black Lives to Black radical movements in the US from the 20th century.
Movement For Black Lives — shortened by the organization to M4BL — works as a space for Black organizations in the US to centralize their ideas, strategies, and leadership around political intervention in the current living conditions of Black people. A Vision For Black Lives is the document that informs that political intervention, initially released in 2016 and still being updated in 2020. In it, demands of greater society and other Black organizers include: political power, community control, economic justice, divestment from police and investment in Black communities, reparations, and an end to the war on Black people.
This last demand is imperative to Harris’ case study and this review, in that, particularly in 2020, the framing narrative is that there is a war against Black people in the US. Harris addresses in detail the militarization of the police and how the stereotype of Black people as criminals has entrenched the idea and acceptance of Black people as enemies of the State; if the police are the military, the protectors of Statehood, then their actions towards Black people show that they are a national threat, and the justification of their actions and station lock Black people into a struggle for their lives. M4BL aims to restore Black agency and solidarity in order to end this war.
This is a continuation of the missives of Black radical movements started in the mid to late 20th century that chose centralization (e.g. the Black Radical Congress) and taking back the streets (most famously the Black Panther Party) as pathways to developing Black power. As a modernized version of these (still existing) groups and a spiritual successor of their collectives, M4BL is imagining a future without the vulnerability and exploitation of Black isolation and identifies that the way to change that is through getting control to the communities.
Black Lives Matter Network and liberation
The Black Lives Matter Global Network is more present in the public consciousness. The name and slogan have been easy to slip into the national conversation. The Black Lives Matter Network began as #BlackLivesMatter and was conceived to change the repetitive narratives around Black death into calls for action toward holding those individuals and institutions that cause the demise of Black people accountable.
Black Lives Matter, frequently shortened to BLM, is decentralized organizationally and ideologically, and in their missive choose to center difference in Black lives. In their stated goals, BLM recognizes that the lives of Black women, Black men, Black queer and trans people, Black people with disabilities, and other matrices of marginalization live different lives but that all of their lives matter and are connected by systemic reactions to Blackness.
Whereas M4BL is the spiritual successor of Black radical movements of the 20th century, BLM is part of the genealogy of communist Black women being agents of change regarding race, gender, and labor rights in the US. Two of BLM’s founders, Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, are familiar with Marxism as community organizers and lean on it as a framework for social change. That follows a historical trend, which has been chronicled in Angela Davis’ Women, Race & Class. The multiplicity that defines BLM resonates with the work of Frances Beal and in particular her 1969 pamphlet Double Jeopardy, where as a Black woman and Marxist fed up with the racism in white feminism and the sexism in Black radical movements, she addressed how a movement to end oppression not only needs to address racism and sexism at the same time but how they are informed by Capitalism and classism. The movement to end oppression should be a challenge to the system that binds all oppression together, and BLM has embraced that in the focus on the many ways Black lives are lived and policed.
The framework of difference and solidarity is reflected in the collective goals of BLM: expansion, affirmation, and interruption. These goals are apparent in the actions of BLM chapters and peaceful protests, from the diversity of Black leaders and activists of color present at protests and representing BLM, the proliferation of art amplified and used by BLM to celebrate Black life, and the choice to protest in front of police stations and on highways.
This is the work towards Black liberation, where Blackness is freed from racial and other oppressions. At the center of this liberation effort is Black joy, the agency to not only hope that it will get better but the capacity to appreciate Black people now. The Black Lives Matter Global Network is imagining change and acting on that dynamic imagination at the individual, local, cultural, and structural level.
Black Rose Anarchist Federation and survival
My original review of Movement For Black Lives and Black Lives Matter would have ended here if not for the works of the Black Rose Anarchist Federation. While I had heard of them in passing, I hadn’t read their work until, when I was collecting resources, I found that both M4BL and BLM are mentioned in one of their articles. Black Rose is another organization considering Black futures, and their assessment of other organizations that eschew direct political identification complicates the idea of a unified conception of Black futures and shows that there is a Black critical consciousness regarding political organization that can be sought out without white criticism.
