The Appearance of Black Lives Matter

The Appearance of Black Lives Matter (Miami: NAME Publications, 2017). Available here! A free e-book about visual activism in and around Black Lives Matter.

summary

Police killings captured on cell-phone video or photographs have become the hallmark of United States visual culture in the twenty-first century. In this book, I examine this transformation of visual culture from the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in the summer of 2014 to the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017. As a person designated “white” by the color line in the United States, I do so from the perspective of anti-antiblackness. I study the formation of the space of appearance, that space where we catch a glimpse of the society that is to come—the future commons or communism. The first section analyses such spaces created by abolition democracy in Haiti, during Reconstruction and at Resurrection City in 1968. The second section considers the “persistent looking” used by Black Lives Matter protests from Ferguson on, especially “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” the die-in and the turning of backs. I then explore a simple form of visual activism, cropping photographs of crime scenes to exclude the fallen and broken bodies. It reveals the space of nonappearance, the no one’s land where people die in America. In the third section, I use the archive created by the grand jury hearings into the death of Michael Brown to map this space of nonappearance and how it is sustained by white supremacy. At present, that space is imagined as co-extensive with the boundaries of the republic. I still want a space in which to appear that doesn’t reproduce white supremacy, that doesn’t represent a prison, in which there isn’t expropriated labor, and there isn’t genocide. What would that look like? This book is a toolkit for doing that imagining.

Excerpts from the text:

Ouverture

Police killings captured on cell-phone video or photographs have become a hallmark of United States visual culture in the twenty-first century. What these low-resolution photographs and videos have revealed is the operations of the maintenance of a law-and-order society that inflicts systemic violence on Black people.

The America that is seen here is at the intersection of three streams of visibility. First, the witnessing of these scenes, depicted in cell-phone videos and photographs, supplemented by machine-generated imagery taken by body cameras, dash cams, and closed-circuit television footage. Next, the embodied protests and actions taken to claim justice and to make injustice visible. Finally, the sharing of these images and actions on social media that in turn have made their way into mainstream media.

Here I will call the interface of what was done and what was seen and how it was described as “appearance,’ especially as the space of appearance, where you and I can appear to each other and create a politics.

i. prefiguring appearance: from haiti to reconstruction and 1968

In the revolutionary space of appearance, abolition democracy prefigures the commons. This space of appearance is not space in an abstract sense but makes a claim to be grounded. It is created by people seeing each other, inventing each other, and thereby creating a common space of appearance between them.

It is not an atavistic relic or a tradition to be reinvented. It is the means by which social change metabolizes, creating a form of counterpower, “the joining together of women and men willing to expend all of their energy to solve in common, at the margin of, beyond, and outside state normativity, the problems that stifle them.” But the common space of appearance is not (yet) permanent but prefigurative. It is a recurrent moment, and so each time it is present is a revolution. Its sustained state would be permanent revolution.

Making and sustaining that common space of appearance is what I call groundwork, a particular form of prefiguration. Here ground has a double meaning—first as commonly worked or shared earth (land, territory, and other such terms have legal and colonial meanings). It is the (re)formation of common ground and the possibility of lives lived for common good, rather than personal profit. This ground is where the kinetic, live space of appearance happens.

Secondly, ground is the element that makes its depiction possible in potential form. In painting, the ground makes a canvas into a paintable surface. In photography, the ground enables the subject or figure to be comprehended as such. Groundwork is itself common, understood as coactivity, collaborative in process and conversational in research method. Claiming ground in the post-encounter Americas is the work of prefiguring and performing abolition. When slavery is abolished or suspended, the space between regimes becomes a space without regime—abolition democracy.

In abolition, a person is not a subject to representation but claims to be a subject, as Sojourner Truth’s (apocryphal) call “Ar’nt I a woman?” Truth famously sold her own photograph to support abolition, using “the shadow to support the substance,” as she put it.This “substance” was the ground of her abolitionism. Making ground in abolition is undoing the shattered worlds made by slaveries and their afterlives.

ii. the space of appearance #blacklivesmatter

The prohibitions and exclusions that constitute white supremacy have been challenged during the Black Lives Matter movement by persistent looking, meaning a refusal to look away from what is kept out of sight, off stage, and out of view. This looking is sustained by long histories of resistance. It comprises a set of grounded, distributed, and repeated actions, whose persistence is enabled in part by social media. It calls for us to see what there is to see, to be vulnerable, but not to be traumatized.

Looking here is both witnessing and the embodied engagement with space. Such performances of looking are about the recurring present that people choose not to escape, and continue to record in digital media. Persistently, they choose to keep looking against the prohibitions of the carceral state and to feel the presence of the absent bodies of those fallen.

Remember Freddie Gray in Baltimore. His only offense was that he met the look of a police officer in the eye, leading to an assumption of guilt for which he ended up dead. He appeared always already marked in the space where police believed themselves to be sovereign. To meet the police’s gaze was lèse-majesté in the language of sovereignty but, as bell hooks named it, simply “uppity” in language of racialized encounters. 

All the trials of the police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray resulted in acquittals, with subsequent charges being dropped, as if no one but Gray could be responsible for his death. Notably, Black Lives Matter protestors have described the experience of the movement as a coming-to-meet the police gaze.

iii.the space of non-appearance: the murder of michael brown

The maintenance of white supremacy rests on the continued existence and exploitation of spaces of nonappearance. In the case of Michael Brown, the appearance of due process was in fact the production of immunity for police as part of a social order where the police produce and supervise a racialized hierarchy. Because of the nontechnical nature of the grand jury proceedings, it is entirely reasonable to read these materials as we might any other narrative assemblage of word, image, and object. My reading highlights the techniques by which Wilson’s immunity was produced and its subsequent confirmation by the Department of Justice.

Prosecutors were supposed to be presenting materials to generate an indictment. Instead, their work from the beginning was intended to have the opposite effect. In order to achieve this result, it was important that they control what a filmmaker would call the mise-en-scène, the very way that jurors would understand the space and time of the event.

It was created using extensive crime scene photographs, data from the St. Louis autopsy report, and additional photographs taken at the prosecutor’s behest. The effect was to expand space and time, so that what happened seemed like a grand drama, a gunfight at the O.K. Corral, rather than a banal shooting played out over no more than sixty yards in less than a minute.

afterword

The 2016 presidential election was underscored by the unspoken question: do Black Lives Matter? Its result reaffirmed that for the white majority, the answer remains “no,” or at best, “only once we have everything we need.” These changes are indicative of a systemic collapse in the hegemonic postwar concept of the social, mirrored by the ongoing implosion of social democratic parties across the West. Majorities of white people in the United States and the UK, and significant minorities of whites in other Western countries no longer accept the antiracist formation of the social.

That is a politer way to say that they do not accept people of color and indigenous populations as belonging to their society, so they have attempted to displace the concept of society with that of race. “Race” is now being deployed to mean a nation of culturally and ethnically homogenous individuals, who accept the need for strong leadership as the means of coherence in everyday life. If that sounds like fascism, so be it. It is where we are now.

Against that violence, I want a space in which to appear—whether an institution or public space—that doesn’t reproduce white supremacy, that doesn’t represent a prison, in which there isn’t expropriated labor, there isn’t extinction, and there isn’t genocide. What would that look like?