Notes

1. I tell autoethnographic stories from memory, sometimes re/creating speech, acknowledging that stories change through re/telling; however, where available, I use emails, text messages, published materials, and written notes to augment these re/tellings.

2. In reference to the epigraph from Ahmed (2012, 2).

3. All character and institutional names apart from my own are changed throughout this project as a courtesy to the folks animated in it.

4. I capitalize “Black,” “Blackness,” and related terms throughout as a grammatical move signaling a centering of Blackness.

5. I prioritize ideas of affect mobilized in cultural studies drawn from the work of Audre Lorde and Sara Ahmed. The latter explains that “to be affected by something is to evaluate that thing. Evaluations are expressed in how bodies turn toward things” (Ahmed 2010, 23).

6. I recognize the im/possibility, then, of speaking of the ‘paraontological,’ without operating on some received ontological plane.

7. While Z. I. Jackson tackles Western scientific and philosophical discourse to tease out Blackness in relation to bestialized humanization, underscoring how through enslavement and colonization discourses on “the animal” emerge as both human and nonhuman forms (rather than the opposite) (2020, 23), I focus on rhetorical tussling with the plasticity of Blackness in antiBlack spaces.

8. Although related to Jenny Edbauer (Rice)’s approach to rhetorical ecologies—and consequently building off of her terminology—the description of the concept above acts as more of a corollary than a borrowing (Edbauer 2005). While I agree that we should “look towards a framework of affective ecologies that recontextualizes rhetorics in their temporal, historical, and lived fluxes” (9), this project departs from the way in which Edbauer (Rice) performs ecological readings. She describes elements within these ecologies using the term “testimonies,” which goes undefined. While I attempt to clarify these elements, I also prioritize power dynamics and race work that she sidesteps, by pinpointing instances which I describe as fractures. By paying attention to these dynamics, I pursue ecological reading that resists the (cultural and ontological) flattening of ecological elements and subjects.

Additionally, I note here that my concept of ‘deep ecologies’ deploys language associated with (and ideas superficially similar to) the environmental philosophy and activist movement, emerging in Western thought in the 1970s, without inherent endorsement of this movement’s ideologies. Agreeing with Ramachandra Guha that the deep ecology environmental movement potentially mobilizes Eurocentric bias through anthropocentrism, therefore ignoring Western overconsumption and militarization, offers potentially imperialistic frameworks, and appropriates and oversimplifies Eastern philosophies, I look to African indigenous understandings of conscious, mutual, and intertwined relationships between humans, nonhuman animals, and their material environments through botho or Ubuntu. See Guha (1989), “Radical Environmentalism and Third World Preservation: A Third World Critique.”

9. Deep rhetorical ecologies acknowledge antiBlackness as foundational to their functions and politics. I draw on Sharpe’s notion of ‘weather’ as the antiBlack totality of our climates (2016, 104), requiring adaptiveness, “the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies . . . The weather trans*forms Black being” (106).

10. I summon the economic connotations of produce/negotiate intentionally, as they highlight how the very concept of Blackness always already operates within/from a history borne from racial capitalism, objectification, and colonialism—one in which “Black” signaled a commodification of a human resource (see Mbembe 2017).

Rather than offer boundaries/borders for reading such ecologies, I’m more concerned with potential overlaps in the conditions/temporalities for knowledge production. So, for example, if we were to read the racialization of the Black Lives Matter movement, we would inherently be caught up in mulling the rhetorical aspects of the Movement for Black Lives. The Occupy Wall Street movement, however, might offer conditions or temporalities that suggest possible deepening of the rhetorical ecologies being read, so I don’t bracket myself off from delving there or elsewhere.

11. Remixed from Shirley Brice Heath’s ([1982] 2001) conception in chapter 3.

12. Following folks such as Jeffrey Grabill and Stacey Pigg (2012) in rhetoric/communication and writing studies scholarship.

13. In an Aristotelian framework, ἐνέγεια (enérgeia) situates ‘being’ as simultaneously act (enérgeia) and potency (dýnamis), explained in his Metaphysics, according to physicist Robert Lindsay as a “realized state of potentialities,” dealing, though, with the capacity to bring about something else. See Robert B. Lindsay (1975, 16–32) Historian Philip Mirowski adds that the Greek philosopher uses the term in multiple senses: in his Ethics, Aristotle uses it as ‘activity’ as opposed to disposition, in his Rhetoric, he uses it in the sense of “vigorous style.” According to Mirowski, Aristotle also deploys enérgeia to differentiate activity from potential, while also implying the interminable transformation from the possible to the actual. See Mirowski (1989, 13).

