“Wouldn’t you know / We been hurt, been down before”9

Russell’s above declaration also suggests that the ways in which we have read Black resistance—and Blackness—in relation to systematic oppression in the past cannot be ahistorically applied to reading #BlackLivesMatter. The movement, unlike the Civil Rights movement, shifts focus from legal recognition as its motivating ideal. How institutions might come to the question of racial justice—for Russell, by asking “what’s legal?”—forces us to reconsider exactly what white capitalist heteropatriarchal institutions confusingly promote as the meanings of race and Blackness in doling out that justice. If we look to governmental institutions, surely, we might find some “official” stance on the meanings of race and/or Blackness they operationalize.10 The US Department of Commerce—the branch of the US government responsible for census data—uses the following as its definition of “Black”: “a person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa,” while explaining that it allows individuals to self-identify on the category of race (Census Bureau 2020).11 The Census Bureau’s website, in addressing the question “What is Race?” cautions that “the racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically” (Census Bureau 2020). That definition, or rather lack of a definition, seems only to intimate a push against traditional white supremacist logics of racial categorization—that race does not equate to some biological/phenotypical, and therefore “natural” character—logics historically used to justify slavery in many forms. However, how the bureau’s categorization of “Black” is not biological/phenotypical, anthropological, or genetic when the very description of it includes the words “origins” and “groups of Africa” is puzzling. From this contradiction on a governmental stance on race and Blackness, we begin to read the vexed and unconfident ways institutions deal with the concept for their own purposes. If the chief means by which the US government collects demographic data on its citizens (and noncitizens) mystifies the concept of race and places it within a framework gesturing defensively on questions about it, we might usefully consider other ways such defensiveness—what I call white public and institutional defensiveness12—at institutional and public levels usher in a resistant stance such as Russell’s: one that overtly races, genders, and classes the ecological elements/relations of #BlackLivesMatter.

When I say white defensiveness, I refer to articulated responses that result from what whiteness studies scholar Robin DiAngelo calls “White Fragility” (2011). Such defensiveness manifests in “a range of defensive moves” triggered by white fragility, “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable” (57). Whereas DiAngelo confronts affective defensive reactions on an intra/interpersonal level, the above definitions used by the Census Bureau operate on an institutional or public plane to attempt to “reinstate white racial equilibrium” (2020, 57) by anticipating white fragility and racial stress through defensive rhetorics. So, while Cohen contextualizes Russell’s remarks as reacting to oppressive conditions of neoliberalism, I additionally link them to three important, intertwined cultural moments that arguably prompt white institutional (or public) defensiveness. These moments converge with several others to set up conditions for #BlackLivesMatter and its notions of relational Blackness post-Ferguson. They include—but are not limited to—the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the election of President Obama, and the ideal of colorblindness in US society.13

While African American studies scholar Taylor’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016) foregrounds the explosion of #BlackLivesMatter through a “culture of racism,”14 focus here remains in ma(r)king the deep ecologies of these three specific cultural moments to highlight how their fractures evolve through contact with white institutional defensiveness arising specifically, but not chronologically, with/in the backdrop of colorblindness. In Russell’s plea for “having a right over laws,” I deploy these in concatenated, reflexive response to blacklivesmatter.com’s (Roberts 2016) question/response “What does #BlackLivesMatter mean?” Effectively, this section uses critical memory of these events as a historical/temporal backdrop to “[broaden] the conversation around state violence” as a means to considering “the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state” (Cullors 2018). Because of the institutional and public front of white defensiveness, as illustrated through these moments, such tensions promote an environment conducive to #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations of relational, inter(con)textual Black meaning-making as literacy events to counter white fragility.

Reductively, the events of 9/11 positioned the United States as nationally at odds with Islam and in some ways as anti-im/migrant, more pronouncedly than relations had indicated previously.15 That positioning was undoubtedly racialized and citizened as the Western nation attempted to exterminate the threat identified with the Eastern religion both inside and outside of its “geographical borders.” After September 11, 2001, the titular aim of the bipartisan End Racial Profiling Act of 2001—pursued by politicians aggressively earlier that same year—took a backseat to the perceived threat to national security that brown and Black folk in the United States represent. According to a Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights report,

The federal government immediately focused massive investigative resources and law enforcement attention on Arabs and Muslims—and in some cases on individuals who were perceived to be, but in fact were not, Arabs or Muslims, such as Sikhs and other South Asians. In the years that followed, the federal government undertook various initiatives in an effort to protect the nation against terrorism. The federal government claimed that these counterterrorism initiatives did not constitute racial profiling, but the actions taken—from the singling out of Arabs and Muslims in the United States for questioning and detention to the selective application of immigration laws to nationals of Arab and Muslim countries—belie this claim. (Angulo and Weich 2003, 5)

The response to 9/11 thus complicated unfolding interrelations with the issue of institutionalized racism, with the terrorist attack providing justification for the intensification of racist methods of maintaining “safety.”16

Because of the public “racial stress” resulting “from an interruption to what is racially familiar” (DiAngelo 2011, 57), the government sought fit to exasperate institutionally practiced discrimination as a defensive response. Such discrimination ramped up efforts at racial profiling, especially of those conjuring difference to whiteness in extremity, in im/migration, “antiterrorism” measures, public security, and policing. Because Blackness was/is formulated to “represent difference in its raw manifestation—somatic, affective, aesthetic, imaginary . . . a caricature of the principle of exteriority” (46), as Mbembe (2017) puts it, such profiling undoubtedly played into the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. As surveillance studies scholars note, the typical “disposition of US-led security measures and practices, and increasingly so post-9/11” (S. Browne 2015, 38) is to profile some by sorting them into risk categories, and then to project those categories by generalizing persons in them with its potential behaviors (Bigo 2008, 81). Public Blackness, “abnormalized by way of surveillance and then coded for disciplinary measures that are punitive in their effects” (S. Browne 2015, 17) in white public spaces, meant Martin’s hoodie and Black teenage body in a gated Florida community were always already out of place demanding vigilante policing. White institutional defensiveness authorizes his murder. These events catapulted #BlackLivesMatter into the public sphere.

