Black Squares for Black Lives – Virtue signaling or lack of clear demands?

         Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang

The changing of profile pictures in a gesture of solidarity towards a specific social justice movement has been around for many years. 
However, I want to dedicate this text to the posting of black squares predominantly on Instagram and Twitter in the context of the Blackout Tuesday launched on June 2^nd, 2020, by Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang, both executives of major record companies.

#TheShowMustBePaused – a demand by both women who were calling for a day of action within the music industry as a reaction to the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Ahmad Arbery. The call for action asked companies in the music industry for a 24-hour suspension of releasing any music and refraining from any business activities for the duration of that day. The businesswomen argued that while the music industry was benefiting off the work and talent of black and brown artists, the industry still lacked a genuine effort for more structural diversity and equity. Little did the women know, the movement around the Blackout Tuesday shifted from a music industry specific action and expanded into other realms of racial injustice. With the original message being so diluted, predominantly white users started posting black squares, replacing the #blackouttuesday with the #Blacklivesmatter since they believed that this day of action was in solidarity with the protests. The lack of contextual knowledge by the allies backfired, as it made the gathering of information surrounding the #Blacklivesmatter protests increasingly difficult, with the algorithm pushing down protest related content and only showing black squares in the search results. 

It did not take long, until black protesters were calling out the postings of black squares as an empty form of performative allyship. Although I do understand the frustration of yet another incident of allyship that could be interpreted as a mere symbolic lip-service towards the BlackLivesMatter movement, the question if social media can be used to the advantage of social justice movements or if it rather tends to turn movements into commodities, that can be worn by actors such as enterprises as a shiny badge of honor, remains unanswered.

On the other hand, incidents such as this misunderstanding of the #TheShowMustBePaused call for action, also let us question if it actually is a problem of the tools that are applied – namely social media – or rather a problem of the lack of a radical critique by the originators. If a company such as Billboard, is all too happy to hand out ‘Executives of the Year Awards’ to both Agyemang and Thomas, maybe our alarm bells should go off.

 

Here is a video of the acceptance speeches by Agyemang and Thomas after having received the Billboard Award: 

In the speech, the women both thank leading black female entrepreneurs for leading the path for them in the music industry. However, their stance is rather reformist as they express the necessity for more representation in numbers in companies such as Motown Records. But instead of using their assigned speech time to reiterate their original message, they keep the tone of the speech rather lighthearted. Both executives missed out on this opportunity and chose not to reflect on any of the demands that the protestors on the streets had. No mentions of the killings of unarmed black people by police officer, no demands for the arrest and conviction of the police officers involved in the killings, no demands for defunding the police and no connections to other struggles. 

 

When I first saw the sharing of the black squares, I thought, that this was just another incident of the appropriation of symbols of resistance in order to appear ‘woke’ and liberal. But now I am wondering, if maybe only those types of struggles can be appropriated for virtue signaling if the core of the struggle is already lacking a systemic analysis that calls for a truly radical reconstruction of society. 

The reasons for a commodification of a movement would then not lie within the use of social media per se, but more so in how the movement itself is set-up. This is not a defense of social media, since I do doubt its subversive potential. But as a technological mass phenomenon of the 21^st it is still important for us to understand the possibilities and risks of social media in the construction of identity and in the struggles towards a more just world. In this case, the Blackout Tuesday movement seems to speak more loudly on the identity construction of a white liberal reformist middle class. 

Although it is interesting to see how white users were constructing their identities as allies of the black community by showing a vague sense of solidarity towards the BlackLivesMatter struggle, the demand that police should not kill black people, or any citizens, seems to be so common sensical that it would be all too cynical, if this were to be the only change necessary towards a world where we may overcome social injustice. This is the bare minimum. US citizens, regardless of their race or ethnicity, should not have to ask for this. If this should be white allies only demand and only point of connection with the demands of the movement, then it is a rather comfortable position chosen that spares any question of their own implication in, contribution to and benefit from racial injustice. 

An in-depth analysis on where the #Blacklivesmatter movement was in 2020 would exceed this blog post, but I would like to quote Martin Luther King Jr. here. 

A year after his assassination, his keynote address at Duke University was published. In it he eloquently summarized the intersectional nature of struggles that a black revolutionary resistance uncovers: 

“In these trying circumstances, the Black revolution is more than a struggle for the rights of negroes, it is forcing America to face all of its interrelated flaws — racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are deeply rooted in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

 

Finally, the failure of the Blackout Tuesday movement and the cooption by self-proclaimed allies may go to show that the BlackLivesMatter movement might need a recalibration in its organizational structure, messaging and its core demands to overcome the status quo.