Hashtags as Digital Counter/Public Commonplaces

Compositionist David Bartholomae’s oft-cited “Inventing the University” explains “a ‘commonplace,’ . . . is a culturally or institutionally authorized concept or statement that carries with it its own necessary elaboration. We all use commonplaces to orient ourselves in the world; they provide a point of reference and a set of ‘prearticulated’ explanations that are readily available to organize and interpret experience” (1986, 7–8). In a student’s essay about an on-the-job experience, Bartholomae, for instance, points to phrases such as “lack of pride,” “no incentive,” and “lazy” as examples of commonplaces that each come with sociocultural associations (8). Students might employ them in writing as points at which they might try to identify with or enter discourse communities. In such attempts, however, such reliance on commonplaces might serve to reify presiding systems of thought that can translate in and beyond the classroom to sustain white heteropatriarchal systemic power. All three of the above examples might advocate for historically scripted and neoliberal understandings of racially marginalized, im/migrant, or disabled peoples’ lack of “American” labor ethics, based on context. Indeed, Bartholomae goes on to explain that “commonplaces are the ‘controlling ideas’ of our composition textbooks, textbooks that not only insist upon a set form for expository writing but a set view of public life” (8). But if antiracist teachers and scholars look to hashtags, can we perhaps re/conceive these tags as commonplaces representing deep ecologies that might push against stasis and hegemonic ideologies in writing/composition classrooms today?

Hashtags, as discursive political networks, can offer entryways, vistas, and easily recognized ways of engaging the world in online communication spaces. According to digital media critics Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess, “as a concept, the hashtag has its genealogy in both [Internet Relay Chat] channels and the Web 2.0 phenomenon of user-generated tagging systems, or ‘folksonomies,’ common across various user-created content platforms by 2007” (Bruns and Burgess 2015, 16). Their sociopolitical exigence has been most studied and evident on the microblogging site Twitter, where they serve as an “indexing system in both the clerical and the semiotic sense” (Bonilla and Rosa 2015, 5). Brock highlights that though originally developed for curational purposes, hashtags have evolved as an expressive tool for contextualization of tweeted content (2012, 534). And while Bruns and Burgess argue that they not only create “ad hoc” but also “calculated” publics because of Twitter’s control and internal filtering of content found via tags (2015, 25), their political and cultural impact via social media cannot be denied. Through their use to snowball social movements in the last decade such as #OccupyWallStreet, #BlackLivesMatter, and #MeToo, some politicized hashtags demonstrate capacities for undercutting their intended neoliberal functioning. Indeed, as Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles’s #HashtagActivism shows, marginalized peoples use hashtags to promote counternarratives, building networks of dissent (S. Jackson, Bailey, and Foucault Welles 2020).

Moreover, hashtags’ archival function on social media networks provide users access to both commonplace points of reference and to opportunities to build ecologically on those points of reference, creating relational meanings with/in that building. Hashtags are, I argue, a “remediated” form of commonplaces and/or commonplace headings. New media theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin explain remediation as the idea that “media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replicating each other” (2000, 55). Commonplaces—and commonplace headings when used as an organizational tool in commonplace books—in their traditional sense represent indexing, controlling ideas that allow users to draw upon established notions of those ideas for ethos. Hashtags, however, not only reproduce that referential affordance/constraint but also allow users to build upon, resist, and create relational and rhetorically deep ecological relationships with other tags and thus other archives. They demonstrate how “remediation always operates under the current cultural assumptions about immediacy and hypermediacy” (21), as they point to themselves as text (immediacy) while also pointing to themselves as other texts (hypermediacy). Hashtags, therefore, operate as hybrids: “text and metatext, information and tag, pragmatic and metapragmatic speech . . . deictic, indexical . . . between textual and chronological” (Rambukkana 2015, 30). Situated within contemporary contexts of their cultural significance in social protest (explained more fully in the next section), hashtags offer avenues through which histories of sociopolitical/intellectual dominance might be undercut for marginalized peoples.

If students understand hashtags for their encultured potentials as these kinds of commonplaces (or commonplace “headings”) in a reconceptualization of particular social media spaces as “remediated” commonplace books in the writing/composition classroom, these tags can afford such writers means to resist dominant ideologies through communal/collective, deep rhetorically ecological frameworks. Preexisting hashtags proffer with their deployment in-built histories of relations, communities of “strangers” made members of such networks via previous use, and cultural signifiers based on (and reflexively built by) the unfolding identities of those strangers. The way in which tags mobilize these series of evolving relations, providing them the prospect to shape public knowledge and the deep ecologies they denote, lies very much in the workings of Black feminist relational discourse.

Positioned with/in such relational frameworks (Hill Collins, Lorde, Wynter, hooks), these tags can propel an everyday critical consciousness that works toward social justice aims, as section 3 of this chapter shows. As Black feminist means of fostering alternative forms of connection, community, and relation to publicly affirm an already-extant awareness (Hill Collins [1990] 2000), the antiracist tag can para/ontologize such moves. These tags hold promises to embody/perform a talking back, a response to multiple oppressions in the face of multiple violences aimed at disrupting hegemonic orders of intellect, epistemologies, and cultures. Such possibilities align with educational philosopher Paolo Freire’s problem-posing critical pedagogy where “through transforming action” new situations might be created for more just futures in the classroom space (1970, 12). By stressing relationality and moving ecological meaning, hashtag composition not only “denies that [beings are] abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world” (12) but also (re)make worlds, inherently stressing opportunities for interconnectivity and collectiveness that align with the African indigenous framework of botho/Ubuntu (Chilisa 2017). As Conley specifically shows, Black feminist hashtags “burst to connect to other stories, events, encounters, and desires, and form new(er) articulations of lived experience” (2017, 30). Using this digital media technology in/outside the classroom might thus show students and publics the sociopolitical impacts inherent in their daily routines of composing in social media spaces.

This study thus responds with recent work in writing studies, such as Paula Rosinski’s (2017), that calls attention to the influence of implementing students’ modes of digital self-sponsored writing into academic writing opportunities in order to destabilize the gap between the writing/composition classroom and out-of-school literacies and contexts. As digital rhetorician Adam Banks highlights, “beyond the tools themselves, meaningful access requires users, individually and collectively, to be able to use, critique, resist, design, and change technologies in ways that are relevant to their lives and needs, rather than those of the corporations who hope to sell them” (2006, 41). Deploying hashtags as an antiracist technology—particularly centered in articulations of Blackness—can re/form the cultural commonplace from its historical underpinnings/applications to provide means to enact that kind of transformative access.