Barack Obama’s rise to the US presidency in 2008 elicited notions that the country had somehow transitioned to a “post-racial society.” Ironically, “the hope [to put racism ‘behind’ us] lay largely in the underlying representational politics that Barack Obama, a Black man, carried. That is, almost regardless of his political background and his experience, it was his [B]lackness that mattered” (Flores and Sims 2016, 206). Adding to the significance of President Obama’s racialized identity, opponents (such as Donald Trump and the Birther movement) pointed to him as a Muslim and not a natural-born US citizen—the very identities of “enemy” born out of responses to 9/11. Race and Blackness, embodied nationally and problematically essentialized in the profile of one Black man, engaged in—as communication studies scholars Lisa L. Flores and Christy-Dale L. Sims call it—a “zero sum game.”17 So, while the election of President Obama made race and intersectional (via racing, gendering, and citizening) Blackness an unavoidable, ongoing national conversation, those discussions were often quashed by the office he held. Conversations on racism, particularly antiBlack racism, could be shut down more easily via white public/institutional defensiveness—it had found an inbuilt excuse. As president, Obama represented an invitation to exchanges on Blackness that were reductively dismissed by the very invitation—much in the way that the census frames race as a social construct but uses biology and genetics to ask respondents to read themselves. Yet that conversation remained volatile in the modes in which it would be initiated or not explicitly discussed. An air of public passive-aggressiveness, of defensiveness, often plays out in the rationale behind racial colorblindness that plagues efforts to discuss race in the United States.

What political scientist Naomi Murakawa calls “the problem of the twenty-first century” (2014, 7)—colorblindness—Taylor declares, “has become the default setting for how Americans understand race and race work” (2016, 73). Racial colorblindness refers to the ideal that race should not be a factor considered in an individual’s potential for socioeconomic success (and “productive citizenship”). The concept is intricately linked to the rise of neoliberalism in the United States as both an economic agenda and a dominant cultural principle. The term “neoliberalism” summons the economic policies of Presidents Reagan and Nixon that began eroding the “social welfare state” through political policies and rhetoric of “freedom and choices”: according to Taylor, “Nixon officials worked to narrow the definition of racism to the intentions of individual actors while countering the idea of institutional racism by focusing on ‘freedom of choice’ as a way to entertain differential outcomes” (63). Neoliberalism/colorblindness thus evokes a culture of vilifying those outside of the laissez-faire productivity model that (racial) capitalism promotes. Because state responsibility for the social welfare of its citizens has been corroded by free market economics and a culture of “every man for himself” for almost fifty years, those operating against/outside such a culture have and continue to be (acceptingly) marginalized.18

Neoliberal philosophies and practices have since been imbedded in and beyond most institutional spaces, policies, and cultures with/in white capitalist heteropatriarchal frameworks. The very philosophy breathes white institutional defensiveness into life through racially colorblind rhetoric. If to be American means to individually pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, then, conversely, freely made “bad choices” that “lead” to crime, poverty, incarceration and literal premature death, means that white fragility could be weaponized in the face of racialized language. Armed with white public and institutional defensiveness, white institutions could and have charged overtly racialized and overtly Black rhetoric as criminal, as terroristic. Reagan and Nixon’s gifts that keep on giving grant the United States capacities to publicly talk about Blackness without talking about Blackness. The logics of colorblind approaches to race/racism, reified by the election of President Obama, add to the workings of historical antiBlackness and neoliberal epistemologies to demonize Blackness. By vilifying Blackness, then not allowing public conversations on it, rhetorics of white institutional defensiveness solidify Blackness’ objectness, rhetoricizing Trans-Atlantic slavery’s logics. #BlackLivesMatter slaps the hand that offers these “gifts.”

Contextualized in this country’s fraught histories of white supremacy built via antiBlackness, slavery, and segregation, “the new Jim Crow” of the mass incarceration of Blacks and Latinxs (Alexander 2012) provides an important additional backdrop to the post-Ferguson cultural moment. The problem of criminalizing these identities depends heavily on the notion of institutionalized/inter-/intrapersonal racial colorblindness. Civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar Michelle Alexander explains, “In an era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind” (2012, 2). The idea that individuals who and institutions that openly discriminate on the basis of race mark themselves overtly as counter to “American” ideals has found itself confusingly translated to imply—and even mean—that individuals or institutions should not recognize distinctions based on race. Both the former and the latter perceptions find themselves legitimized by the scientific dissociation between race and personality and thus feed into the neoliberal ideal that personal responsibility leads to material success in the United States. Colorblindness, thus, almost acts as a kind of trump card (hah!) in the game of white public and institutional defensiveness. Whereas 9/11 and the election of President Obama were temporally located markers of previous cultural moments, racial colorblindness’ interconnectedness with fundamentally antiBlack “American” ideals weighs heavily on the current post-Ferguson cultural moment. This is not to say that we have moved past the influence of the two former events but, rather, to signal that they help fuel the latter deep rhetorical ecology.

All three cultural moments / deep ecologies remain integral with/in the (continued) shaping of where we stand on the question of cultural rhetoricity post-Ferguson, propelling us to consider what co-constitutes that rhetoricity through the following analysis of #BlackLivesMatter. Both the movement’s expressed push toward “broadening the conversation around state violence” (Cullors 2018) and Russell’s suggestion that “we more connected than most people think” (PBS NewsHour 2014) implore us to think through notions of Blackness in dynamic Black feminist and African indigenous inter(con)textual relations with institutions. In carrying out such analysis, I also contend that we reflexively engage in co-constituting the deep ecology of the post-Ferguson cultural moment.

We Might Not Overcome But . . .

In responding to calls, such as Corrigan’s, for “new methods for racial inquiry . . . particularly around geographies of violence and resistance” (2016, 190), I operationalize Tori Russell’s and #BlackLivesMatter’s prompting for intersectionally relational, deep ecological readings of literacy events. I approach three literacy events (constellated texts), that give us insight into the meaning-making taking place in the #BlackLivesMatter movement: Garza’s (2014) “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement”;19 the audio track (Lamar 2015a),20 music video (Lamar 2015c),21 and February 2016 Grammy performance (CBS Television Network)22 of rapper Lamar’s “Alright”; and blacklivesmattersyllabus.com’s fall 2016 “Black Lives Matter Movement” syllabus, created by NYU instructor Frank Leon Roberts (2016).23 We’ll recall that they demonstrate historical, populist, and pedagogical relations between Blackness and state power. But the historical might better be re/visioned here as herstorical—conjuring not only the Black feminist epistemological tenet of Black women as knowledge agents (Hill Collins [1990] 2000, 266–269) but also the legacy of the Combahee River Collective’s Statement alongside the Movement for Black Lives’ “radical Black feminist praxis as its bedrock” (Ransby 2017, 181). With a primarily herstoric focus—that is, building from and upon histories/temporalities of Black feminist production/negotiation of meaning—the populist and pedagogical become the means to consider contestation of hegemonic notions of history that feed systemic power. To read ecologically and diachronically, my analysis of them moves around from text to text purposefully.