14. This body includes, but is not limited to, work by Geneva Smitherman, Keith Gilyard, Beverly J. Moss, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Adam Banks, Carmen Kynard, Vershawn Young, Staci Perryman-Clark, Marsha Houston, Olga Idriss Davis, Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Karma Chávez, Bernadette Calafell, Lisa Flores, Kent Ono, Andre Johnson, C. Riley Snorton, Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, David Cisneros, Dexter Gordon, Tom Nakayama, Lisa Corrigan, Catherine Squires, Ralph Cintron, Eric Pritchard, Abe Khan, Morris Young, and other key figures who examine critically marginalized rhetorics, communication practices, and literacies in these fields.

15. This includes work by, but not limited to, Krista Ratcliffe (2005), Asao Inoue (2015), Timothy Barnett (2000), Jennifer Beech (2004), Wendy Ryden and Ian Marshall (2012), Frankie Condon (2012), Matthew Jackson (2006), and so on.

16. See White Privilege: Readings from the Other Side of Racism, ed. Paula S. Rothenberg and Soniya Munshi, now in its fifth edition (2016), for other foundational texts in whiteness studies.

17. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost contend, materialist frameworks “are congruent with new materialist ontologies inasmuch as they understand materiality in a relational, emergent sense as contingent materialization” (2010, 29).

18. Likewise, in Black studies, Sharpe (2016), following Saidiya Hartman, emphasizes how the autobiographical example counters a “violence of abstraction” (Hartman 2008, 7) by looking to one’s emergence via sociohistorical processes as a window into those very processes (Saunders 2008, 7; Sharpe 2016, 8). In cultural studies, Ahmed points out that “migrant memoirs . . . give texture and complexity to the migrant experience, to the ways in which hope, fear, anxiety, longing, and desire shape the decisions to leave one’s country as well as the experiences of arriving and becoming familiar with a new country” (2010, 154). Autobiography, aesthetically, might be potentially considered autoethnographic given the consideration of sociocultural power alongside personal reflection. Chapter 1 more fully unpacks the relationships between these narrative modes.

19. Undergirding this deployment of Black feminist thought, the philosophies’ five epistemological tenets remain essential to this study. Patricia Hill Collins ([1990] 2000) outlines these as lived experience as criterion of meaning, the use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims, the ethics of caring, the ethic of personal accountability, and acknowledging Black women as agents of change.

20. I replace the names of institutions where my analysis takes place for the purpose of anonymizing the vulnerable people of color mentioned in this study. Replacements (both in-text, in notes, and in references) are marked with square brackets “[].”

21. Where X represents a condition, such as “cool,” or “strugglin’. ”

22. White institutional defensiveness arises from public stances or policy implementation by white institutions/media that move to preempt or skirt racial stress or even the subject of race to protect white feelings. Contextualized in the age of neoliberal narratives of “post-raciality” and colorblindness in institutional operations, that defensiveness subtly manifests itself in several ways including through policy, diversity initiatives, media displays, and day-to-day rhetorical encounters. For example, my undergraduate university—in grappling with how to snuff out the idea that such racial tension, racist ideology, and violence do, in fact, survive into the twenty-first century—illustrates this defensiveness, as it asks students to simply unplug from the social media network citing capitalist values (career advancement) as validation. White institutional defensiveness serves as an ever-present backdrop for the Black rhetorics explored in Black or Right. Chapter 4 provides further examples.

23. Brian Street defines literacy practices as modes of reading and writing connected to broader sociocultural patterns in its use (2000, 21).

1. Reprinted with the kind courtesy and permission of the Village Voice, where “Power” was first published.

2. Tangentially: ScHoolboy Q’s membership in the supergroup Black Hippy—which includes Kendrick Lamar—and his tracks’ intermittent focus on social justice issues arguably mark him this way in popular culture.

3. I use “autoethnography” to refer to autobiographic stories contextualized within the theorization/study of culture (ethnography) for knowledge production/negotiation. Tony Adams, Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis mark autoethnography distinct from autobiography due to its academic audience (2015, 36–37); however, Pratt’s explanation (noted here) points out that autoethnography might address multiple audiences. I lean on Pratt here to open up possibilities for knowledge production/negation with/in/beyond the academy.

4. As critical race theorist Lisa Marie Cacho stresses, “criminalized populations and the places where they live form the foundation of the U. S. legal system, imagined to be the reason why a punitive (in)justice system exists” (2012, 5; emphasis in original).

5. Though institutions border spaces for control and commodification, I argue those spaces operate with/against such bordering. “Off-campus areas,” even while signaling separation, are inculcated in an institution’s ecological meanings, since they remain relationally, geographically, and linguistically tethered to it. My study aligns with feminist geographers’ “notions of space as paradoxical, provisional, contradictory, fragmented” (Reynolds 2007, 20).

6. She even wrote me a private note after the semester to thank me for helping her understand her (racialized) identities and experiences. Thank you, Shaina!