“Common sense ain’t always common”: Decoding Histories of Dominance

Media technologies function with/in their particular histories, cultures, and socialization when employed. Cynthia and Richard Selfe have drawn digital media and writing studies’ attention to these dynamics in their work on the exclusionary consequences of interface design since the mid-90s (Selfe and Selfe 1994). These fields have been well aware that if instructors bring technologies to the writing/composition classroom, they should be cognizant of their politics because even if “technologies are not inherently political, the conditions in which they are created and which they circulate into society are political” (Banks 2006, 23). Black feminist Safiya Umoja Noble’s (2018) Algorithms of Oppression, for instance, spotlights how search engines like Google (our popular, twenty-first-century tool for autodidacticism) fund discrimination, particularly against Black women, under a veil of neutral operation. To more fully contextualize the particular media technologies on which I focus in this chapter, this section works through brief histories of dominance and marginalization in the Western intellectual tradition inherent in the classroom deployment of commonplaces, commonplace books, and hashtags.4 It “decodes” this history through Conley’s Black feminist notion that “decoding as a stance is a practical method for disentangling encounters, identifying dominant modes of knowledge production, and contextualizing the roots of those systems” (2017, 29). Such work is vital if we choose to cut away at those roots. We must remain cognizant of how our sense of what is “common” might not always be universally common. Our understandings of “common sense,” then, cannot be one size fits all.

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Commonplace books have a rich past as a teaching tool in Western philosophy and education. That background comprises commonplace/book usage that generally reinforced culturally dominant systems of thought. The compilation of “common” ideas for intellectual and social use within that tradition can be traced to Greek philosophy: through his 160 commentarii, the elder Pliny dictated excerpts of critical value to his scribes, which the younger Pliny championed as central to the elder’s Natural History (Pliny the Elder [77 AD] 1979). Aristotle explains them as a “stock of arguments to which [a speaker] may turn for a particular need” ([4 BCE] 1932, 154). Roman Stoic Seneca the Younger later frames ideal reading and writing (through borrowings from Horace) with the student as a bee flitting from one source to another, picking what pollen might be sweetest for the production of honey—the former act representing reading, the latter act writing (Seneca [65 AD] 2001). In the early modern period, at the dawn of print technologies, the use of maxims became central to rhetorical exercises in European Latin grammar schools with Erasmus’s mandate based on classical precedent. The philosopher’s De Copia explains that students should

prepare for yourself a sufficient number of headings and arrange them as you please, subdivide them into the appropriate sections, and under each section add your commonplace and maxims; and then whatever you come across in any author, particularly if it is rather striking, you will be able to note down immediately in the proper place, be it an anecdote or a fable or an illustrative example or a strange incident or a metaphor or a simile. This has the double advantage of fixing what you have read more firmly in your mind, and getting you into the habit of using the riches supplied by your reading. (Erasmus [1512] 1978, 302)

The commonplace book embodied such a practice—not only as a tool that proved useful in written and oral composition in the classroom but also as one representative of the physical basis for an individual’s “moral” foundation. That foundation might take effect through the book’s categorized headings, its collected quoted material, and symbiotic relationships between and across quotations and headings. Other prominent early modern European philosophers and pedagogues, Juan Luis Vives and Michel de Montaigne, endorsed these methods as a basis for rhetorical composition and moral grounding. As historians of early modern Europe Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton argue, reading and note-taking in the Western Renaissance moved beyond the passive and cerebral to become the basis for agency (1990, 30). These annotative ideas—a representative basis for a “common” culture and derived primarily from classical and biblical texts—became central not only in the composition/reception of contemporaneous literature but also in legal, political, and economic institutions. The use of commonplaces as linguistic units and more broadly as a basis for and practice of ideology helped to strengthen and disseminate shared cultural values of those in power, regardless of their institutional context.

When commonplace books found themselves versioned in print in various generic forms, that standardization impacted “common” rhetoric/thought beyond the classroom, as classical reception scholar Moss (1996) illustrates in Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. The rise of what we call the humanities saw the common enter educational spaces with the aim of fashioning mass numbers of students into “morally sound” citizens. For centuries, these students, writers, politicians, philosophers, playwrights, and so on, both in Europe and the United States, were almost exclusively white, able-bodied males. And while students were predominantly lower/middle-class white males, because of the nature of material being consumed/(re)produced by these educational processes, what constituted a sense of the common flowed through canonical literature, histories, legal proceedings, and the like, with reinforcing oppressive ideologies perpetuated by church and state. Susan Miller’s (1998) analysis of “common” writing, which includes commonplace books,5 illustrates how early-American white males used these composition spaces to centralize white maleness and gender (and less explicitly racial) hierarchies.6 In European and US society and educational institutions, canons of thought filtered through these writing exercises (both in and outside of schools) to legitimize hegemonic ideologies. Commonplace/book use in curriculum studies and in teaching style remains alive in writing studies entering the twenty-first century, as Dennis Sumara (1996), Lynee Lewis Gaillet’s (1996), and Laura Micciche’s (2004) work shows. And while these canons of intellectual knowledge have begun to be eroded and more radically transformed in the last fifty years or so7—and while rhetoric/communication, writing, and literacy studies as fields have certainly shifted to more socially conscious work in the last thirty years or so8—centuries of ideological dominance and practices that buttress that dominance require extensive undoing in college classrooms.9

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In the latter half of the 2000-aughts and onward, hashtags developed distinct associations with social movements, activism, and racialized discourse communities in social media spaces. While social media has been analyzed and credited with benefiting oppressed peoples in non-Western countries (Howard and Parks 2012; Diamond 2010), the role that hashtags play in spreading awareness of the conditions that these peoples resist has been of particular scholarly interest in US contexts. Specifically, much analytical attention has been paid to the dynamics of hashtag use in resisting racial oppression, particularly in the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Black people, for a number of years, have been shown to make up a disproportional amount of social media’s general and most frequent users. Statistical information from the Pew Research Center from 2011 highlights that “25% of online Blacks used Twitter, compared to 9% of online Whites” (Brock 2012, 529). While more recent data from the same source (Pew Research Center 2018) suggests that more white folk now use Twitter than shown in the earlier study (24% white adults as compared to 26% Black), such information still reveals numbers incommensurate with general US population dynamics. In 2018, a larger percentage of surveyed Black internet-using adults used social media on most social media platforms (Facebook [70%]; Instagram [43%]; LinkedIn [28%]; Twitter [26%]) than survey participants identified with other racial groups.10 Given such demographics, Black folk have established counter/public cultures on social media that demonstrate the effects of these disproportional statistics, most notably Black Twitter—sometimes referred to as “Young Black Twitter” based on the age of users. Black Twitter thus attracts not only widespread popular online and social media attention but also scholarly attention because of its part in viral and activist movements via tags.