In such analysis of these sets of texts, my inter(con)textual readings take into account the points of encounter and disjuncture (intersections) between the texts and the associations that they set up in their unfolding. These intersections offer rhetorical encounters across texts within literacy events (each of the three centralized constellated texts) that operate in deep rhetorical ecologies with/in which meanings of Blackness are produced/negotiated. I prioritize (1) the inter(con)textual ways in which each literacy event overtly plays off and against each other, (2) how each references material that engages or centralizes the roles of Black women—particularly radical Black feminist women—and their work, (3) the events’ referral to and enactment of histories and historicization, (4) how they critique the prison industrial complex, its cultural offspring, and consequences, and (5) the role of spirituality in connection to or against oppressive institutional (white capitalist heteropatriarchal) power at play in these literacy events.24 Points of fracture where Blackness comes to be un/made with/in these ecologies via literacy events arise throughout, signaling the object-being of Blackness’ potentials for meaning-making through Black inter(con)textual reading.

Going, Gon’, Gone: #BlackLivesMatter Signifyin’

Due to its genre, Roberts’s (2016) Black Lives Matter syllabus brings into conversation the two other literacy events. What’s notable, however, are the modes in which it engages with them and the material operating in the immediate ecological space of Garza’s (2014) and Lamar’s (2015a) texts. The syllabus constitutes institutional engagement with the radical (Garza’s manifesto) and popular (iterations of Lamar’s track) with the pedagogical aims of producing/negotiating knowledge. We can perhaps use the references across the three texts—how they signify or are signifyin’,25 with/against each other—as an initial entry point.

Lamar’s song, though not directly listed on Roberts’s (2016) syllabus as a whole assigned text to be read,26 prominently features before all others through a graphic display of its chorus’s lyrics—if one scrolls http://www.blacklivesmattersyllabus.com/fall2016/ from the top of the home page at the syllabus’s online location, it comes into frame before all other info. In its graphic rendering “BE ALRIGHT” appears larger than the preceding “WE GON’” against its black backdrop, markedly using a black/white contrast. This contrast is reminiscent of the word “Compton” in white on the black map of Africa in Lamar’s Grammy performance (CBS Television Network 2016), and could recall the black and white aesthetic of Lamar’s music video (Lamar 2015c). The differences in the font size of the two pairs of words from Lamar’s (2015a) chorus might highlight being alright as a potential declarative goal of #BlackLivesMatter’s racial politics, or a possible position that bodies participating in Roberts’s (2016) class can strive to occupy. The latter perhaps responds to a central question of the syllabus: “How, when, and in what ways is it possible for us to stand in formation against the treacherous legacies of capitalist patriarchal white supremacy?”27 The goal of the chorus’s statement, however, seems to be a condition rather than a destination: the goal is not a place but rather a way/means of being, a kind of affective ontology. Or maybe the condition and the destination warp into each other so that marching, movement, and traction represent the modes in which one might (em)body Blackness in relation to institutional power—perhaps the repeated lyric summons an object/beingness, a how and a where, methods and temporalities. One might always already be moving away, progressing from, or destabilizing the place from which one comes or goes to in Blackness.28

Such a conception of Blackness might converse with Du Bois’s (1903) theory in The Souls of Black Folk of “double consciousness,” where Blackness within a white supremacist society involves an internal conflict of push-pull toward and against an impossible ideal of whiteness. A possibility for relational Blackness post-Ferguson, then, could hinge on a desire to resist and be apart from institutional and systemic white capitalist heteropatriarchal frameworks, while being affectively okay with the knowledge of that desire’s impossibility in the West. But Lamar’s (2015a) text, like Roberts’s (2016) syllabus, wants to constantly interrogate that condition. Lamar’s (2015a) chorus repeats its driving phrase six times, four times prefaced by the racially classed/gendered addressee of the statement “nigga,” once without such an addressee and once with the question “huh?” The chorus asks if the audience (referred to in second person) hears and feels its speaker before the framing sentiment, asking his (Black urban) audience to contextualize what being alright means to them. Lamar’s (2015a) lyrics, like Roberts’s (2016) syllabus, perhaps asks such audiences not only to be “woke,”29 but also to routinely return to the question of what it means to be “woke.” Yet could we also think through how the questions “Do you hear me? Do you feel me?” (Lamar 2015a) resuscitatively animate social death—the object-beingness of Blackness conjured through cyclical movement toward being alright, toward (em)bodying the historically commodifying but reclaimed rhetoric of nigga? Let’s dig deeper.

Sociolinguist Geneva Smitherman in Talkin and Testifyin highlights the contraction “gon’” as one of a few emblematic “pronunciations in Black English that are used by a large number of black speakers [in the US]” (1977, 17). Smitherman explains that “here the to is omitted altogether, and the nasal sound at the end is shortened, producing a sound that is somewhat like an abbreviated form of ‘gone’” (18). We might bring this omission to bear on Lamar’s (2015a) lyrics in further questioning the destination/condition spectrum set up in the chorus’s repeated line. Is it possible to conceive “going” alongside/against its phonetic referent (and past tense) “gone” in relation to a potential feeling of popularized urban Blackness? The going/gone interplay fractures meaning, temporality, and affect. It conjures “the wake.” It invokes critical memory. The very end of Lamar’s (2015c) music video seems to speak to its paradox when a white cop gesturally “shoots” Lamar, and he appears to be dead, but after a brief blank black-screen transition, he smiles up at the camera/sky. The sentiment of being rendered simultaneously dead to white institutional power, or the phonetic “gone,” while very much alive in one’s Blackness, or the articulated “gon,” reminds us of Weheliye’s (2014) Black feminist search for generative meaning in “not-quite-human” and “nonhuman” spaces/bodies/beings. This condition is object-beingness. In the “disaster of recognition” (L. Gordon 2007, 11), the Fanonian fracture reveals a para/ontological Blackness: non/being with/in “the possibility of one’s death as a legitimate feature of a system.” Similarly, the lack of a preposition (“to”) in Lamar’s (2015a) phrasing could signal an acknowledgment that Black folk have the potential with/in the here and now (of the wake) to be “okay.” But to arrive at such a position—which might seem impossible—they must involve themselves in a self-reflective interrogation, a narrative inventing, a world-making, as in the chorus’s reiterative questions. In the syllabus (Roberts 2016), that inquiry comes by way of pedagogical work centered around these kinds of questions and texts. One such text—and a crucial text at that—is Garza’s (2014) “Herstory.”

