All Art is with the Crowd or the Police

Partisan in tone, “All art is with the crowd or the police” draws clear battle lines. This piece of experimental writing collages texts from anti-capitalist activists, corporate news, critical theorists, poets, and press releases to form a quasi-unified voice “from the crowd” that works toward a position against representation. This hybridized voice is juxtaposed with excerpts from a police manual on riot control. The crowd contradicts itself as it grapples with what is possible to produce in struggle; the authoritarian voice of the police outlines methods for containment. Meandering through various events—the blockade, the protest march, the occupation—the conflicted voice weaves together conversations about art, gentrification, violence, whiteness, representation, community, and capitalism. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: [email protected] Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2021 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.] KEYWORDS: Gentrification, Riot, Whiteness, Police, Anarchism.

Blackness as Riot Control: Managing Civic Unrest Through Black Appeal Programming and Black Celebrity

During the uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, black hip-hop artist Killer Mike appeared on television to ask that people remain nonviolent and in their homes. Similar events took place years earlier. James Brown performed a live concert on WGBH to keep Boston peaceful following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968. During the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, both The Cosby Show and The Arsenio Hall Show were used to similar ends. These examples demonstrate the ways in which television has activated black identity to quell certain forms of civil rights protest and implicate televisual discourses of liveness, domesticity, and public service.