Researchers in a range of fields (such as ethnic studies, cultural/linguistic anthropology, media theory, rhetoric/communication studies) have studied #Ferguson, #RaceFail, #AliveWhileBlack, #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, #YouOKSis and, of course, #BlackLivesMatter (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Rambukkana 2015; Prasad 2016; Conley 2017; Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark 2016). Deen Freelon, Charlton D. McIlwain, and Meredith D. Clark in particular, through a 2016 big-data study of #BlackLivesMatter, highlight the explicit public educational capacities of the social movement via its hashtags. Their findings detail that “the primary goals of social media use among [their] interviewees were education, amplification of marginalized voices, and structural police reform” (Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark 2016, 5). Evidence of such “education” of “casual observers” on Twitter came through “expressions of awe and disbelief at the violent police reactions to the Ferguson protests, and conservative admissions of police brutality in the Eric Garner and Walter Scott cases” (5). The study consequently shows the cultural impact and rhetorical efficacy of #BlackLivesMatter in engaging in a kind of freestyle public education project while undertaking its social justice aims. So, while corporate interests might wield these tags and their viral capabilities to assess and exploit market trends, and though the tags and tag data could be used insidiously for surveillance, marginalized groups see/mobilize their prospective subversive possibilities. Links that hashtags offer between the spread of education and Black antiracist efforts align with the Black feminist principle of literacy as the practice of freedom (hooks 1994) as well as the movement’s overtly Black feminist stance on its philosophies outlined in its “Herstory” (Garza 2014).11

Here, I suggest that based on demonstrated usages of racialized hashtags—specifically #BlackLivesMatter—for counter/public education and the above-outlined statistics of heavy social media use by Black folk, rhetoric/communication, writing, and literacy studies scholars might usefully understand hashtagging as a marginalized (out-of-school) literacy. Such a move might reclaim the hashtag commonplace for its subversive potentials—offering a kind of (para/ontological) being through/in the moving rhetorical object. Black cultural inventiveness pervades hashtagging as a literacy practice, underlining the sociopolitical importance of these tags to digital/viral Blackness and contemporary Black protest. In joining with Black social media users in deploying tags that have been encultured in Black protest, non-Black users become part of racialized assemblages co/constituting deep rhetorical ecologies with which they may or may not offer political solidarity—through tag use and beyond—in social media and lived material spaces. Putting tags to Black feminist use—along with and alongside the application of explicitly Black feminist tags—works to “shake loose dominant logics to reveal new(er) relations that sometimes form on the basis of solidarity, sometimes not,” as Conley suggests (2017, 29). Because of potential rhetorical agency in these hashtags and their possible virality, they represent counter/public commonplaces that offer nexuses of exchange allowing for moving aggregations of identity—the distinct promise that engaging in deep ecologies offer.

As Nakamura and Chow-White highlight, “race itself has become a digital medium, a distinctive set of informatics codes, networked mediated narratives, maps, images, visualizations that index identity” (2012, 5). Culturally aware, social-justice-oriented social media users, however, should be mindful of possible appropriative leaps that remain possible with particular tags. We must underline/acknowledge their cultural histories, be mindful of neoliberal engagement, and position ourselves as rhetorical listeners (Ratcliffe 2005) and learners. Hashtags and other online technologies (such as retweeting, reblogging etc.), still, offer distinct possibilities for relational building across inter- and intraracial markers for the prospect of antiracist agency. Despite highlighted constraints, instructors interested in engaging in discussions/practices of online composition, identity, or racialization might recognize benefits in deploying hashtag composition (and the framework of deep ecologies) in twenty-first-century classrooms and in confronting frank discussions of appropriation, oppression, and systemic antiBlackness that might arise in their use.12

To be clear, such discussions need not be always already put in the service of recovering some “humanity” for Black folk, though such avenues for that use certainly exist. Black hashtagging as antiracist rhetoric suggests a process of making, a politics of inventive possibility. While Black media historian Kim Gallon offers that the “‘technology of recovery’ undergirds black digital scholarship”—adding the racial signifier “black” to conceive “black digital humanities” as bringing about “the full humanity of marginalized peoples” through digital means (2016, 42, 44)—this study seeks to generate questions about processes rather than ends. Since hashtags reveal specific potentials to world-make through a paraontology that irreversibly disturbs ontology’s time and place (Moten 2013, 739) while still operating as ontologized rhetorical objects (thus opening spaces for para/ontology), they allow us to consider the very question of the human vis-à-vis Blackness. As intimated earlier, the spaces in which conditions arise for these tags and their consequent imaginaries co-constitute their meanings and therefore deserve critical attention.

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Tumblr, like Twitter, is a microblogging site; however, it does not enforce character limits on the lengths of alphabetic posts.13 Founded in 2007, as of June 2020 it boasts 501.4 million blogs, with 14.6 million daily posts. Forty-two percent of its traffic is based in the United States (Tumblr.com 2020). Users may share posts in a variety of formats: text, audio, video, and hyperlinks. The main hub of a user’s Tumblr blog, called the “Dashboard,” features a standardized design layout and a stream of content from blogs that specific user “follows.” A blogger can choose from a variety of themes and settings to set up their blog space, however, where different types of posts might be arranged side by side, vertically, or in other spatial arrangements—not always chronologically. Users have the option of adding as many hashtags as they would like to individual posts.

In humanities professor Alan Jacobs’s (2012) piece in the Atlantic, he draws a comparison between Tumblr blogs and commonplace books citing their scrapbook-like qualities as users cull material from numerous sources to constitute their pages.14 Jacobs does not mention how hashtags might act as commonplace headings for their indexing capabilities in his comparison, though such explanation does further illustrate them. Feminist and textile historian Amanda Grace Sikarskie explains that though Tumblr can be isolating for new bloggers, hashtags serve as a “primary means” by which users “connect with other bloggers of like interests and begin to build a sense of community within the site,” in her analysis of Tumblr quilting communities (2015, 170). Indeed, according to New York Times journalist Valeriya Safronova (2014), while users of Facebook or Twitter tend to primarily engage with people they know in-person, Tumblr users connect via interests and themes. The culture of Tumblr, consequently, emphasizes tag use as means to connect, making it a suitable environment for students to experiment with and learn the various dynamics of hashtag composition as commonplacing.

That sense of community that Sikarskie (2015) mentions remains pivotal in the “social-justice halls of Tumblr . . . dominated by users in their teens, 20s and early 30s” (Safronova 2014). While Twitter receives much scholarly and public attention for its activist communities, digital protest on Tumblr responds similarly to Twitter during events involving public racial injustice. As Liba Rubenstein, director of social impact and public policy at Tumblr, shares, the site experienced “‘extreme peaks’ in the use of the ‘social justice’ and ‘black lives matter’ tags” after the ruling on the Eric Garner case (Safronova 2014). Writing studies scholar Meghan McGuire likewise describes that “communities involved with issues of race and LGBT use Tumblr as a space for discussion” with less worry about trolling backlash (2017, 120).15 Yet while Twitter activism has been heavily researched, scholarly work on Tumblr tends to engage with fan communities and their identity politics (see Sikarskie 2015; Zekany 2017). This chapter attempts to help fill that gap in research, showing prospects inherent in doing such work in and on Tumblr’s discursive material and rhetorical spaces.