While Lamar’s (2015a) lyric graphically signifies a medial point of departure on the syllabus, Garza’s (2014) may represent a grounding means of orientation/origin. Following the screening of the BET documentary Laurens Grant’s Stay Woke (2016), on the first week of the syllabus to consider ways of “approaching” the #BlackLivesMatter movement (Roberts 2016), the second session begins with Garza’s (2014) article. The unit that it kicks off centers around the question “Who are they?” (Roberts 2016). Related readings for the week include several other sections of the #BlackLivesMatter website, an audio interview featuring Garza and fellow #BlackLivesMatter creators Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, and the first chapter from Cornel West’s (2004) Democracy Matters. The syllabus thus uses Garza’s (2014) “Herstory” to direct understandings of the movement’s provenance, as opposed to the way it uses Lamar’s (2015a) lyric as a popular culture reference to acclimate readers/students to his destination/condition spectrum of (urbanized, and at points primarily masculinized) Blackness. Garza’s (2014) manifesto, however, works in ways to push against Lamar (2015a) and his text to centralize the efficacy of Black queer women and their work. In addressing the use or appropriation of #BlackLivesMatter, Garza writes, “Straight men, unintentionally or intentionally, have taken the work of queer Black women and erased our contributions. Perhaps if we were the charismatic Black men many are rallying around these days, it would have been a different story, but being Black queer women in this society (and apparently within these movements) tends to equal invisibility and non-relevancy” (2014). Lamar’s popularity might qualify him as one of these “charismatic Black men”30 at whom Garza throws shade in wishing for political visibility and relevance for Black queer women’s labor. Garza’s stipulation that we be cognizant of what centering radical movements around these cis-het Black men and their texts means alerts us to the kinds of fractures that provide disjunctive opportunities for constructive meaning-making. Neither the #BlackLivesMatter movement nor its potentials for producing/negotiating racial meaning signal static conceptions of Blackness. What it might show us is the ways in which intersectional Blackness operates in relation to institutional power with/in the post-Ferguson cultural moment as reiteratively interrogating Black non/beingness or even “wokeness”—gendered, sexualized, classed, dis/abled, and citizened through its racialization.

A #BlackLivesMatter protest in Cleveland was the site at which public association between the movement and Lamar originated.31 In July 2015, “attendees of a Black Lives Matter conference at Cleveland State University confronted transit authority police arresting a fourteen-year-old for allegedly being intoxicated on a bus” (J. Gordon 2015). Students at the university responded by repeating Lamar’s chorus in resistance. According to Fact Magazine, “one of the conference attendees told ABC News Cleveland that people locked arms and blocked the street near the police cruiser while chanting [it]” (2015). Through the fracture with/in the deep ecology emerges new(er) Black meaning-making/negotiation, notably through (em)bodied Black relationality. Lamar became intrinsically linked to the movement and his popularity—and Grammy Award–winning success—a spotlight for issues related to #BlackLivesMatter’s cause, spurred by the institutional abuse of a Black youth. So, despite Garza’s (2014) overt reminder that the lack of attention paid to the Black queer women behind the movement is “hetero-patriarchal,” public attention flocked to Lamar’s (2015a) articulation of some of the movement’s affects rather than in affirming Black queer work. That reaction is unsurprising, as the deep rhetorical ecologies being examined operate in, as Roberts puts it, “treacherous legacies of capitalist patriarchal white supremacy” (2016). So, while radical intersectional, relational Blackness might seek to position itself away from such legacies—as a destination it might be “going to” a difference place—the logics of Du Bois’s (1903) “double consciousness” means that it remains a condition operating with/in/against white capitalist heteropatriarchy. Public perception of those positions means that Lamar, through his literacy event, has the privilege to create meaning more widely consumed as (in effect, populist) Blackness—straight, (hyper)masculine, though urbanized, notions that feed capitalist frameworks—than Garza (2014), or even Roberts (2016).

For music critic and psychologist Adam Blum, “Alright” represents “a de facto, unofficial anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement,” as he pronounces, that To Pimp a Butterfly, “will likely be remembered as an emblem of the cultural moment in which it was conceived, at the height of the initial swell of the Black Lives Matter movement” (2016, 143). Though Lamar does not candidly claim direct association with the movement, his response to questions regarding his stance in relation to it recognizes his role in shaping its deep ecological meanings. When specifically asked about the relationships between the song and the #BlackLivesMatter movement in a New York Times interview with Joe Coscarelli, Lamar explains, “It’s a chant of hope and feeling” (2015). This assertion seems to argue for his song—particularly the chorus’s lyrics—as (em)bodying emotions in conversation with intersectional Black queer activist affect in the contemporary United States. Lamar’s “hope” might trigger an affective conversion of the “bad feelings” of articulating injustice through narrative, moving away from the unhappy object of a protest chant to some happiness to come. Though, as Ahmed argues, if “in having hope we become anxious, because hope involves wanting something that might or might not happen” (2010, 183)—and historically has never happened (has Blackness ever really been “alright” in the Western world?)—then hope might be Blackened/queered with revolutionary unhappiness. Indeed, the Cleveland protests demonstrate how “revolutionary forms of political consciousness involve heightening our awareness of just how much there is to be unhappy about” (223).32 Selling CDs, therefore, cannot make #BlackLivesMatter, but protest chants might ignite movement toward that mattering.

About the moment in which Lamar realized that the song had become caught up in the #BlackLivesMatter movement, he responds, “When I’d go in certain parts of the world, and they were singing it in the streets. When it’s outside of the concerts, then you know it’s a little bit more deep-rooted than just a song. It’s more than just a piece of a record. It’s something that people live by—your words” (qtd. in Coscarelli 2015). Lamar’s (2015a) “words” become operational in the material lives of its consumers, with that consumption then playing out in ways such as protest-chanting. His particular expression “more than” suggests the generative capacity the song has to create/negotiate meaning in deep rhetorical ecologies. While Lamar’s summation of “Alright”’s significance acknowledges its entanglement within capitalist strictures, when it takes on functional meanings in people’s lives—as he sees it—its lyrics take effect/affect as the audience’s. They are “your words,” not just his. Those words then move with/from being caught up in one meaning/intention, as well as its urbanized, masculinized, and racialized identities—from a going to—to ways of being. The destination/condition spectrum represented in the line from the chorus and its apposite questions conceptualizes some anxious “hope and feeling” of interrogative, relational, Blackness post-Ferguson.

