The Movement for Black Lives and the Language of Liberation

This chapter explores the content and strategy of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) by describing the speech that sustains and promotes the movement. It explicates the content of the movement through the protest chants and other communicative tools M4BL has borrowed from past black liberatory movements. After a brief discussion of some of the challenges facing the movement, it describes four more novel communicative tools associated with M4BL—the hashtag and slogan #BlackLivesMatter, videos of police violence, naming the dead, and stereotype engineering. Each of these tools helps address some challenge, and also bears on some questions of independent philosophical interest—how to remedy testimonial injustice, what it means to engineer a concept, what makes a mental state a moral attitude. It concludes with a brief discussion of the limitations of some of these tools.

Fachadas pintadas, janelas quebradas:

“Painted Façades, Broken Windows” is an excerpt from my 2017 doctoral thesis in Urban and Regional Planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The text utilizes vocabularies of performance studies, urban planning, and urban anthropology to present different manifestations of urban art in Rio de Janeiro, creating a “dream methodology” to examine shared experiences of and visions for city streets. Additionally, the work investigates the absent bodies that haunt cityscapes, especially bodies that have been rendered absent by physical or economic violence (such as police brutality, on the one hand, and gentrification, on the other). As such, urban ghosts and the “counter-memories”, they carry haunt the research from its beginning, both in examining the interpersonal, street level effects of major urban changes and in prompting reflections on the relationship between collective memory and individual identity. In the work, I seek to approximate the heteroglossic experiences of bodies meeting in the city through textual and thematic juxtapositions. As such, I have departed from standard academic writing and approached the work as a performance text, utilizing protest chants, popular songs, and personal narratives – as well as citations from theoretical essays and newspaper articles – in order to investigate relations between memory, territory, and corporeality. Key-Words: Urban aesthetics. Mega-events. Counter-memory. Gentrification. Rio de Janeiro.

Introduction: A Movement Architect

On a wintry Monday in December 1969, a small contingent of African American protesters gathered at 1820 South Michigan Avenue just outside the main headquarters of the black-owned Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) in Chicago. Armed with picket signs and protest chants, they dramatically captured the attention of eyewitnesses and bewildered employees inside the building. Included among the demonstrators were several artists, intellectuals, and activists from a variety of local organizations—a genuine cross-section of the Black creative community in the city. In their efforts to seize the attention of JPC’s founding owner and president, John H. Johnson, the group staged the protest with the stated goal to make the company “truly representative of the Black community.”...