Hashtags, Anti/Racism, and “Tumblr as Commonplace Book”

The English department’s second-year writing course at MwSU fulfills two general education requirements: one in “Writing and Communication” and the other in “Social Diversity in the United States.”16 The latter, importantly, asks students to “describe and evaluate the roles of such categories as race, gender and sexuality, disability, class, ethnicity, and religion in the pluralistic institutions and cultures of the United States” and that they “recognize the role of social diversity in shaping their own attitudes and values regarding appreciation, tolerance, and equality of others.” Ahmed argues that diversity language in “statements of commitment are non-performative: they do not bring about the effects they name” for historically white institutions (2012, 17). I fully agree with this sentiment but want to push at such statements for purposes not for “appreciation, tolerance, and equality of others” but to highlight antiBlack racism, to engage in viral Blackness, and to employ Black annotation in an effort to center Blackness for subversion.

“Appreciation” of difference requires recognition of the worth of “others”: a request by those in power to assign such value means an enfolding in the genres of Western Man—the kind of enfolding that Sylvia Wynter presses us to avoid (1994a, 10). Wynter’s “A Black Studies Manifesto” articulates clearly that operating in terms of such an order, where difference measures in relation to Western bourgeois man, means “our continued complicity with its truths of power—whether in its mainstream form or in the now proposed ‘multicultural’ variants” (7). The Black feminist calls for epistemic rupture through Black studies. Such rupture means that we cannot continue to “define our liberation in terms of a canon or multiculturalization of knowledge,” which “simply serves to continue our destruction as a population group” (9). Hashtags as Black rhetoric facilitate, mark, and open space for such epistemic rupture; they cull a place and a no place, a para/ontological thought and a no thought always evolving. Greene Wade (2017) also emphasizes how viral Blackness moves against such acquiescence. In its spread, worlds make possible alternative ways of non/being. Hashtags in this way may not just serve as objects of study but as forms of rhetorical performance that can make alternate realities through the entangled narratives that they permeate.

“Tolerance,” the endurance, allowance, willingness to put up with difference will not stop antiBlackness. The mere existence of different beings alongside those who carry histories of commodifying, manipulating, and exploiting those different beings by creating the very controlling categories of difference offer Black folk only more of the same. “Equality” suggests even playing fields / conditions exist; they do not. Rights, status, and opportunities always already operate with/in disproportionate logics in the Western world and can serve to lionize oppressive respectability politics. The Civil Rights movement in the United States offers an easy example of how notions/goals of equality can serve such means. So even if such diversity language did, in fact, perform to bring about intended impacts, pursuing them sacrifices precious space, time, and energy to work/live otherwise.

In light of these institutional aims, the hashtagging assignment could perhaps be understood “as theft, a criminal act” (Harney and Moten 2013, 28), though a very public one. While it does not exemplify what interdisciplinary scholar Stefano Harney and Black studies philosopher Fred Moten call Black “fugitive study” in “the undercommons of the university,” it sheepishly enacts some of their study’s qualities. For Harney and Moten, fugitive study steals resources from the university to create subversive collectives/thought-spaces (undercommons) that harness unprofessionalization, that work against neoliberal/bourgeois individualism. The scholars explain that “to enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons” (28). Entering the deep ecologies of Tumblr, of protest tags related to #BlackLivesMatter, of the historically white classroom, of the temporal/sociocultural turn pre- and postdating the election of Donald Trump, and of those in between means to enter a different kind of commons, yet one might still endeavor with/in them to steal back space/s from the white university. Paradoxically positioned by the institution to engage in diversity and race talk, I take these opportunities with the specialized theme of the course, centering Black antiracism through the topic “Modes of Resistance.” Students read primary and secondary material authored predominantly by Black writers, scholars, poets, musical artists, activists, filmmakers, and podcasters. The final line of our course theme description reminds participants that “our readings will acknowledge that our contemporary understandings of American resistance narratives both pre- and post-Ferguson have come to be shaped by the #BlackLivesMatter movement.” Through this sentiment, I hope to orient students via the movement, informed heavily by Black feminist politics, so that our analyses/reading/writing of texts interrogate inter/relations between those texts and the post-Ferguson cultural moment.17

The “Tumblr as Commonplace Book” assignment functions as a semester-long project that combines digital media remix composition, critical thinking, and analytical writing through the use of hashtags and “reblogging.”18 On the second day of class I do a short demo on setting up a Tumblr blog, working through the site’s privacy policy before highlighting the following assignment guidelines:

1. 1. Students are asked to set up a Tumblr blog (either set to public or private) at www.tumblr.com.19 They then share their blog’s URL on the Discussion Activity board on [MwSU’s online learning management system] with fellow students. Students should “follow” their classmates’ blogs and the instructor’s blog.
2. 2. For every text discussed in class (provided on MwSU’s online learning management system), students should pick their favorite line, image, sentences, lyrics, and so forth, and post quoted material onto their Tumblr page before we read that text in class. For alphabetic material, they should quote directly. For images, they should screenshot.20 For multimodal texts, they can choose either. In either case, they should name the source and the author in their posts.
3. 3. Along with the quotations or screenshots posted, students should use a series of hashtags to describe and analyze each text.
4. 4. On days when “Reblogs” are due, students should locate a peer’s post that they find interesting and reblog it to their own blogs with two to three sentences of explanation as to why they found it interesting. Reblogged posts can use hashtags as well.
5. 5. As indicated on the syllabus, the Tumblr blog will be examined twice during the semester for completion and adherence to post format (as opposed to content).

The central purposes of this project are

1. 1. To get students to begin analyzing what they find most interesting in a text through hashtagging: with those details categorized/described as concise, digestible concepts, each demonstrating an interpretation of that text and allowing for further readings with conjunctional hashtags
2. 2. To use hashtags for practical composition and research purposes: as the basis for in class discussion, for foreseeing and preparing for difficult and controversial topics, for terms in library searches; in coming up with research proposals and identifying topics and artifacts of interest to each particular student, and as a repository of info for their final papers
3. 3. To engage students with ongoing critical discussions of hashtags as activism, such as debates on the #BlackLivesMatter, #Ferguson, and #[X]SoWhite movements, reflected on the course syllabus in articles by Jones, Faithful, and Bonilla & Rosa
4. 4. To create a digital classroom where students interact with their peers without instructor input

This project aims to conceptualize hashtags as a tool for analysis, research, and curation, as well as to involve participants in understanding how tags work as a form of activism, especially for marginalized communities. Students might grasp how the everyday utilization of popular social media websites involves reading/writing/thinking analytically that can create, spur, and effect material change, illustrating a student/writer’s sociopolitical agency realized through composition and critical thinking. They could also begin to understand the classroom space—both in-person and online—as a communal one, in which all members might choose to play a role in Black activism, solidarity, and actively pursue social justice.