“Nothing to lose but our chains”: Centering Race-radical Black Women33

As critical as Lamar’s (2015a) phrase has grown for the movement, other chants by protestors and materials referenced particularly by Garza (2014) highlight the vital importance of race-radical Black women to #BlackLivesMatter and its making-meaning potentials. In Garza’s contention that ahistorical/appropriative employments of the #BlackLivesMatter movement debilitate its potential for “transformative social change,” the Black feminist activist references a quotation from Assata Shakur’s (1973) “To My People” adopted as a protest chant. While prevailing white public and institutional defensiveness brands Shakur a “terrorist,” Blackness postures otherwise. Shakur, a radical Black woman activist, a former member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, escaped from a US prison in the late 1970s and fled the country in the mid-1980s. Her unapologetic, revolutionary stances/actions that cut against matrixes of oppressive institutional racism (most notably the criminal justice system), patriarchy, and gender normativity (both white and Black—the latter in relation to her dissatisfactions with the Black Panthers) serve as the underpinnings of Shakur’s relevance to #BlackLivesMatter motives. Of Shakur, Garza (2014) writes, “When I use Assata’s powerful demand in my organizing work,34 I always begin by sharing where it comes from, sharing about Assata’s significance to the Black Liberation Movement, what it’s political purpose and message is, and why it’s important in our context.” In insisting on contextualizing Shakur’s herstorical significance, Garza engages Shakur’s biography, encounters, and relationships with Black activism as immediately impactful to the movement today. Shakur and “To My People” become an active part of the deep ecology, mobilizing feminist theorist Vivian May’s “history lessons” of intersectionality’s “theoretical genealogy” (2015, 9–12) so that protestors cannot divorce themselves or their material identities from her/his/stories and other deep ecologies of Black liberation struggles that date back to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, through to Jim Crow, and to the contemporary embattlement with neoliberal culture.

Although Shakur’s (1973) writing does not overtly appear to be included in Roberts’s (2016) syllabus, in his archive of videos from the material application of the syllabus—his Black Lives Matter Seminar at NYU in fall 2016—the chant appears as recited in class.35 Members of #SayHerName (the African American Policy Forum) lead students in the chant “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” #BlackLivesMatter protestors frequently use the chant in marches, and #SayHerName asks students to repeat their cries in a call-and-response format with deep roots in Black culture in the United States and beyond that illustrates the Black feminist importance of dialogue (Hill Collins [1990] 2000, 261). Placed ecologically alongside not only Garza’s text but those written by Angela Davis, Lorde, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and so forth, Shakur’s text within the syllabus gives evidence of the centralized role of radical activist Black women—who adopt resistant intersectional Black feminist frameworks—in the production/negotiation of Blackness post-Ferguson. When their texts are mobilized in a classroom and verbalized in the streets as protest cries, Black women’s voices interrupt the racist heteropatriarchy that fuels the destruction of Black communities in the United States. Those cries also (em)body feelings of Blackness, operationalizing a collective “we” (as in Shakur’s [1973] chant) deeply entrenched in an ancestry of radical Black women’s agency.

Lamar’s (2015a) track might seem bereft of such Black women’s voices as it adopts the traditionally urbanized, masculinized Black frameworks of the rap genre. Black women remain markedly absent in its music video’s (Lamar 2015c) scenes of euphoria and elsewhere. They are palpably and unsettlingly missing. The character of Lamar’s mother only shows up in the lyrics (2015a) in relation to his pronouncedly toxic gendered/sexualized masculinities. Immediately following lines about gratuitous enjoyment of prescription drugs, women’s bodies, and money in the song’s first verse, the speaker sends a message of love to his mother while affirming his penchant for the former. Lamar seems cognizant of how such a lifestyle might be self-destructive, apart from his back and forth with the materialist temptations of “Lucy” (who seems to be a stand-in for Lucifer—perhaps whiteness?). He highlights an awareness of his behavior four lines later in imploring his audience to send a message to the broader public of his self-defeat, possible madness, and succumbing to excess. The critique of wokeness mentioned earlier seems to be functional in this verse as well, though in this occurrence it works in acknowledging Lamar’s concession to capitalistic heteropatriarchal “vices” and struggling to remove himself from them. Problematically, that relenting disables the speaker, as he’s gone “cray,” though it does intimate some relationship between the dis/abled Black body and these vices, providing gaps in which we might seek meaning, however fraught. His mother, nevertheless, seemingly represents the measure against which he positions those vices: his mother’s love reminds him that his lust for prescription drugs and “pretty pussy” is ultimately self-destructive, while presenting rifts in the sexualization, gendering, and commodification of (Black) women. His mother’s character perhaps motivates the statement on previous collective trauma, downtrodden-ness, and the sense of being lost in the track’s pre-hook (that the chorus seeks to alleviate). Again, the dynamic push/pull of going/being appears relevant here—Lamar may desire a raging against such nadirs, against an object-beingness in engaging hypercapitalism—but that spectrum comes to our attention after this passing reference to Lamar’s affect regarding his mother. Black women’s roles, then, on the surface are minimized, but Black women’s gendered/sexualized agencies appear to troublingly motivate Lamar’s “anthem”—as object rather than subject.

Moreover, a Black woman’s voice appears early in—and arguably central to—Lamar’s track, through Lamar’s signifyin’ first line. The song opens by riffing off of Alice Walker’s character Sofia in The Color Purple. Sofia tells Celie (her mother-in-law and narrator), “All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my uncles. A girl child ain’t safe in a family of men” in response to Celie’s advice to Sofia’s husband to beat Sophia when defiant (1982, 38). Sofia explains that she’s had to fight numerous men in her life (her father, uncles, brothers) but never thought she’d need to in her own home (one in which she seeks to hold some sociopolitical power). Sofia’s outspokenness in the book stands against violence being perpetrated domestically (and arguably systematically) against Black women by capitalist heteropatriarchy. In the related film, Oprah Winfrey delivers the line as Sofia (Spielberg 1985). Through Alice Walker, Sofia, and Winfrey, Lamar (2015a) is signifyin’ resistance to the white heteropatriarchy in his opening line, though Lamar’s masculinist discourse reframes that resistance: “nigga” immediately follows the pronouncement. Through signifyin(g), the line “functions as a metaphor for formal revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-American literary tradition” that explores the gap between literal and figurative uses of words or phrases for meaning production (Gates 1989, xxi). That “intertextuality” ecologically aligns the track’s speaker (in 2015 post-Ferguson United States) with a fictional Black woman’s rhetoric of noncompliance with her social position with/in a Black Southern US low-income household in the 1930s, which again plays into the double-consciousness of moving away from one’s position in an oppressive system, while standing “alright” in defiance. While Lamar (2015a) does not manifestly pursue Garza’s (2014) call for historicizing, acknowledging, and making visible Black women’s work, through his metaphor the intersections between his experiences and Sofia’s fracture the making of Blackness. The metaphor, I admit, remains troubling. By situating it in relation to oppressive Black masculinity quite conscious of the dynamics of capitalist exploitation—in the first verse’s collapsing of indulgence in women’s bodies and money in the speaker’s salacious acme (Lamar 2015a)—we find that Walker’s/Sofia’s Black feminist declaration against physical violence can be muffled in service of the very frameworks it protests. But that fracturing also illuminates a self-referential (potentially self-reflexive) history-building that seemingly co-constitutes the spaces of critical memory for Blackness, particularly here in relation to the work/resistance of race-radical Black women. Fracturing possibilities through inter(con)textual reading, we note, open up multiple avenues for Black rhetoricity.

