Answer: Black Lives Matter movement uses creative tactics to confront systemic racism
The police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd have galvanized anti-racism protests throughout the United States, Canada and elsewhere. As a result, lawmakers have made pledges to divest from police and school districts have cut ties with law enforcement. The organizing of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and their provocative protest tactics have played a significant role in this shifting public discourse.
BLM has been resisting dominant narratives in new ways. The movement amplifies knowledge and counter-discourses that affirm the identities and needs of Black communities. The BLM movement can be seen as a “subaltern counterpublic,” defined by critical theorist Nancy Fraser as a space dedicated to centring marginalized voices.
The dominant public often expects marginalized groups to use persuasion to educate them about their grievances. However, some have argued that persuasion alone cannot facilitate substantive systemic change. Dominant society will generally tolerate only those transformations in public discourse that leave distributions of power and privilege untouched. For instance, white Americans may support calls for incremental police reform, but once activists utter the phrase “abolish the police,” the discourse is deemed too radical.
Counterpublics, like BLM, have successfully cultivated their power and drawn attention to their messaging by forcing their narratives onto the public.
Contemporary news tends to delegitimize the demands of activists by focusing their coverage on the spectacle and violence of protests. The BLM movement is aware of this media bias, and the limits of respectability politics and they challenge this status quo. They refuse to placate the public and policy-makers through politeness. They know agitation and a rejection of “appropriate decorum” norms is needed to confront existing racial inequities.
The scale and multiracial nature of recent BLM protests suggest that the BLM tactics of agitation have made it difficult for the dominant society to continue to look away.
One such tactic, frequently depicted in news images, is the idea of BLM protesters unflinchingly staring into the eyes of police. This daring “look back” exemplifies a refusal to submit passively to police intimidation. Visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff describes this as looking at police to “see what there is to see, to be vulnerable, but not be traumatized.” This persistent looking carries symbolic power considering that making eye contact with police has historically posed a lethal threat to Black people.
Another tactic that subverts the police gaze is the performance art piece “Mirror Casket” created by a collective of BLM organizers and artists in 2014. Its aim is to evoke empathy for the Black victims of police killings. Activists carried a casket covered with cracked mirrors from the site of Michael Brown’s killing to the police department in Ferguson, Mo. The police were forced to look back at themselves and see what systemic terror looks like for Black communities.
Philosopher George Yancy proposes a Black counter-gaze that centres on Black lived experiences and sees beyond the supposed invisibility of whiteness. This counter–gaze challenges the cultural norms and practices that make whiteness appear natural, normal and right. The performance of a Black counter-gaze in “Mirror Casket” gives back the problem of racism to police and others who inhabit whiteness to fix.
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