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I read a cross-section of student hashtags in two sections of this second-year writing course, which I taught in the autumn 2016 and spring 2017 semesters (from August 2016 to May 2017). The racial make-up of my classrooms across both semesters was as follows: 30 students identified as white; 6 students identified as non-Black students of color’ 5 students identified as Black.21 For the purposes of this analysis, I collected and combed through 41 Tumblr blogs (21 from the autumn semester, 20 from the spring semester), all set to “public,” looking specifically for instances where students initiate the kinds of relational, ecological reading of racialized texts that the assignment encourages. Such instances might be consistent use of the same tag across one student blog; deployments of already existing popular hashtags (such as #Ferguson), along with inventive or unconventional tags on the same post; tags that riff on preexisting/well-known ones (such as #allblacklivesmatter); tags that cut across multiple student blogs; and tags employed with multiple different associated primary text material. While I focus on examples of deep ecological composition, my emphasis does not aim to center notions of “success” at fulfilling the assignment’s goals; rather, I illustrate students’ pursuing performance/making of alternate meanings of Blackness that make them counter/public pedagogues.

Creating/Negotiating Relational Meaning

#blacklivesmatter #ferguson #police #policebrutality #innocent #unnecessaryforce #racism

#community #together #racism #change #revolution #socialmedia #equality #blacklivesmatter

Because hashtags build meaning-making connections between texts, while being texts themselves, understanding them as reading/writing in the writing/composition classroom reveals possibilities to create relational meaning. These relations can develop between texts in an individual student’s blog, as well as with other students’ posts in our online classroom community, along with communities that already exist on Tumblr who deploy the tags a particular poster might pick up. These connections (and fractures between them) provide evidence of the deep rhetorically ecological prospects that hashtags promote in producing and navigating meaning across people, cultures, contexts, histories, associations, and spaces. Take student blog tcb37, for example. The student uses #blacklivesmatter a number of times throughout the semester to demonstrate, create, and negotiate dynamic meanings of the phrase (and by extension the movement) within the context of their digital commonplace book.

With a highly publicized photograph taken by Scott Olson (2014) from the Ferguson Uprising depicting a Black dreadlocked person with hands up being approached by numerous police officers in military riot gear, the student uses #blacklivesmatter, #ferguson, #police, #policebrutality, #innocent, #unnecessaryforce, #racism. They also employ #blacklivesmatter to analyze a line from an online article by Feminista Jones (2013) on Twitter as a modern-day underground railroad for activism. With the movement’s hashtag in the second instance, tcb37 uses #community, #together, #racism, #change, #revolution, #socialmedia, and #equality. Using #blacklivesmatter in each case, the student creates a multitude of active, fluid connections: between police brutality and community, between ideas about unnecessary force and social media, between Ferguson and ideas of revolution. These connections spur discursive relationships that allow for further meaning-making and promote class discussion for me as an instructor f/or further artifact analysis by students. Questions easily arise from these juxtapositions; for instance: What role does police brutality play in preexisting Black communities or in forming new (versions of) community? How has the use of unnecessary force impacted the cultures of social media spaces? How might the events of the Ferguson Uprising be or not be considered a “revolution” in US racial politics? These fracturing questions highlight—through an image of social death and an article actively searching for metaphorical connections between slave escape and social media—possibilities for “imagining that the work of Black annotation” can uncover “a counter to abandonment, another effort to try to look, to try to really see” (Sharpe 2016, 117). Functioning in fractures between contextuality and chronology (Benovitz 2010, 124), these readings/meanings cut across temporalities/spatialities, operating as points of connectivity and disjuncture amidst textual artifacts, their associations, and the commonplaces used to index them.

#racism #policebrutality #evidence #injustice #blacklivesmatter #institutionalizedracism

Feb 14th, 2017

Tcb37 Lorde “Power” Post

In another example from tcb37, the student again deploys #blacklivesmatter, but on an excerpt from the Lorde poem “Power” (1974). With the lines “I didn’t notice the size nor nothing else / only the color. And / there are tapes to prove that, too,” they deploy #racism, #policebrutality, #evidence, #injustice, #institutionalizedracism. These tags form further deep rhetorically ecological connections between notions of what counts as evidence in legal cases that involve racialized instances of police killings of Black folks, while also highlighting and interrogating the function of institutions in such incidents. The hashtags also link a poem from 1974 about the 1973 killing of a ten-year-old Black child with the events of Ferguson in 2014 through the tags #racism and #policebrutality. That historical association pivotally opens space for the student (or other students or public visitors) to understand the genealogies of oppression that exist in chronologically disparate incidents of police brutality—a patterning kind of analysis that can inform future rhetorical engagements with these topics in this classroom and elsewhere. The connections also offer insight into anti/Blackness as a/temporal and legalized injustice through cross-contextual bonds. Even within the one blog, these relational meanings help to facilitate understandings of Black resistance not tied to singular historical events, but building through a multitude of individuals, spaces, events, and temporalities. The use of hashtag composition offers avenues for fostering such dynamic reading/writing/thinking.

“However, in contrast to this body of literature whose celebration of women’s power is often accompanied by a lack of attention to the importance of power as domination, Black women’s experiences as mothers, community other mothers, educators, church leaders, labor union center-women, and community leaders seem to suggest that power as energy can be fostered by creative acts of resistance.”

Patricia Hill Collins, “Black Feminist Thought in the Matrix of Domination” ([1990] 2000)

#afrocentricfeminism #knowledgeispower #oppression #empowered #community #individualbiography #resistdomination #suppressed

1 note Feb 7th, 2017

Tcb22 Hill Collins Post

Another blogger in this course section of second-year writing, on their page, tcb22, uses #community on one of their posts, creating a connection with tcb37 across blogs within the digital space of our Tumblr class. Tcb22 turns to the tag with a quotation from Patricia Hill Collins’s ([1990] 2000) Black Feminist Thought on how Black women’s various roles in labor unions, churches, and their communities demonstrate how creative/concatenated resistance can undercut a lack of focus on the ways that domination is related to power. The post uses #afrocentricfeminism, #knowledgeispower, #oppression, #empowered, #individualbiography, #resistdomination, and #suppressed, along with #community. In establishing relationships between an academic/theoretical text by a Black feminist thinker with a popular online article about the possibilities for coalition on Twitter through the common #community, the hashtag offers students and Tumblr’s general publics windows to notice, analyze, or even question how academic philosophy relates to social media activism. It also ties scholarly Black feminist thought with digital content produced by a Black feminist activist working through different communities toward social justice through Black resistance. From tcb22, #knowledgeispower becomes linked with #socialmedia via #community, relaying connective meaning through these deep ecologically implicated ideas. #community also links #individualbiography with knowledge-making, agency, and resistance, culturing those ties with #afrocentricfeminism while connecting to tcb37’s notions of coalition-building through #change and togetherness (through #together in tcb37’s Jones Post). For students and Tumblr’s publics, the associations between these concepts can stimulate even more meaning-making in further thinking through the bridges between how communal knowledge on social media relates to “power” (systemic or otherwise).

