Movement Building

We see this represented by Lauren, Butler’s protagonist in Parable of the Sower, who is a sharer, an individual who can share the pleasure and pain of those around them. Indexicality and hypervigilance are not only prominent within the literary imagination; rather, they serve as vital tools for survival. These mechanisms enable Black women to navigate the intimate microcosms and broader macrocosms of pervasive social injustice.

Erica Edwards, in The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire, defines the terms “imperial grammar” and “insurgent grammar” to describe the complex and often fraught relationship between Black women’s creative and activist work and its instrumentalization by the state. Edwards critiques how imperial grammars absorb and aestheticize Black cultural production, aligning Black languages, music, performances, and visual codes with the state’s projects of multicultural governance and U.S. imperialism. Insurgent grammars, by contrast, offer what Edwards calls “templates of refusal”—gestures that unsettle and critique empire while grappling with the pervasive pressures of imperial co-optation. From the necessity of internalizing imperial grammars to the radical work of disidentification, insurgent grammars attempt to forge community and care networks, often by linking fragments of both grammars in tense and contradictory ways.

Edwards identifies examples of this dynamic in contemporary Black performance and politics. She critiques moments like Kerry Washington’s public endorsement of Kamala Harris during the vice-presidential campaign, where Washington’s real-life political performance seemed to borrow directly from her fictional persona as the political “fixer” in Scandal. Edwards highlights the absurdity of this moment: Washington, in an almost theatrical gesture, cast her audience as “fixers” themselves, encouraging them to elect Harris. This reflects a broader trend in which Black public figures are aestheticized as political symbols, their personas leveraged to secure neoliberal state power. The rise of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement underscored the stakes of this tension. BLM highlighted insurgent grammars by showcasing images of Black radicals under surveillance, drawing attention to the state’s complicity in suppressing Black political organizing. Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class provides a historical foundation for understanding this dynamic. Lott traces how Blackness has long been commodified as both a cultural and political aesthetic, particularly through minstrel performances that appropriated Black music and dance to construct an imagined folk culture. Lott writes:

“The juxtaposition of American Blacks with the idea of governance, particularly in the notion of slaves as poet-legislators. The assumption that the only music and dance considered authentic is that found in blackface minstrelsy, which represents something akin to the folk culture of an American peasantry.”

This analysis complements Edwards’ critique by showing how Black creative and political labor has been systematically absorbed into structures of governance, both symbolically and materially. By linking these frameworks, this essay argues that the commodification of Blackness collapses insurgent critique into imperial grammar, transforming the “coolness” of Black cultural figures into tools for state power. The so-called “cool” aesthetic of Blackness—a charismatic prism of entertainment and political demand—frequently serves imperial aims, erasing the risks of surveillance and violence faced by Black activists and grassroots struggles.

From 2013 to 2021, Black Lives Matter (BLM) garnered substantial attention to the demands for personal dignity and respect for individuals experiencing mental illness, as well as for victims of police brutality, thereby representing a profoundly therapeutic and empathetic movement.

This decentralized approach facilitated the emergence of new chapters with diverse and overlapping concerns on an international scale, all of which were encouraged by founder Patrisse Cullors to develop their own methods for “shutting shit down.” Cullors elucidates, “…we didn’t become an established organization until 2020. Before 2020, we were fiscally sponsored… it wasn’t formalized as an institution at that point; we were calling ourselves a decentralized network, which we are, and many of us are traveling around the world preaching the BLM story.”

The consumption of mass media and the irreverent utilization and exploitation of BLM messaging have largely disrupted and led to the spectacular erasure of direct action or the hyper-theatricalization of such action that runs counter to its demands. Celebrity co-optation, coupled with the white liberal eagerness to consume Black political messaging as an indicator of racial awareness, resulted in significant backlash against the primary objectives of BLM organizers.The utilization of representations of black spiritual, political and social leaders reached a fever pitch in media spectacle in the years accompanying BLM’s media impact. This backlash ultimately precipitated a wave of animosity and death threats directed at the founders, culminating in the resignation of Cullors in 2022. This phenomenon exemplified a reversion of racial signification displacement from political agency and its interplay with commodifiable and marketable racial capitalist agendas.

However, the movement continues to resonate in interpersonal demands for respect and dignity, particularly as these communications can be readily perceived through theatrical reenactment and candid capture. In the post-Black Lives Matter (BLM) era, the demand for Black dignity has fundamentally disrupted the phenomenological core of the unspeakable aspects of racial barriers within the necropolitical framework of enmity. There exists no socially acceptable racial color blindness in visual representations, especially within filmic media, necessitating a shift in white liberal public perception in response to the unveiled resurgence of white supremacist generic fascism both online and within cultural spheres. The racial voice industry and the Black chattering class—both of which have emerged as prominent advocates for racial capitalism—represent significant market forces in the contemporary political landscape.

W.E.B. Du Bois articulated in 1903, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro… two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder”.

The fascism characteristic of the Trump era has been largely met by Black Lives Matter activities, which serve as a galvanizing grassroots source of civil disobedience.The origins of this phenomenon can be understood through the public script of hyper-accessibility of Black bodies to the general populace—a harsh reality marked by the perception of Black bodies (flesh) as communal economic and social property among individuals not similarly marked. As Boz Garden observes, the triple consciousness generated by this public script for the enslaved operates under the premise that being captured is similarly subsumed. Garden asserts, “If the Slave was subject to the ‘authority’ and ‘control’ of all civil subjects, then the distinction between the civil subject and the individuated master only formalized a structure of disavowal to further permit the common use of the Slave in and through the law (of property rights)”. In addressing the ramifications of that duality in its call for social justice, BLM has generated a mass social demand for awareness and recognition of trauma and the demand for representational justice that is cognizant of such trauma. A notable consequence of the movement has been the facilitation of a global dialogue concerning the victimization of Black women.