7. Ratcliffe uses it to initiate her antiracist ‘rhetorical listening’ but then turns to “academic research” to “explore further” (2005, 37).

8. I neither mean to essentialize Blackness or the role of the Black graduate/instructor, nor to provide any kind of guidelines for the future negotiation of that position.

9. I look to ways that we may consider Black masculinity, in particular, nonmonolithically: beyond binaries of exceptionalism or victimhood, toxically straight or stereotypically queer. I follow Simone Drake (2016) in approaching the study of Black masculinity through Black feminist frameworks, imagining possibilities for intersectionality, complexity, and accountability. This project thus follows on work in rhetoric/communication and writing studies like Eric D. Pritchard’s (2017) that operates at the intersection of race and gender/sexuality studies. I acknowledge able-bodied, straight, cis-gender male privileges, hoping to dismantle a tradition of their misuse. In centering Black women’s scholarship, I theorize Black masculinity in this chapter to work against essentialization of difference, both in the United States and transnationally.

10. Such as Wendy S. Hesford in Framing Identities (1999) and Mike Rose in Lives on the Boundary (1990).

11. I include these texts to show a (three-decade) trajectory, acknowledging that there are many other examples.

12. While traditional griots use oral performance, autoethnography’s performativity/reciprocity allows readers spaces to relate and respond (Calafell 2013, 8), dis/identify, riff, and clap back, offering deviations from standard fare in research/academic writing. As Barbara Christian spotlights, “people of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from Western logic . . . [Our] theorizing (and [she uses] the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles, in proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking” (1987, 52).

13. The US tradition dates back to Black knowledge-making by former slaves through autobiographic writings and speeches.

14. For more on the rhetorical, historical, and linguistic politics of the word/concept “nigga,” please see Kermit Campbell’s (1997) “Real Niggas Never Die,” Gloria Naylor’s (1986) “A Word’s Meaning Can Often Depend on Who Says It,” Vershawn Young’s (2007) chapter “Nigga Gender” in Your Average Nigga, and/or Randall Kennedy’s (2003) Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. My project here focuses more, instead, on the rhetorically ecological radiations of the word in the context of the historically white classroom than on the particular word’s politics proper.

15. This heading re/calls attention to the epigraph to this chapter from Lorde (1974).

16. This charted history is inherently somewhat reductive. I choose Black scholars who represent the analytic for which I argue and speak in some way to my project’s politics, welcoming further engagement with this history.

17. For further descriptions of these environments, see Young (2004, 2007).

18. Later in Du Bois’s (1903) text, in “On the Meaning of Progress” and “Of the Training of Black Men,” he switches roles from student to teacher/education theorist, still engaged in critical reflection of how the color line works to dismantle attempts at Black education.

19. Black autoethnography shares similarities with Kimberly Benston’s “black autocritography” (2000, 284). However, I contend the former centrally analyzes the materiality of peoples and cultures (as opposed to literature) and represents more than slippages in other writing genres.

20. Young’s (2007) second chapter features his poem “shiny,” interrelating analysis of it. I extend this aspect of Black autoethnography.

21. Liberal Arts College is a four-year public liberal arts college established in the late sixties in the US Northeast.

22. At the time, I didn’t own many dress clothes, both because they were unnecessary for the job I held and because that job paid close to minimum wage. I distinctly recall making between US$6 and $7 an hour, while being restricted to working no more than twenty hours per week due to my nonresident alien status. Naturally, the photograph does not necessarily highlight the material realities of the situations that lead to the “success”—at least superficially—celebrated by it. The related article, with a chance to do just that, also does not.

23. Both incidents occurred within a one-mile radius of each respective campus.

24. Chapter 4 delves deeply into analyzing such notices.

25. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets website at: https://www.poets.org/academy-american-poets/ohio-state-university-poetry-prize-2016.

26. Groups of about six classes make up a work group. Six instructors grade from their group’s assigned pile. A classroom instructor thus has under a 20 percent chance of grading their own students’ work.

27. “Raff” in Trinidadian dialect is a verb meaning to pull an object away (usually from another person) violently, to potentially abscond with it.

1. Certain tags have indeed been identified as “Blacktags,” such as #onlyintheghetto and #ifsantawasblack—racialized hashtags deployed and circulated by Black Twitter users (Sharma 2013). Sanjay Sharma argues, however, that “as digital objects, Blacktags reveal the contagious effects of networked relations in producing emergent, racial aggregations rather than simply representing the behavior of an intentionally acting Black group of Twitter users” (48). This chapter engages with the utilization of hashtags for (education about) Black virality and annotation in ways that counter neoliberal value systems of literacy/agency, stressing the racial enculturation of tags for their resistant Black capacities.