In Tumblr’s digital spaces, hashtags additionally present students with venues to make meaning in relation to other blogs not associated with the second-year writing course and their classmates. That affordance means that their reading/writing/thinking enters and shapes counter/public deep rhetorical ecologies, inherently dissolving the typical insiderness of classroom writing / composition. Because of the broad activist use of Tumblr, tags like #community, #oppression, #policebrutality, and #racism provide occasions for public meaning-making. #equality for instance, at the time of my first writing of this chapter, references blogs such as feimineach’s (2018), and its article on institutionalizing gender budgeting; a post by pro-Black user i-will-personally-eat-yourhand (2018) and their call for more Asian representation in Western media; and news about transgender representation at a recent award show by user reginad1984 (2018). Because of the ephemeral nature of social media spaces, such examples have surely already changed, but encultured in a writing/composition classroom that centers (viral) Blackness, Black annotation, Black artifacts, antiracist pedagogies, and conversations about racialized politics, the tags students produce will likely engender such results beyond any particular temporal/spatial moment.

In composing hashtags, students thus open up their classroom education to a host of digital, activist, relational possibilities beyond the artifacts they read/write/analyze. McGuire’s study on her students’ application of Tumblr in a professional writing course similarly argues that “having access to a space where students can observe a diverse group of voices talking about diverse issues in ways they may have not seen before can be critical to helping students understand . . . how the rhetorical situation of communication on social media can be much larger than their immediate surroundings and can contribute to much larger cultural conversations” (2017, 120). The deep rhetorically ecological meanings that tags create/negotiate in such spaces suggest that students can engage in a mode of meaning-making that enacts/mobilizes these broader possibilities of digital activism, viral Blackness, and Black annotation.

“Tag it and bag it”: Conceptualizing Key Terms

#domination #racism #feminism #sexism

#feminism #powerful #successfulwomen

#powerfulwomen #independent #feminism

#feminism #powerfulwomen #equality

#feminism #sexism #equality

Hashtag composition also provides means by which participants might understand broader evolving terms, philosophies, and concepts in antiracist work. While most students bring to the writing classroom ideas about what “racism,” “equity,” or even “neoliberalism” mean, hashtag use allows students to actively pursue the practice of and engagement in meaning-making. For instance, a general understanding at the beginning of the semester often held by students about “feminism” is that it translates to women and men having “equal” opportunities. As students deploy the tag throughout the course in hashtag compositions, a multiplicity of relations arises, which then broadens and concatenates interpretations of the term. These classroom activities echo the work of viral Black feminist tags like Mikki Kendall’s #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, which continue fracturing work of activists like Lorde in challenging problematic theories/practices of “white feminism,” while “actively redefining the function of the hashtag beyond means of tracking and archiving data” (Conley 2017, 26).

On tcb20, one student deploys #feminism across five texts they read during the spring 2017 semester. These include theory by Patricia Hill Collins ([1990] 2000), lyrics by Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj (2014), lyrics from another Beyoncé track (2016) and by Nicki Minaj (2014), and poetry by Korean American queer writer Franny Choi (2014). Along with lyrics focused on ostentatious displays of wealth, the student uses #powerful, #powerfulwomen, and #successfulwomen. Although these tags play into neoliberal notions of economic gain as “success,” other hashtags used in conjunction with #feminism undercut these ideas. #sexism links Choi’s (2014) poem about being racially catcalled with a quote from Hill Collins (1990) about subjugated knowledges and their suppression by dominant groups. Connecting a poem that stands in defiance of sexual harassment with theorization about Black feminist thought systems suggests potentials to understand spaces between abstractions about feminisms as ideologies and everyday manifestations of woman of color resistance, all while they also engage public definition of the terms for resistant purposes.

“Momma taught me good home training

My Daddy taught me how to love my haters

My sister taught me I should speak my mind

My man made me feel so God damn fine”

“Flawless (remix),” Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj

In order for men and women to ever be equal, feminism cannot just be a movement only supported by women. Feminism and confidence are learned from a young age from the most important people in a women’s [sic] life, meaning men and family members also need to recognize equality and never make any women [sic] feel like she isn’t worthy. Feminism starts and ends with the daughters, mothers, sisters, girlfriends and wives in the world.

#wokeuplikethis #flawless #support #feminism

Sep 20th, 2016

Tcb05 Beyoncé Post

Tcb05’s blog uses #feminism alongside #wokeuplikethis, #support, and #flawless to read the following lines of lyrics from Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj’s (2014) “Flawless (Remix)”: “Momma taught me good home training / My Daddy taught me how to love my haters / My sister taught me I should speak my mind / My man made me feel so God damn fine.” They notably cull two of their tags from other (not quoted) lyrics of the track (#wokeuplikethis and #flawless), which represent versions of already-existing popular hashtags—and thus related deep rhetorical ecologies—that social media users typically attach to body-positive selfies (sometimes as feminist resistance to oppressive/normative beauty standards). Those links spotlight the interconnected Black feminist message of such rhetorical ecologies. Whereas tcb20 negotiates the meanings of feminism with power through #sexism, #powerfulwomen, and #successfulwomen, tcb05 contextualizes feminism with practical application—with ideas about self-confidence and the function of communal support.

Tcb05 also blurbs their own prose response to emphasize the support of allies as crucial to the aims of feminism. The poster’s supplemental response demonstrates their interpretation of the material while acting as their own pedagogical gesture—destabilizing student/teacher boundaries of normative classroom spaces. Additionally, putting the connections made via #feminism on tcb05 in conversation with tcb20’s focus on resisting #sexism by bringing awareness to catcalling, these hashtags make visible the potential connective spaces between their respective interpretations; those links put forward understandings of feminist resistance as self-confidence and allied support. But these connective spaces continue to evolve with further iterations of any of these hashtags and future tags associated with them and so on. Indeed, “hashtags push the boundaries of specific discourses. They expand the space of discourse along the lines that they simultaneously name and mark out” (Rambukkana 2015, 30). Such capacities for expansion make hashtag composition a valuable antiracist tool for writing instructors; they represent distinct possibilities for learning/engaging in fluid, deep rhetorically ecological meaning-making already existing and widely applicable beyond the writing classroom.

“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”

Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”

#blackfeminism #standupforourdifferences #lgbtq+rights #endracismandhomophobia #independence

Jan 28th, 2017

Tcb22 Lorde Post

“Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women—in the face of tremendous resistance—as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.”