“By sharing where it comes from”36: Fracturing Historicity

A major point of encounter across the three literacy events arises from a focus on the historical. Garza’s (2014) text, perhaps more than both others, frames itself in and resists the whitened, masculinized genre of history, as “Herstory,” speaking not simply to events that occur—like the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown—but around epistemological notions that underline the historicity of the #BlackLivesMatter movement’s ethos. Additionally, it continues in the tradition of Lorde, who pushes against white feminist “assimilation into a western european [sic] herstory” (1984, 69), highlighting creative possibilities for social change in difference to lift up Black feminist herstories as necessary/legitimate. Garza (2014) writes in the lineage of the Combahee River Collective, who, according to cofounder Demita Frazier, view the genre as moving beyond manifesto. Frazier explains that “in publishing the [Combahee River Collective] statement and then continuing to remain unapologetic Black feminists over time despite everything just really tells the story . . . speaks the truth about the message that we were choosing to put out” ([1977] 2017, 131–132). Herstory writes and extends beyond that act through practical performance. The fracturing genre evolves through praxis by meaning-making in the Black feminist everyday to cycle back in the potentially fracturing present through the wake of Black being.

Garza’s (2014) contextualization of Shakur, for example, calls attention to not only a herstorical figure’s significance but also a powerful prevailing affect intrinsic to the thrust of the #BlackLivesMatter cause. Garza uses the example of Shakur’s (1973) message to demonstrate a resistance against appropriative uses of the movement’s meme/moniker—particularly as the work of Black queer women—contending that to “promote it as if it has no history of its own such actions are problematic” (Garza 2014). Similarly, Roberts (2016) begins his syllabus through historical framing. Its first “essential question” in the initial week of the course is “What is the history of the Black Lives Matter movement?” But Roberts does not only employ this frame for approaching the course matter; her/his/story runs through it. Later in the semester, in week 8 centering on “Legacies of Rebellion,” the unit on “Black Lives Matter’s Protest Populism” asks that students “pay attention to the vital role that commercial artists have historically played in amplifying the concerns of black freedom movements” (emphasis mine), while the legacy/background of the prison industrial complex remains key to the course’s approach to its examination. Throughout both the syllabus and Garza’s (2014) “Herstory,” her/his/story serves the dual function of illuminating contemporary oppressions and activist sentiments while mobilizing the ongoing production/negotiation of relational meanings—as #BlackLivesMatter operates with an astute awareness of how it works in its ongoing her/his/stories.

Like Garza and Roberts, Lamar (2015a) proclaims the importance of past wrongs and resistance to current injustices in his pre-hook. The rapper goes on to place that line within an ecology that works to highlight being downtrodden alongside feelings of self-conscious insecurity in being lost in the (white) world. We re/turn again to the notion of movement, of going somewhere beyond the stasis of (gendered) self-doubt. By the end of the pre-hook, we arrive at / circle back to the track’s chorus, vitally framed with the conjunction “but” that indicates how its gut feeling might interrupt those histories of insecurity. The expressed hatred for police in the pre-hook underscores the criminal justice system’s role in that past, as Roberts (2016) likewise spotlights with his three-week-long unit on the histories/cultures of the US prison matrix. Garza’s (2014) “Herstory” appropriately speaks to the roles police brutality and white vigilantism play early on in the text. Lamar’s (2015a) “hate,” however, signals an affective position in relation to those powers, highlighting the purposes emotion holds in Black relationships, particularly urban Black masculinist relationships, with US institutional power. With the track’s opening reference to Walker (1982), Lamar (2015a) rallies Sofia’s histories of challenging abuse by the heteropatriarchy, while changing Walker’s (1982) character’s “had” to present tense. While problematic, Lamar’s (2015a) signifyin’ move to make present Sofia’s defiance to physical/sexual abuse in his first line fractures meanings of Blackness through the latter’s cry illustrating how in Black temporality “everything is now. It is all now” (Morrison 1987, 198). But we should mind the trauma of the fracture, of incorporating Black women’s (em)bodied resistance to oppressive power structures located in their positions as relative to urbanized Black masculinity, where an appeal to a commonplace Blackness might possibly erase Black women’s work. The potentials of re/turning to a past that is now through inter(con)textual reading (in this case through signifyin’) must be navigated with a critical memory if our projects mean to work against hegemony. Across and between these rhetorical encounters, history therefore becomes wrapped up in both affect, agential impetus, and pedagogical exigence with propelling immediacy, a present in a past tense and vice versa.

“In cages in this country”: Blackness and the (School to) Prison Industrial Complex37

All three of these literacy events highlight the United States’ oppressive prison industrial matrix. That system not only renders Black bodies disposable in relation to state power but also works to create a culture that filters in/to schools, neighborhoods, and ways of non/being. Roberts (2016) raises this issue as the first of the four “phenomena” set in relation to the #BlackLivesMatter movement in his course objectives. The syllabus mobilizes this particular phenomenon most explicitly for three weeks nearing the end of its span, following a unit on “Legacies of Rebellion.” Placing this issue in close relation to histories of resistance allows for a long-view approach to the prison complex’s relation to other systems of control that have sought to hold Black bodies (materially and culturally) captive in and beyond the era of chattel slavery. Roberts sets in motion three major texts: Alexander’s (2010) The New Jim Crow, journalist Shaun King’s (2016) twenty-five-part series on police brutality in the United States, and Angela Davis’s (2004) Are Prisons Obsolete? The syllabus (Roberts 2016) also contains a short video on Shaun King’s violent experience endured in high school in rural Kentucky—an experience that marked for him his Blackness in the racial schematics of the United States. Though that experience does not directly deal with the prison system or even the militarization of schools, its fracture allows for possible generative meaning creation/negotiation in #BlackLivesMatter’s deep ecology. King explains that though not called a “segregated high school” outright, there was an “agricultural wing” of his school that was effectively whites-only. We might surmise that with such cordoned-off areas in a “public” place, whiteness functioned to set that space apart and not for Blacks, to racially “citizen” it as white. This meant that Black students were contained in other spaces—perhaps forcibly so—reenacting Jim Crow logistics that the prison system now animates, policed by culture. King then tells of being jumped by a group of white students and beaten so badly that he sustains multiple spinal surgeries as a result. Roberts’s positioning of this video in the same ecological space as texts that interrogate the culture of Black imprisonment suggests that other institutions beyond that prison system operate along co-constitutive lines. When educational spaces coexist as carceral spaces that racially mark and de-citizen Black folk, how do such locations work to shape/produce/negotiate meanings of Blackness in the United States? That white students felt the need to police King’s Blackness to the point of his near literal death illustrates the degree to which Blackness on its own accord stays set against/outside the “law” in the United States and remains surveilled as such, re/turning us far deeper into history than Jim Crow. Relatedly, Garza’s (2014) “Herstory” critiques the prison complex in two ways that underline resistance to both the enculturation of its antiBlack philosophy and material imprisonment itself.

