Conditions of the Subaltern: Examining the Black Lives Matter Movement
The infamous slogan of the 21st century goes “Black lives matter,” I say infamous because this slogan has become a negative connotation due to the context in which others tend to perceive it, but some people will say, “no blue lives matter, women’s lives matter, Hispanic lives matter, Asian lives matter, Indian lives matter, all lives matter.” It is these backlashes that more often than not, the white-male dominant uses as a means of further oppressing the Black Lives Matter movement and by the fact that it is these minority groups that remain as targets because their protests are not recognized for what they really are.
To not recognize a movement or protest for what it truly is, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains, is one of the conditions of the subaltern.
What then is the subaltern?
Spivak describes the subaltern as “men and women among the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat, ” (78) that is, the subaltern is the most oppressed experiencing oppression. The subaltern are those who are seen as their own problem, they are the other. The subaltern is considered the worst of the oppressed group because their voice is not heard by the masses; it is as if the subaltern is non-existent in the dominant society because they experience the worse oppression and do not have the means to overcome their position as the subaltern. The subaltern’s become stuck between power positions where they are at the bottom of the hierarchy and are very limited in their upward mobility.
The conditions that make up the subaltern are: no agency, no urgency, and not recognizing the resistance of the subaltern for what it really is. That is, to be without agency constitutes being without access to social mobility because of lack of resources (those in poverty), lack of opportunity (social status), and lack of recognition (both social status and poverty). If the subaltern does not have agency and their voices cannot be heard by the masses, their protests are not seen as urgent and therefore, subaltern resistance is not recognized for what it truly is. When the subaltern’s resistance is not recognized for what it really is, their oppression becomes undermined and is not taken as seriously as it should. This further restricts the subaltern from being heard and allows their resistance to become more ingrained into the system. Essentially, by acknowledging the subaltern’s resistance, it is reinforcing the exact oppression that the subaltern is attempting to resist. It creates a never-ending cycle of the subaltern remaining in the most oppressed position in the dominant society.
The Black Lives Matter Movement has evidently experienced these very conditions of the subaltern. Seen as the most deviant from whites because of their darker skin colors, Blacks in this country have experienced the worse cases of oppression: from having been taken from their African homelands to serve as a slave nation for the whites, slave codes and Jim Crow laws, desegregation, Separate-but-equal, prejudice and discrimination, extreme poverty, high cases of mental retardation in smart African students seen as deviant, high incarceration rates, to their current oppression, police brutality. African Americans are undoubtedly a subaltern group in the United States and their subaltern state is further exemplified within the Black Lives Matter Movement.
As Linda Caroll mentions, in her response to Ansley Fender’s article “Day 24: Stop telling me I don’t understand you because I’m White.” that by saying that all lives matter, it undermines the groups being targeted through oppressive ways. By creating hashtags #alllivesmatter and #bluelivesmatter it takes away the meaning of resistance from the Black Lives Matter. The hashtag #blacklivesmatter was created as part of the movement to make others more aware that specifically, Blacks are the targets of police brutality and cases rarely appear where other minority groups or whites are targeted, not even from a Black male police officer policing a white male. Thus, “all lives matter” and “blue lives matter” further creates boundaries and limits the agency, urgency, and resistance of those who are for the Black Lives Matter movement and why they are protesting against police brutality.
Similarly, Paul Thomas argues that by saying all lives matter, it reinforces the hegemonic ideology that white lives matter more than black lives. Thus, by using the slogan against black lives matter, it further puts blacks into the position of the subaltern because it takes away heir agency and doesn’t recognize their resistance for what it truly is, that is, to emphasize that Blacks matter as equally as whites do, as equally as women, Hispanics, Asians, Indians, it emphasizes that everyone, including blacks, should be treated equally under the law.