2. Pritha Prasad’s “Beyond Rights as Recognition,” in particular, illustrates them. Prasad examines how specific tags (#IfTheyGunnedMeDown and #AliveWhileBlack), through “the embedded, distributed modes of collectivity and community they offer[,] can create critical posthuman coalitions and affirmative bonds” (2016, 52). Prasad’s study aligns with the abovementioned critical race scholars in theorizing racialization in these spaces by looking to tags as field sites for research, but through an exploration of hashtag’s rhetorical capacities, the article intimates prospective follow-up work in writing studies.

3. Greene Wade (2017) characterizes this thrust as Wynterian, in order to create new genres of the human in order to untangle Blackness from (Western) Man.

4. These are, naturally, condensed and particular histories. For more on the role that printed commonplaces played in the formation of ideology in the Western tradition, see Ann Moss (1996); for a view of how commonplaces and “common” writing shaped early American thought systems in particular, see Susan Miller (1998).

5. Miller (1998) analyzes the writings held in the archives of the Virginia Historical Society in the 1800s. These include commonplace books, family histories, lists, narratives, and so forth.

6. See, in particular, Miller’s chap. 4, “The Class on Gender” and the analysis of Thomas Massie’s commonplace book (1998, 163–70).

7. Examples include the sometimes-problematic institutionalization of Black studies as an academic discipline and the growing practice of ‘multicultural’ or ‘diversity’ requirements in university general education course requirements.

8. One might argue that the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) policy statement on “Students Right to Their Own Language” (1974) helped spark such changes and that statements like the National Council of Teachers of English/CCCC’s Black Caucus “NCTE Statement Affirming #BlackLivesMatter” (2015) evidence continued change in these fields.

9. This history is not to suggest that dominant ideology could not be undercut by commonplace book use but to give a broad picture of how writing/composition tools through their design and implementation in the classroom and beyond can inform and reinforce such ideologies.

10. Facebook represents the only exception, where a greater proportion of surveyed Hispanic internet users (73%) used Facebook than Black users (70%) (Pew Research Center 2018).

11. Similarly, a 2015 special issue of the journal Feminist Studies, “Teaching About Ferguson.” articulates “the meanings of the [Ferguson/Black Lives Matter] moment” and their unfolding conditions for their latent pedagogies (Nash 2015, 2).

12. I recognize that such discussions come with varying degrees of risk dependent on the identities of instructors and students, as well as surrounding contexts. I mean to suggest that hashtags can be a means by which such risks might be pedagogically confronted, and in the third section of this chapter I explain how the “Tumblr as Commonplace Book” assignment navigates some of the complications that arise in race talk—especially in historically white spaces.

13. In the proceeding section, I analyze my writing assignment “Tumblr as Commonplace Book,” in which I pick up hashtag composition as a means of using digital commonplacing for pedagogic purposes of engaging in viral Blackness with potentials to subvert rather than reinforce cultural hegemony and its antiBlackness. I don’t suggest, however, the latter as impossible. The above history of commonplacing suffices to argue otherwise. Before delving into that analysis, though, I sketch the digital environment for the assignment (another deep ecology at work in this educational hashtagging)—Tumblr—in the remainder of this section.

14. Jacobs’ (2012) article originally inspired my assignment, which later developed to focus on hashtags. The article does not discuss the role of tags in the commonplace book / Tumblr comparison, however, nor does it consider the racialized dynamics of tag use.

15. No safeguard, of course, exists from the possibility of offensive or violent responses from other Tumblr users once a blog is set as public on the website. That possibility remains a distinct constraint of public/digital writing exercises. For example, in a 2019 graduate course, my students were followed by a white supremacist Tumblr account.

16. In this section, I examine my students’ application of the “Tumblr as Commonplace Book” social media writing assignment that operates as a reading/writing/note-taking activity scaffolding other projects for the course throughout the semester. Before looking at student examples of hashtag usage for their relational Black feminist meaning-making potentials, I unpack the assignment and contextualize the course for which the assignment is crucial.

17. Chapter 3 unpacks the term “cultural moment” and the moment termed “post-Ferguson.”

18. Similar to a retweet, Tumblr’s “reblog” feature allows users to repost content on their blogs while giving credit to the original poster. Re-posters may add additional data below the reblogged post.

19. I specifically ask students not to use part or full real names in the URLs for their blogs. For the purposes of maintaining further anonymity (and in accordance with International Review Board–exempt status), I have coded the blog titles tcb01–tcb41.

20. Students are also encouraged to use content such as GIFs and video stills that already exist on the site on or the internet.

21. Across each semester, the racial demographics were as follows: in the autumn 2016 semester, 15 students identified as white, 2 students identified as non-Black students of color, 4 students identified as Black; in the spring 2017 semester, 15 students identified as white, 4 students identified as non-Black students of color, and 1 student identified as Black. Students self-identify through an autoethnographic reflection exercise early in each semester.