Garza spotlights the #BlackLivesMatter movement’s antiprison stance in these ways on separate occasions in her “Herstory.” First, when asked by another organization if they could incorporate “Black Lives Matter” into one of its campaigns, the #BlackLivesMatter movement declared that “as a team, we preferred that we not use the meme to celebrate the imprisonment of any individual.” Though the requesting organization went ahead and used #BlackLivesMatter material in its campaign anyway, Garza’s opposition to “[applauding] incarceration” suggests that even indirect associations with potential consequences of imprisonment are anti-#BlackLivesMatter. Garza proceeds to pronounce the movement’s stance in relation to Black bodies legally en/slaved (or de-citizened) by the state. #BlackLivesMatter, Garza declares, “is an acknowledgment that 1 million Black people are locked in cages in this country—one half of all people in prisons or jails—is an act of state violence.” This statement asserts the material, racial, and bodily realities of the prison system. It re/turns us to the reality that “US incarceration rates and carceral logics directly emerging from slavery into the present continue to be the signs that make Black bodies” (Sharpe 2016, 75). It underscores what Alexander’s scholarship explicates in Roberts’s syllabus and makes digestible—or perhaps indigestible—the very real implications of systematic oppression of Blackness in the United States: the mechanisms of white capitalist heteropatriarchy subject Blackness to hypercontrolled objected-being.

Reading inter(con)textually Lamar’s 2016 Grammy performance (CBS Television Network 2016) of “Alright” (along with the track “The Blacker the Berry” [Lamar 2015b]) in the same deep ecology as the syllabus affords further meaning-making possibilities for Blackness. Lamar enters the stage in a chain gang of imprisoned Black men, flanked by two prison cells with more locked-up Black males on either side of the stage (CBS Television Network 2016). The lyrics from “The Blacker the Berry” (Lamar 2015b) used to preface the performance of “Alright” very plainly critique white supremacy in the United States, while Lamar’s costume and props specify how that supremacy functions.

Lamar spits to a second-person addressee about their hatred for, and plans to, destroy Black folks and their culture. In the previous line, he situates the politics of recognition alongside gendered, sexualized, (em)bodied meanings of Blackness when he raps about his Black phenotypical features, particularly drawing on the stereotype of Black men as well endowed. Lamar contextualizes Blackness and the imprisonment of Blackness in white culture at the intersections of hatred and destruction, summoning Fanon’s suggestion that in the white male gaze, the Black man becomes a phallic symbol, with racial violence materializing sexual revenge for usurping the ideal of white “infinite virility” ([1952] 2008, 123).

Whereas Garza (2014) uses statistics and a stance on the cultural associations of #BlackLivesMatter to delineate her position on the issue, Lamar (2015b) uses his gendered/sexualized Black body in relation to the instruments of incarceration (chains, cages, jumper uniforms), to show how whiteness by way of the prison industrial complex and its contemporary manifestations of slavery might deliberately destroy his people, fashioning him into “a real killer.” For US broadcast television, “nigga” transfigures to “killer.” In the performance, Lamar therefore almost inverts the white defensiveness operating in the racialization of President Obama’s body to confront directly the institutional oppression of Blackness (CBS Television Network 2016). In the deep ecological spaces between the three texts—between Garza’s (2014) opposition and statistics, between Roberts’s (2016) use of Alexander and Davis and alongside King’s brutal attack in high school—we find means to generatively negotiate/create relational, intersectional Black meaning. The possible interconnectivity between these texts and the others explicitly enfolded with/in them suggest not just one way of being anti–prison system, but various means by which to (em)body/(per)form/demonstrate opposition to that system in relation to concepts of dynamic Blackness—from refusal to being associated with an organization to rhetoricizing the object-beingness Blackness (em)bodies in various gendered, sexualized ways.

On God, and Us: Black Christianity and Heteropatriarchy

But just as what immediately strikes readers of these three literacy events as visible across them, the relation/ships between Blackness and institutional power that seemingly defy inter(con)textual conversation deserve our attention. The relation/ships warrant our attention because material gaps across constellated texts do not equate to the absence of certain possibilities for Black meaning. Lamar’s (2015a) “Alright,” for instance, includes a general engagement with Christian themes in its lyrics, which seemingly does not stretch to the other apposite literacy events. After the opening play on the previously discussed lines from The Color Purple, Lamar writes about difficult periods and drops a biblical reference to Jesus’s hometown.38 Apart from that allusion, the formula that takes us into the chorus seems to put the weight of figuring out how to relate to the pressing issues of being Black in the United States on a higher power.39 Elsewhere, mentions of temptations, encounters with the “preacher’s door,” and exclamations to God—such as the one that follows immediately the mention of Lamar’s love for his mother to gender the spiritual relationship—punctuate the track. Most significant, however, Lamar struggles with “Lucy,” the embodiment of temptation. The very last line of his track’s poem-coda explains that the ubiquitous presence of this figure propelled Lamar to escape seeking reprieving solutions. But does this mean that the Black Christianity that sustains Lamar through the narrative of the lyrics proves insufficient to provide such answers?

Black Christianity seems to represent a core theme in the song, though it does not play a role in the music video (Lamar 2015c) or Grammy performance (CBS Television Network 2016). Its relationship to Lamar’s mother’s love appears to bolster its relevance for the speaker as a source of stability in the running/escape motif apparent through the track (Lamar 2015a). Yet, it remains unclear if the titular affective condition has stopped the running or the “going to” discussed earlier. We might make a conjecture that the faith in a Christian God articulated in the lyrics—especially as a contrast to the devil character, who seems to be the personification of capitalist heterosexual vices—motivates this escape or this “going to.” The search for a state in which one can settle as “okay” parallels with a Christian search for salvation, though not in the sense that salvation will lead to “overcoming” (as in the Civil Rights’ “We Shall Overcome”). Lamar’s lyrics wrestle with Christian faith,40 using it somewhat as a motivation for a continual search for self-acceptance. This one-on-one relation with a Christian God in Lamar’s track seems set apart from institutionalized religion, which potentially escapes critique across these three literacy events.