The Black Rose Anarchist Federation identifies with Black anarchists such as Lucy Parsons, Kuwasi Balagoon, and Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, from the early 20th century as well as the later half. In the contemporary spirit of these activists, BRAF locates the possibilities of lasting political change in organizing the working class, collective action with a political “home” over centralization, and ultimately, adaptive to present needs, something that can be built upon — or dismantled — as needed.
In their missive “Below and Beyond Trump: Power and Counter-Power,” the federation critiques BLM and M4BL. In reviewing the strategies of US-based social movements at the end of Donald Trump’s first year in office, the federation notes an increase in groups “entrenching,” leaving the political realization of Black Lives Matter to voting. As BLM becomes more reliant on the institutional left for social change, M4BL does, as well. Regarding their perspective of M4BL — and with emphasis added,
it’s unclear how the platform is being advanced or if the collective strength of the organizations behind it are being mobilized in any meaningful way. Few seem to be engaged in the kinds of on-the-ground direct action rebellions that initially catalyzed and electrified the struggle against anti-black state violence, despite the endless string of black murders by police, while the Movement for Black Lives Platform points in the direction of a more electoral or legislative strategy.
All groups reviewed here point to current institutions and systemic inequality having led to a need and a way to address the crisis that has been facing Black people in the US. The federation sees the other two organizations as co-opted, that their imaginations have not extended to beyond this moment and the system that manufactured it.
In his article on M4BL, Christopher Harris describes the radical imagination as inspiring new forms of action and solidarity in the present as activating the work towards making anti-racism, dignity, and vulnerability possible in the future. Aligning with the institutions that repeat and rephrase Black criminality and servitude, even liberal and at times leftist, is relying on the forms of political engagement that have failed Black lives for hundreds of years in the US as a strategy for meaningful change.
The Black Rose Anarchist Federation, meanwhile, is imagining the continuance of Black survival, but an improved survival. In their mission statement, they announce that they are working towards meeting basic needs, with the recognition that institutions have failed thus far in securing the basics needs of all Black lives, highlighting mutual aid, passion, and social and ecological sustainability. They identify their politics as collaborative, something foundational to community agency, additive to active life, and pedagogical—replenishing.
Imagining a Black future
In popular culture, Black death is a fascination. Videos of murdered Black people circulate on social media. Vanity Fair featured art of a fantasized, almost princess-like Breonna Taylor, murdered during the summer, as the cover of their September 2020 issue.
Black life is more than preparing to be the subject of such a video or a ghost haunting a newsstand. The futures framed and worked towards by all of these groups are needed to shake us from terminating Black life — if not physically, then in our activist imaginations.
As many breathe a sigh of relief at the election of Joe Biden, signalling the departure of Donald Trump by January, the popular reaction to Black progressive and radical rhetoric is already starting to sour. White liberals and leftists can easily obfuscate Blackness and race in general in their civic imaginations once again. It takes considerable effort on our part to think and act below and beyond Trump, below and beyond police, ICE, and the “justice” system, below and beyond war, genocide, and colonialism, and this effort is needed now even more than in the previous four years. Our complacency is not a response to the terrorism of whiteness emboldened under Trump but a curt nod (and occasionally, a disapproving tut-tut). The identity of whiteness and the trajectory of white supremacy have not been disrupted.
For many of us, the story of Black peace, freedom, and life has not yet begun. Our civic imagination shrugs off the stories of Black activism and the histories of marginalized solidarity. I have spun some of those stories into one that resonates with white anti-racism and the need to know how and why. But the conclusions are not new—every review of Black organizing, manifesto of Black organizations, narrative of Black materiality reaches them.
- The past continues to both haunt and resonate with the needs of Black people today.
- Black theories and activism have already charted courses for change, courses that are sometimes in contention.
White pontificating is not interchangeable with the continuously ignored ethos of Black living; consider this an entry point to recognition. This narrative relies on stories and criticisms that have informed me on how to “read” the social contract, what to look for in the collective goals and civic action, and where to situate my dreams —towards a Black future.