22. I read three students’ posts using this same image to show how different meanings might be made from the readings of the same text.

1. I use #BlackLivesMatter here (and throughout) to refer to the hashtag as well as the social movement, choosing to contextualize that use based on chapter 2’s arguments about the meaning-making potentials of the hashtag.

2. Rachel Dolezal was a former Spokane, Washington, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a former instructor of Africana Studies. In 2015, she lost both positions after it became public that she had falsely claimed to be African American. Because (based on biological notions of race), she is white/Caucasian, her presentation as a Black woman and identification as such on documents led to the eruption of a debate on “racial fluidity.” General sentiment was that Dolezal’s racial identification was offensive to Black folk, as she adopted the histories and cultures of Black womanhood and alleged race-based hate crimes against her.

3. As someone who identifies as such, I acknowledge that this implicates my reading of Blackness and #BlackLivesMatter. I, thus, prioritize the term “Black” as opposed to “African American.”

4. By “cultural moment” I mean the contextual, yet dynamic, backdrop within which we consider social relations during a sociopolitical and historical period that relates to, but can differ from, other such periods. Certainly, earlier histories/historical events play a significant role in contributing to proceeding cultural moments. But I argue that reframing and recontextualizing those histories due to significant events and cultural shifts within certain geographical spaces allow for spills from/between one cultural moment to another. Cultural moments can vary by location, but thinking transnationally, I classify such moments through highlighting issues that arguably move in and out of widespread (news and social) media-driven narratives. Cultural moments represent very deep rhetorical ecologies.

5. I mean to ask with/in this particular fracture (“relation/ships”), by conjuring the Trans-Atlantic slave ship, Sharpe’s question: “If the crime is blackness, is the sentence the circuit between ship and shore?” (2016, 57).

6. Whereas these scholars tend to focus on the interplay between oral and written communication, and if “participants . . . learn whether the oral or written mode takes precedence in literacy events” (Heath [1982] 2001, 445), our attention lies with the prioritization of interactivity in the production/negotiation of meaning.

7. Whereas Street (1999; 2000) and Janet Maybin (2005) propel conversations regarding literacy events toward readings of literacy practices, I privilege the event because I do not work with the notion that I study cordoned-off “communities.” Street (1999) extends the conversation around literacy events in proposing his notion of “literacy practices” to point to the importance of “social practices and conceptions of reading and writing” (1). He seeks to alleviate what he sees as the descriptive nature of literacy events, as opposed to a focus on the meaning construction. For Street, the idea of literacy practices, on the other hand, “attempts to handle the events and the patterns of activity around literacy but to link them to something broader of a cultural and social kind. And part of that broadening involves attending to the fact that in a literacy event we have brought to it concepts, social models regarding what the nature of this practice is and that make it work and give it meaning” (2000, 21). Literacy practices, then, might seem more applicable as a concept to the approach that this chapter takes. Maybin’s contention of their importance might be of relevance. She explains that “the taking on of more complex ideas about discourse and intertextuality” allows for scholars “to more clearly conceptualise the pivotal role of literacy practices in articulating the links between individual people’s everyday experience, and wider social institutions and structures. It also enables them to explore issues of power, through examining the relationship between micro- and macro-level contexts” (2005, 197). The issue with looking toward literacy practices within the deep rhetorical ecologies at hand in this project, however, lies in the assumption that that attention lies with a defined, sociological community. Deep rhetorical ecologies refuse such boundaries.

So, while I indeed mobilize issues related to individuals’ relations to social power and draw from Street’s (1999, 2000) (and others’) efforts to consider social practices and cultural discourse, I emphasize the literacy event. This emphasis highlights the particular fracturing in events radiating with/in deep ecologies.

8. In using the term post-Ferguson I do not suggest that we have somehow transcended the events of the Ferguson Uprising of 2014. Rather, my employment of the term seeks to center the cultural moment that follows the Uprising as distinct from moments prior. We might understand “post” as closer to the literal “after,” with the imposition to re/turn (through critical memory [Baker 1995] and wake work [Sharpe 2016]) to the salient role that the Uprising plays in events following it. As historian Barbara Ransby argues, “In the wake of the Ferguson uprising, Black freedom organizing overall took on new agency” (2018, 76).

9. This section heading uses lyrics from Lamar’s “Alright” (Lamar 2015a).

10. I do not mean to suggest here that the census is the one place where the US government defines all its ideas of race and/or Blackness. I use it as an example to emphasize the preponderance of confusion with/in government institutions on these ideas. Because demographics are wielded freely as weapons in Eurocentric analyses of race in the United States, I highlight the methods for the collection of those statistics here as a counterpoint.

11. This “self-identification” seems to be an implied affordance, rather than a stated constraint in collecting official data.