But Roberts’s (2016) syllabus does bring up Black women’s complex relationship to the Black Christian church, notably in his unit on populist responses to #BlackLivesMatter. In this section, he assigns Beyoncé’s (2016) Lemonade, which contains visual and verbal references to the Black Christian church. One article for that week, Candace Benbow’s (2016) “Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ and Black Christian Women’s Spirituality,” touches on the multifaceted and often contradictory struggles between Black womanhood and the heteropatriarchal Christian church. Benbow argues that having been brought to the church by their mothers, Black women must seek ways to relate to the institution that do not repress their sexuality and render them the passive objects of Black men susceptible to abuse and absolute control in heteropatriarchal frameworks. In articulating her stance, she points to a “Lemonade syllabus” that seeks to affirm Black womanhood and their tools for freedom. Here we might take heed of the role of pedagogical apparatuses (syllabi) play in relation to populist literacy events (Beyoncé’s Lemonade) and the relational meanings they produce/negotiate (articulations of Black women’s gendered and sexualized positions vis-à-vis Christianity) in relation to histories (the Christian church as heteropatriarchal). Benbow ends, “Through ‘Lemonade,’ Beyoncé calls young Black women to reimagine their relationships in intimate and social spaces through constructing a relationship with God that makes self-love primary. Their mothers brought them to the faith. Now it must become their own.” Though this text represents only one blip in the deep ecology of the #BlackLivesMatter syllabus, we can see how it might speak to and, in some ways, disrupt Lamar’s (2015a) gendered and racialized contentions with God, faith, and Blackness. Although similar issues of self-searching and self-acceptance arise in Lamar, Black women’s particular positions as always already having to fight (Walker 1982) (because of the particular intersectional matrixes of their oppression) mean that their relationships with Christian faith involve specific compounded and complex resistances; when, in heteronormative relationships, their husbands become representative of Black Christian authority, how might Black women engage that authority and Blackness, while moving away from systemic oppression?

Garza’s (2014) “Herstory” does not seem to address these kinds of questions, though one might argue that they lack relevance to an explanation of the origins/philosophies of #BlackLivesMatter. But, is the #BlackLivesMatter movement’s rejection of “the hierarchical and hetero-patriarchal politics of respectability” (Ransby 2018, 3), critiqued in Garza’s (2014) “Herstory,” then, a rejection simultaneously of systematic Black Christianity? How can we square the institutional church with one-on-one confrontations with faith present in Lamar’s (2015a) track and in Beyoncé’s (2016) Lemonade (and raised directly by Benbow’s [2016] critique)? Are these personal struggles with Blackness and Christian morals the means by which Black activism circumvents discussion on the role that the Christian church plays in oppression, resistance, or Blackness? Perhaps Garza’s (2014) elision of religion in critiques of US institutions speaks to a move away from involving religion in Black activist work, which caused notable rifts within the Black community during the Civil Rights struggle. Media theorists/rhetoricians Amanda Nell Edgar and Andre E. Johnson analyze #BlackLivesMatter activists’ use of faith, spirituality, and religion, finding that these things led participants to support the secular movement. Participants are not “non-religious” or “antireligious”; the movement’s cofounders claim Christianity in nontraditional ways, and #BlackLivesMatter “has ‘inspired and energized Black Christians’ in Black churches” (Edgar and Johnson 2018, xxii). So, given these dynamics, how do we dis/engage with Black Christian spirituality when populist messages centered on Black resistance, like Lamar’s (2015a) and Beyoncé’s (2016), so clearly make it visible? How do appeals to self rather than system relate to neoliberal conceptions of racial identity that reify the former in service of the latter? Regardless of how we go about attempting to respond to these and other questions, the inter(con)textual reading of rhetorical encounters between these literacy events produce/negotiate them with/in the deep ecology of #BlackLivesMatter. Such reading helps us to not only see connections but also gaps, offering possibilities for meaning to create, fill, and exceed them, or compelling us to seek other texts, subjects, or rhetorical bodies as related foci for analysis. In these ways, Black inter(con)textuality reads/writes Blackness dynamically.

Conclusion: How “everybody gets free”41

So how does an argument for an inter(con)textual approach to deep rhetorical ecologies mark a demonstrative shift from other types of rhetorical analysis and/or meaning-making? How is reading one of these texts in isolation different from reading them with/in a deep ecological framework in which literacy events co-constitute a core focus? What do Black notions of temporality (Baker 1995; Sharpe 2016) in Fanonian fractures reveal for inter(con)textual readings of deep rhetorical ecologies to read otherwise? I contend that because our analysis focuses on relational interconnectedness in communicative and textual spheres, we could approach the literacy events in our primary frame with a sharp Black feminist relational awareness of how they speak to their environments and spaces in/between and across them, how they show the outside-inside-ness of Blackness in white worlds, how they mobilize a para/ontology. That conversation means being open and willing to divert our attentions to material not immediately relevant, pressing, or central and to considering how surrounding texts, meanings, and gaps can be sources for producing/negotiating meaning. Tangents, riffs, sounds from the next room might become drifts to follow in seeking meaning for the spaces in which we stand.

Shakur, for example, might not passingly appear important to populist meanings of #BlackLivesMatter or the conceptions of the post-Ferguson cultural moment, if we listened to Beyoncé’s “Formation” or even Lamar’s “The Blacker the Berry” track, for example. But in considering Shakur’s relevance across these texts, we understand how her work (em)bodies relational race-radical Black activism—significant to conceptions of Blackness post-Ferguson in defiance of white (public and) institutional defensiveness. Shakur’s intertwined relationships with other race-radical Black women like those on Roberts’s (2016) syllabus, and even with Lamar’s (2015a) mention of his Black mother, offer us paths to reading Blackness’ multiplicity (in resistance to state power)—how it fashions and furthers Black meaning-making. By insisting on her/his/(s)toricizing, contextualizing, and demonstrating the importance of such women, this approach demands that reading be ecologically layered—and layered in ways that speak (to) power through a Black feminist relational method.

Inter(con)textual reading responds to the critical need for understanding Black con/texts not as just what is immediately relevant to a Black text’s background and its specific time of production/publication. It summons also in what (wake-)works between them and around them, and in what histories worked with/in them contemporary deep ecologies re/imagine. In reading and producing meaning inter(con)textually, we not only (re)make meaning through a creative, generative process, but we also build upon rhetorical archives that came before us. Doing so means that we don’t only have potentials for dynamic understandings of Blackness in interpersonal communication. We move closer to conceptualizing how Blackness (em)bodies the commodified object-beingness fueling the ever-expanding West, so we might conjure rhetorical technologies to destabilize it.