“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Audre Lorde

#feminism #whitefeminism #blackfeminism #fightthepatriarchy #racism #societalnorms

Feb 14th, 2017

Tcb37 Lorde Post

Other bloggers, such as tcb22 and tcb37, make active distinctions between #feminism, #blackfeminism, #afrocentricfeminism (appearing in their Hill Collins Post presented earlier), and #whitefeminism. Along with quotations from the same influential feminist text—Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1984, 113)—each makes pivotal rhetorical choices with their hashtags that shape the meaning of these tags, Lorde’s essay, and other texts they use with them. On one hand, tcb22 reads their excerpt from “The Master’s Tools,” about using difference creatively instead of papering it over with calls for “tolerance,” with #blackfeminism, #standupforourdifferences, #lgbtq+rights, #endracismandhomophobia, and #independence. Tcb37, on the other hand, selects #feminism, #whitefeminism, #blackfeminism, #fightthepatriarchy, #racism, and #societalnorms to analyze Lorde’s resistance to a continuing history of Black women and women of color being asked to educate white women on difference. Tcb22’s tags root its calls for action in #blackfeminism, while tcb37’s attempt to break down Lorde’s message in considering its main points. Yet these meanings connect through #blackfeminism, which then further relates through the popular use of #feminism by tcb37 and other students to interpret activist material. The interconnected meanings created with these students’ exercising of varied tags spotlight the dynamic possibilities hashtag composition presents as students’ interpretations work to join together/dismantle meaning from different vantage points and further promote possibilities for viral Blackness through the evolving (re)conceptualization of terms like #feminism.

As students navigate terms like “feminism,” “racism,” or “stereotypes,” they also gather a repository of information from both primary and secondary material with which they can build further analytical investigations. When we approach Research Proposal assignments, I steer participants to see the distinct possibilities that hashtags offer as field sites of investigation, which reading by cultural/linguistic anthropologists Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa (2015) bolsters and helps to explain. Students then review that store of curated hashtags, browsing their archives to determine where their interests lie within the course theme. Because Tumblr hashtags clicked through from a students’ main blog page unpack an existing archive from that particular page, students can easily access numerous connections that they make and continue to make through hashtag composition. They can also use relational tags to deepen their interests on a particular topic by employing these terms in library searches. #feminism’s relationship to #support or #lgbtq+rights, for example, might then help to fund further interests for tcb22’s research process. The hashtags’ practical research purposes tied with outlined activist meanings and consequences present a multiplicity of possibilities for their utilization as digital compositions in antiracist writing classrooms.

Ma(r)king #BlackLivesMatter

“When America pulls open the curtain of white supremacy, the truth emerges much like the Wizard of Oz—not only do Black lives matter, their lives are the reason that white lives still exist.”

“#BlackLivesMatter Kitchen Talk,” Rachael Faithful (2014)

#blackculture #blacklivesmatter #stereotype #corruption #violence #survival #civilrights #racialpolitics

Feb 20th, 2017

Tcb22 Faithful Post

#blacklivesmatter #policeforce #innocent #stereotype

Jan 11th, 2017

Tcb22 Olson Post22

Is Twitter the Underground Railroad of Activism?

“Black Twitter” can be described as a collective of active, primarily African-American Twitter users who have created a virtual community that participates in continuous real-time conversations. When they work together, this collective is proving adept at bringing about a wide range of sociopolitical changes. It doesn’t take much effort to get users to rally together behind causes that may have an impact on their lives. “We don’t need a whole bunch of background information to fight injustice—if you tell us about a problem, we can fact-check online within minutes to verify, and be down the road on tackling inequality,” says Angela Rye, director of strategic partnerships at IMPACT.

—Feminista Jones (2013)

#Unity #Protest #InjusticeinAmerica #BlacklivesMatter #VirtualBlackCommunity #SocialChange #NoLongerSlaves

Sep 2nd, 2016

Tcb11 Jones Post

#BlackLivesMatter remains an important touchstone throughout each iteration of this particular second-year writing course. The social movement’s application and spread through tags undergird the politics of our using them for activist pedagogies. So how do students specifically deploy or manipulate the tag through their interpretative note-taking to become parts of that particular deep rhetorical ecology? Of course, they often used the tag with content that directly addresses the Ferguson Uprising or articles about the movement creating relations with logically germane ideas—such as tcb22’s associated tags #blackculture, #stereotype, #corruption, #violence, #survival, #racialpolitics, #policeforce, and #innocent on their Faithful and Olson posts. But some students push beyond these readily available connections and contexts. Tcb11, for example, negotiates temporalities/histories with their usage of #BlackLivesMatter. In one instance, to read Jones’s article on Twitter activism, the blogger deploys it with #VirtualBlackCommunity and #NoLongerSlaves (Jones 2013). These tags actively position the movement between a violent history of bondage and the digitized possibility of collectivity; through the fracture, the hashtags conjure a kind of conscious multi-situated-ness in the meaning of #BlackLivesMatter: one in a present that looks (and is) forward while looking (and being) back in the past. This fracturing evidences the “wake work” of Black annotation, making “Black life visible, if only momentarily, through the optic of the door” (Sharpe 2016, 123). Hashtags can open these doors.

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream Speech” (1963)

#Justice #BlackRights #Urgency #TakeAction #BlackLivesStillMatter #Freedom #UnityandBrotherhood

Aug 30th, 2016

Tcb11 King Post

#blacklivesstillmatter #MichaelBrown #SayHisName #PoliceBrutality #Justice #HandsUpDontShoot

Aug 28th, 2016

Tcb11 Olson Post

The same blogger deploys #BlackLivesStillMatter, which also plays with the temporality of the movement’s meanings. The supplemental “still” suggests the fight for Black liberation as ongoing but might trouble particular temporal meanings in the movement’s titular tag. The revised tag begs the question: How does the ethos of this declaration function if the assertion that Black lives matter suggests that they don’t or haven’t in relation to white supremacy in the United States? Does “still” acting as an adjective or even a verb rather than an adverb posit further ways to think through a kind of object-being of Blackness within that oppressive framework? The fractures mean. Tcb11 tags Olson’s Ferguson photograph with it, along with the tags #MichaelBrown, #SayHisName, #PoliceBrutality, #Justice, #HandsUpDontShoot. The tags #Justice and #BlackLivesStillMatter, however, recur with an excerpt from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s (1963) “I Have a Dream” speech, along with #BlackRights, #Urgency, #TakeAction, #Freedom, and #UnityandBrotherhood. Across these instances, the blogger’s insistence on the Black Lives Matter movement (and the Civil Rights movement) continuing to have relevance—by adding “still” to its phraseology—has ripple effects on its relational meanings with surrounding tags and textual artifacts. Let’s dig deeper.