12. I call this defensiveness “white institutional defensiveness” because of the convergence of power used by institutions (and people) to deploy and promote racial supremacy of whiteness via antiBlackness: Eurocentric and now neoliberal (within the last half century) ideals established based on notions of universalist aims and worldviews. The following paragraph explains what I mean specifically by the term. Chapter 4 provides more examples of its operation.

13. While I acknowledge that other socioeconomic issues have (in the past twenty years) and continue to negatively impact Black communities in the United States—such as gentrification, the school-to-prison pipeline, and so on—I foreground these events to exemplify their publicly articulated or institutionalized white defensiveness.

14. Taylor (2016) charts this culture from the establishment of US nationhood, through slavery, the Civil Rights movement, and on to the era of colorblindness.

15. While we might rightfully acknowledge that extremist Islamic groups do not represent the views of the tenets of the entire religion, such a stipulation was arguably flattened in the national (military) response to the events of 9/11.

16. In 2017, these efforts crystalized in Trump’s “Muslim ban.”

17. In that game “the body and politics of Barack Obama intersect with the body politics of the nation, reminding rhetorical scholars of the continuing significance of race and (un)marked bodies, as well as of the ease with which anti[B]lack racism can be easily publicly voiced and as easily dismissed as nonracist.” (Flores and Sims 2016, 207).

18. See chap. 2, “From Civil Rights to Colorblind” in Taylor (2016).

19. Originally published online on FeministWire.com on October 14, 2014, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement” is written by Alicia Garza (2014), a Black queer activist and one of the cofounders of the movement. The text can now be found on BlackLivesMatter.com as a kind of manifesto for the movement. It defines the origins and aims of #BlackLivesMatter, explaining how it arose as a response to the vigilante killing of Trayvon Martin. Garza declares “Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.” The article emphasizes the implications of using Black queer women’s work institutionally. It stresses how problematic erasure might occur when such work becomes integrated into discourses and movements that do not acknowledge historically marginalized intersectional positions of Black folk, particularly Black queer women’s. But the movement should not only be understood in relation to Black death, as the article highlights a focus on Black life—lives traditionally obscured in media coverage of the Black power struggle, like those of Black queer trans folk, Black undocumented immigrants, and Black disabled folk.

20. Kendrick Lamar (2015a) released “Alright” as part of his album To Pimp A Butterfly in 2015. He later published the track as the album’s fourth single, released on June 30, 2015. Later in the year, the song’s chorus “we gon’ be alright” developed into a chant frequently used at #BlackLivesMatter protests across the country. The song’s lyrics deal primarily with struggles with materialism that Lamar potentially faces as a gender-conforming straight Black man from an impoverished urban background in the United States, relationships between Black folk and institutional authority, and the role that violence plays vis-à-vis Black masculinity. They also include several Christian references in Lamar’s contention with temptation. The audio recording also includes a short poem as a coda, which focuses on the speaker’s internal conflict, though it refers to a “you,” to whom it is addressed.

21. The track’s associated music video (Lamar 2015c) was released on the same day as the audio track. Entirely shot in black and white, the almost seven-minute video begins with shots of inner-city life, significantly including images of mostly Black males in violent interactions with white police. Concurrent images of other Black men drinking and “making it rain” interject, as viewers hear an extended version of the poem attached to the end of the audio track. A short interlude between the poem and the track proper offers images of Lamar and associates in a car actively being carried by four white police officers. Most of the video consists of a rotating series of scenes that show Lamar floating around a West Coast US city, Lamar in a car spewing money, three hoodied black men dancing on a cop car, and shots of urban celebration involving Black youth. Close to the end of the video, Lamar is shot from atop a lamppost by an older white cop gesturing a gunshot with his hands. Lamar’s same short poem from the end of the audio track (Lamar 2015a) is again recited; he hits the ground, yet, after a short moment, smiles as though alive in the very last shot of the video.

22. Lamar’s Grammy performance (CBS Television Network 2016) of the song uses markedly different kinds of scenes. It begins with a chain gang of Black men entering the stage to the sound of a saxophone, led by Lamar. At the mic, the rapper starts with lyrics from “The Blacker the Berry” that particularly speaks to Black identity—bodily traits traditionally associated with Blackness and particularly sexualized Black masculinity—and rage in relation to oppressive institutional power (Lamar 2015b). Having removed his chains, Lamar moves the performance to an interlude that includes backup dancers clad in neon-colored jumpsuits (CBS Television Network 2016). Lamar moves across the stage to a group of Black men and women dressed in tribal costumes, some with drums, all moving around a large burning fire at the center of the shot. As he moves to this scene, he gets into the lyrics of “Alright” (Lamar 2015a). The women dancing move around Lamar in a circle, as he gets to the first chorus of the song, at which point several other dancers engage with him in a highly choreographed routine (CBS Television Network 2016). Lamar seemingly emphasizes several lyrics in verse two when the backing music stops; he repeats a couple lines that crescendo as the dancers gather closer and hype his escalating volume and intensity. After another break in the backing instrumentation, he moves again to stage right, where, alone, he spits a third (untitled) track that highlights issues related to the material living conditions of impoverished Blacks, along with what might be accounts of his personal confrontations with fame. Toward the end of the performance, his flow escalates almost to an inaudible speed, during which the camera shots of the performance appositely switch focus and range. A flashing light also intensifies images of Lamar’s face during this frantic climax. When his rapping stops, all lighting on him is removed. We see his silhouette against a bright image of Africa, with the text “Compton” embedded in it in black, lined with large chains on either side, in frank focus.

23. Blacklivesmattersyllabus.com (Roberts 2016) presents a semester-long multimodal schedule for an interdisciplinary course on the #BlackLivesMatter movement. The instructor, Frank Leon Roberts—a faculty member at New York University and grassroots political activist, taught the class at New York University in fall 2016. A section of the site explicates Roberts’s renown for his “pioneering work as the ‘Black Lives Matter Professor,’” which “has been featured in Fader Magazine, NPR, CNN, and an extensive variety of other national media outlets.” The syllabus aims to include considerations of the movement in relation to the rise of the prison industrial complex vis-à-vis Black US urban communities, the relationship between (popular/national) media and race, the place of racial activism in the Obama era, and the “increasing populist nature of decentralized protest movements” in the United States. Required films range from the documentary work of Laurens Grant to Ava DuVernay, while required alphabetic texts highlight writing by Michelle Alexander, Angela Davis, the Movement for Black Lives, Audre Lorde, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Cornel West, Alicia Garza, and other figures. The syllabus includes links to videos that feature a range of public figures from #BlackLivesMatter activists, professors, and politicians, to Beyoncé’s “Formation.” Each weekly class session includes a blurb discussing the ideas to be engaged in for that class, required texts for each respective week, and reflective writing assignments. Notably, the syllabus’s title and core logistical information (instructor, date time, etc.) come after a centered graphic of white text on a black background. The text, written in capital letters reads, “WE GON’ BE ALRIGHT,” while a line runs through the middle of the horizontally oriented phrase. Weekly topics of discussion include the history and historicizing of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, its aims and methods, and its relationships to feminist intersectionality, to the 2016 presidential election, and to popular culture.

24. My reading will in no way attempt to be exhaustive and will potentially offer more questions than solid digestible notions about these texts. Offering fluid interpretations, my rhetorical analysis reflexively seeks to welcome future engagements with its process—my explanations should be means, rather than ends. This method of reading attempts to promote engagement with some deep ecologies that make up and will make up the #BlackLivesMatter movement, motivating afterlives from the relations, intersections, and fractures in my analytical process.

25. I mean to conjure Henry Louis Gates’s (1989) theory of “signifyin’” here. Later in the chapter, I discuss specific applications of the theory for inter(con)textual reading in Black texts at hand in the US milieu.

26. Lamar’s (2015a) track is used as a frame in Robert’s (2016) unit on #BlackLivesMatter in popular culture, however, it is only mentioned as a part of a trend.

27. This question is also signifyin with Beyoncé’s (2016) “Formation.”

28. Consider in relation to chapter 2’s argument about Black hashtags as counter/public commonplaces, as marginalized literacy.

29. Merriam-Webster.com (2020a) defines ‘woke’ as “a byword of social awareness likely started in 2008, with the release of Erykah Badu’s song ‘Master Teacher,’” though it dates first used to 1972. The Dictionary explains that “Stay woke became a watch word in parts of the [B]lack community for those who were self-aware, questioning the dominant paradigm and striving for something better (Merriam Webster 2020b). But stay woke and woke became part of a wider discussion in 2014, immediately following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The word woke became entwined with the Black Lives Matter movement; instead of just being a word that signaled awareness of injustice or racial tension, it became a word of action. Activists were woke and called on others to stay woke” (Merriam Webster 2020b). For more, refer to: Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, 2020a, “woke,” accessed June 26, 2020, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woke; Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, 2020b, “woke Meaning Origin,” Last Modified September 2017. Accessed June 26, 2020. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/woke-meaning-origin.

Compare with Urban Dictionary’s top three definitions with the term that speak to notions of liberal intellectual superiority and ‘fakeness’: Urban Dictionary. 2020 “woke” Accessed June 26, 2020. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woke.

30. I am not interested in making judgments about Lamar’s character, or defining what “charismatic” might imply. Here, I engage with the possibility of this phrase referring to Lamar as a cis-het Black man that has gained popularity in relation to #BlackLivesMatter.