Linking #BlackLivesStillMatter with a photograph from the Ferguson Uprising to King’s refusal to believe that the United States cannot pay its debts to Black citizens through voting rights fractures histories of Black US activism and emphasizes the “still” in #BlackLivesStillMatter. Tcb22’s annotation #civilrights on a post quoting multidisciplinary healing artist Rachel Faithful’s (2014) dialogic analysis parallels Tcb11’s tag. The markers emphasize how a hashtag works as a “node of continued context across media, conversations, and locales . . . [emerging] temporally, self-developing through time, pointing to itself as it points to the other texts it marks as within its ambit” (Rambukkana 2015, 30). Moreover, these tags suggest opportunities for classroom intervention to explain the philosophical discontinuities between the Civil Rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movement that activists have insisted be made clear. Hip-hop artist Tef Poe declared the latter’s disjunctions from the former in protest to a speech by the then NAACP president during “Ferguson October” events in 2014 (Taylor 2016, 161). Black Lives Matter cofounder Garza’s (2014) “Herstory” outlines how the current movement breaks away from the Civil Rights movement by centering Black queer women, Black feminist ideology, and countering narrow visions of Black identity and liberation. Upon recognizing the possibility for conflation between the movements, I adjusted future syllabi to further drive home these important differences through active comparison (a kind of Black feminist dialogue), including Black feminist political scientist/activist Cathy Cohen’s (2015) lecture on the theoretical and temporal differences between them. These hashtag compositions present opportunities for (re)visioning Black/antiracist pedagogies.

Tcb11 offers more cross-contextual possibilities and problematics for viral Blackness along with transforming #BlackLivesMatter to a tag like #BlackLivesStillMatter. The first instance, #BlackLivesStillMatter in tcb11’s Olson post, draws on popular tags associated with the movement like #HandsUpDontShoot, while changing #SayHerName—importantly popularized on Twitter to spotlight the lack of attention placed on Black women victims of police violence (Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark 2016, 83)—to #SayHisName. While the change might endeavor to gender the victim in Olson’s photograph male, it reinscribes the omissions that #SayHerName attempts to address. This instance illustrates that while hashtags do bring with them subversive potentials, such subversion might turn back in on themselves, even with possible activist rhetoric, ethos, and agency and the described classroom context. However, in this fracture, where we might understand the weight of white heteropatriarchal insistence intervening to regender a Black feminist tag, generative, pedagogical opportunities again arise. Here lies an opening for the space of the classroom to enter and, in particular, for the mobilization of the Black feminist epistemological tenet of the use of dialogue to assess knowledge claims. As Hill Collins stipulates, “Not to be confused with adversarial debate, the use of dialogue has deep roots in African-based oral traditions and in African-American culture” ([1990] 2000, 261). #SayHisName gives rise to possibilities for a (material) classroom discussion on that tag and its associated movement, its histories, and its origins and for re/orienting students toward #BlackLivesMatter’s Black feminist ideologies and motives. Likewise, in the digital space, possible responses on social media to such a tag could reveal similar potentially educative moments. The fracture, digitized and/or material, rips open a space in the deep ecology between Blackness and its non/being for para/ontological Black resistance.

“#BlackLivesMatter is not #BlackCisMenMatter”

Rachael Faithful, “#BlackLivesMatter Kitchen Talk” (2014)

#equalityforall #allblacklivesmatter #discussion #inclusion

Oct 5th, 2016

Tcb05 Faithful Post

Tbc05’s transmutation of #BlackLivesMatter to #allblacklivesmatter also raises questions through its fractures in linguistic and textual associations. Garza’s “Herstory” addresses the phrase and hashtag “All Lives Matter” as a racialized erasure. But Garza’s point of contention lies not with the meanings of “all”; instead, she points out that “when we deploy ‘All Lives Matter’ as to correct an intervention specifically created to address anti[B]lackness, we lose the ways in which the state apparatus has built a program of genocide and repression mostly on the backs of Black people” (Garza 2014). Tbc05’s change, however, attempts to invert the erasing “all,” pointing to the marginalizing gaps in the ways #BlackLivesMatter has come to be contextualized in mainstream media. The student blogger uses #allblacklivesmatter with #equalityforall, #discussion, and #inclusion, but does so to index a quotation from Faithful’s article that reads “#BlackLivesMatter is not #BlackCisMenMatter” (2014, 252)—protesting the erasure of Black trans/gender nonconforming lives from popular understandings of the movement’s purview. The hashtags’ relations to such a statement illustrates the possibilities these digital tools yield for coalitional Black resistance, viral Blackness, and Black annotation, upending the universalizing and whitewashing “all” of #alllivesmatter for an appeal to “broaden” mainstream interpretations of the movement. The student’s potential awareness in their turn of phrase helps to show not only prospective futures that hashtag composition advance but also its rhetorically fluid and deep ecological promises for meaning-making/negotiation. Notably, however, the appeal to “equality” in #equalityforall, suggests work still to be done if the desires for viral Blackness lie in a Wynterian conception of systemic oppression.

“Tag, you(,) it”

Hashtag composition, as a form of remediated commonplacing tool, suggests much for writing/composition instructors whose settings afford students access to such technologies. As reading, hashtags join with previous relationships that a concept and/or interpretation might already foster in a social media space via deep rhetorical ecologies. As writing, they operationalize those relations to build upon them and advance/negotiate new(er) meaning. As note-taking, they offer archives of knowledge that stress collectivity and in-built digital communities that a student/writer can tap into. But these modes of engagement function simultaneously, animating these processes with critical thinking and creative expression to suggest hashtag composition’s versatile application as an activity for writing classrooms and beyond.

Moreover, given the tool’s culture/history, it reveals accessible avenues for antiracist energy and agency, particularly when contextualized in movements seeking public justice for Black folk, people of color, and other marginalized groups. While hashtags indeed also bring with them the constraints of public vulnerability, scrutiny, and/or un/intentional employment for neoliberal profit and oppressive ideologies, this chapter advances the notion of hashtags as a dynamic Black rhetoric and literacy tool in writing/composition classrooms. However, as its second section shows, the politics surrounding the tool remains just as vital as the tool itself—in fact, in the case of hashtags, it arguably highlights its cultural relevance.

As a marginalized literacy, hashtags can “suggest a fleeting yet nonetheless enduring coalitional moment as they manifest across space and time as performative political actions meant to protest temporally, spatially, and historically inflected racialized violences” (Prasad 2016, 67). Yet, they might express more. As a Black rhetoric, contextualized in an antiracist learning environment centering Blackness, encouraging viral Blackness and Black annotation, these tags sometimes present dynamic, deep rhetorically ecological windows for Black non/being with/in the fissures of Fanonian fracture. They might therefore help us grasp shifting Blackness and temporal instability in such grabbing, even while under the ever-surveilling gaze of white institutions and multinational corporations. Instructors should be mindful of their appropriation, destructive mutations, and co-optation in explicitly offering anti/racist cultural context for these tools in relation to anti/Blackness. They should enact an awareness of the ways in which the tags might undercut neoliberal value systems rather than strengthen them, if, of course, theirs is a project claiming antiracist motives. If not, destructive dominant cultures prevalent at historically white institutions can just as easily invert their agency to promote hegemonic “commonplace” ideology. We’ve heard the fake news. Let’s unmake it.