31. A video recording of the chanting can be viewed at Piffin (2015).

32. Emphases in both Ahmed (2010) quotations in original.

33. This heading uses this phrase from Assata Shakur’s (1973) “To My People.”

34. Garza’s (2014) article includes a hyperlink to a longer text of Shakur’s (1973) from which the quotation is referenced.

35. The video is one of several found embedded in Roberts (2016): http://www.blacklivesmattersyllabus.com/blmlive/. Accessed April 2, 2017.

36. This heading quotes Garza’s (2014) stance on the importance of sharing the histories of Black liberation from which #BlackLivesMatter draws.

37. This section’s heading references Garza’s (2014) thoughts on the prison industrial complex.

38. This reference could be to Jesus’s tough visit to Nazareth after being raised elsewhere. See Luke 4:14–30.

39. We could potentially read this as Lamar (2015a) establishing an ethos in the song based on honesty and truth, but other biblical references suggest otherwise.

40. By “faith” I do not refer to “Faith” as in the church as a whole but belief in a Christian God.

41. This quotation is a part of an italicized statement from Garza’s (2014) “Herstory”: “When Black people get free, everybody gets free.” It echoes the Combahee River Collective’s Statement that “if Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression” ([1977] 2017, 23).

1. While Rice does admit that feeling actually cannot be divorced from pedagogy or rhetorical publicness, seeking instead an alternate imaginary for the possibilities of inquiry (2012, 168), the material conditions of Black and brown folks in the United States (and the West proper) demand that rhetorical theorists pay attention to the role of affective feeling in these moments and the way that subjectivity co-constitutes pedagogy and rhetorical publicness. Moreover, Wynter (2005) avers that raciality generates our notions of affect and desire that influence even posthumanist imaginaries (which inherently tussle with matter and meaning).

2. Dr. Kynard graciously provided me with an alphabetic text copy of the presentation, from which I cite directly. I thank her for her generosity and for supporting my project.

3. I intentionally begin with the date of the Black Lives Matter in Classrooms Symposium.

4. The act is named after a white female student at Lehigh University who was sexually assaulted and killed by a Black male student in 1987 (Gross and Fine 1990). The document itself, therefore, has historical context that racializes and genders it to play into historical scripts of Black men in relation to white women’s safety.

5. Identified as such by visible hijab.

6. Susan Smith is a white South Carolina woman who drowned her two infant sons in 1995 and then accused a Black man of the crime.

7. The British legal principle of partus sequitur ventrem stipulated that the mark of slavery was passed on via the enslaved Black mother during Trans-Atlantic slavery. The implication, then, remains that Black motherhood—or, more specifically, the Black womb—physically and culturally functions as means by which Blackness, sociogenically, could be continually produced. See Sharpe (2016) for further implications.

8. Such data refer to “data collected by organizations about how they are perceived by external communities” (Ahmed 2012, 34).

9. The Department of Public Safety’s (2017) Crime Report published in 2017 presents 2016 statistics only by the type of crime, rather than by identity markers. A comparison between the total number of individuals involved in crimes reported and those described in detail in alerts to confirm whether suspects were only Black individuals in the six-month period could not therefore be performed via publicly provided information.

10. Several web-hosting services denied Anglin their space after The Daily Stormer’s role in organizing the far-right rally that resulted in the death of a counter-protestor in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.

11. As unpacked in chapter 3.

12. Section title quoted from Lorde’s (1978) “A Litany for Survival.”

1. I learned at some point that this “droiyn room” came from “drawing room,” but I’m not sure why we use this terminology. I would guess it was passed along through British colonialism.

2. The entire text of Smith’s (2014) poem can be found at Split this Rock, an online database of social justice poetry.

3. Singing Sandra, Sandra DesVignes-Millington, became only the second woman (after Calypso Rose) to win the National Calypso Monarch competition in Trinidad and Tobago history. “Voices from De Ghetto” and “Song for Healing” won the 1999 title for Sandra, who routinely focuses on sociopolitical issues affecting African diasporic communities and (Black) women in the Caribbean.

4. See note 6 in the introduction on para/ontological Blackness.

5. I paraphrase here from Sharpe’s description of J.M.W. Turner’s painting Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Aboard Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On. Sharpe describes, “In the roiling, livid orpiment of Turner’s painting, the dead are yoked to the dying. That Turner’s slave ship lacks a proper name allows it to stand in for every slave ship and every slave crew, for every ship and all the murdered” (2016, 36; emphasis in original).

6. Saying something “could salt” in Trini dialect suggests that something or someone is useless for consideration—as in that thing could be left out to dry and wither away. The expression is similar to the Jamaican “dash weh” or “dash dem way,” meaning to throw away or throw (something) away.

7. The last two of these can often be found (per)formed in the energy of the “hotep,” a stereotype of contemporary toxically “woke” Black masculinity.