What are the larger conclusions we can draw from the history of African American resistance? What might this history tell us about the nature of African American intellectual life, American culture and democracy, and the meaning of resistance itself? How should we understand the present and future of African American resistance in the United States?
First, there are several ways to explain African American resisters’ unique strategy of engaging American culture and the particular counternarratives they advanced. One explanation is that African American resisters—like the most ardent of American patriots—could never fully escape engaging with the trope of American exceptionalism. Exceptionalism is the idea that there is something peculiar about American identity: that it is progressive, freedom loving, and marked by a remarkable degree of consistency between the ideal and the practice of democracy.1 Another explanation, however, is that rather than personally subscribe to what Jerry Watts calls “the hegemonic rhetorics of America,”2 African American resisters engaged these rhetorics strategically because they were pragmatically aware of the way American politics is limited by them.3 This interpretation is more apt given that—more often than not—resisters described American ideals in subversive ways. If anything, exceptionalism, for them, was not a reference to the moral benevolence or political genius of American liberalism but of the violence of American racism; democracy was not narrowly constrained to a procedural practice that was about voting and political participation but had more of a social-democratic texture.
The existential act of resistance itself, which is dialectically intertwined with the forces it is criticizing and with which it is breaking, can also help explain why African American resisters revised American ideals in the ways that they did. What makes resistance radical is also what can make it conservative. The resister may seek to articulate a new understanding of rights, freedom, social equality, political power, and human dignity, but the goal of successfully conveying these claims to an audience might also temper their radical potential. Real-world political achievements require strategic concessions that resisters unconsciously acknowledge. The more resisters borrow dominant forms of claim making, the more powerfully these claims register; the more they name goals that are within the bounds of political possibility, the more likely these goals will be taken seriously.4 Here lies one fundamental paradox of resistance: Without the new vocabulary resisters create, the possibility of radical change will always be dismissed in favor of gradual reform. Yet the more effectively resistance carves out a new vocabulary for politics, the less likely it will be heard.
The resister’s commitment to racial justice can also explain the contours of resistance in political thought. Insofar as racial justice names a condition in which racism is eliminated and freedom is achieved for all individuals and groups, it seems plausible why African American resisters favor the theoretical principles of solidarity based on shared political interests, a plural notion of the good, a notion of democratic agency where one is endowed the authority to determine one’s own life choices, the inclusion of as many voices as possible, and the embrace of direct action that challenges existing inequalities.5
Finally, the long history of American injustice might help explain the texture of African American resistance. American racial inequality is unfortunately but one variation on a cyclical theme that seems to be the rule rather than the exception in America.6 Evidence abounds, from the shameless socioeconomic marginalization of and sexual violence toward women, to the vociferous xenophobic attacks on immigrants and the unabashed demonization of LGBT populations, to the big-business assault on the rights of the American working class. Sometimes African American resisters have fallen prey to perpetuating these injustices—sexism, homophobia, classism, and even racism. But more often than not they tie their thinking to a critique of these injustices, exposing how racism is abetted by them in ways that compromise democracy.
But awareness of this history also encourages African American resisters to treat with cynicism claims of goodwill or progress. And it encourages them to be sensitive toward spaces where robust critique and utopian imagination can thrive. The more one expects injustice to be lurking around the corner, the more likely one will seize on those fugitive moments of opportunity to make claims that are generally outside conventional wisdom. African American resistance thought thus shares a certain affinity with what the political theorist Sheldon Wolin has identified as the essence of democracy: that it is a “fugitive” practice as ephemeral as it is powerful.7
RESISTANCE AND THE LIMITATIONS OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
Appreciating the rich intellectual history of African American resistance can also shed insights on American democracy. Widespread backlash from much of the white electorate, political elites, and even segments of the black population against slave abolition, the antilynching movement, the Panthers, and prison abolitionists seems to confirm that the American public is deeply invested in the values of procedural democracy, elite rule, capitalism, and the notion of negative liberty.8 Any perceived threats to these institutions are treated with skepticism, if not overt hostility.
But this cannot eradicate something powerful that defines democracy. In democracy, the idea of “the people” is a performative category, which is always more and less than each of its existing iterations and whose meaning depends on the particular movements who claim to speak on its behalf.9 At the same time, the tension between core democratic ideals lends itself to political struggle. After all, if too much democratic freedom may undermine equality and too much sovereignty can threaten the commitment to plurality, then democracy will always be a product of ongoing political contestation that can never be fully completed.10
American resisters clearly have their work cut out for them. But these tensions ensure that resistance will always have a future because democracy is, on some level, as much science fiction as reality, a futuristic fantasy where more than what is initially imagined can become possible.
BLACK LIVES MATTER AND THE FUTURE OF RESISTANCE
A case in point: Just when a new wave of African American resistance seemed unlikely, the future arrived full steam in the form of Black Lives Matter (BLM), which has come to prominence in the wake of the tragic series of police killings of unarmed African American men—Michael Brown, who was shot to death by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, who was strangled to death by another white officer, Daniel Pantaleo, and other black males killed by police officers across the nation: Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Walter Scott in North Charleston, Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati, and Laquan McDonald in Chicago.
Founded as the Twitter hashtag #BlackLivesMatter by three queer black women activists, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi, in the aftermath of the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman who, invoking Florida’s “stand-your-ground” law, shot and killed an African American male youth, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida, in 2012, the movement has since become an international force, engaging in direct political actions aimed to eliminate everything from race-based police brutality and mass incarceration to socioeconomic inequality and unjust immigration policy. Black Lives Matter’s populist language and youth-directed activism built upon the energy of the anti-inequality movement Occupy Wall Street, which in 2012 brought into relief the way the neoliberal privatization efforts and trickle-down economic theories of the past thirty years have only intensified the longstanding gap between the superrich, the “1 percent” of the population, and the overwhelming majority, the “99 percent.”
But if Occupy Wall Street highlighted the way citizens of all identities were dominated by corporate greed and the excesses of global capitalism, Black Lives Matter takes seriously the particular normative value of black life—in an American society that has, at best, aimed to render unexceptional the distinct experience of black people in the United States or, at worst, has sought to eradicate systematically black people’s dignity. As the organization’s website declares, “Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.”11 BLM has mobilized in response to the painful reality once expressed by the Panthers but more recently by the African American journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates’s National Book Award–winning and bestselling Between the World and Me (2015): The black American body has always been and still is degraded, and it is seen as expendable and as a potential receptacle of state-sponsored violence. Coates writes:
Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal.12
Black Lives Matter has not yet claimed responsibility for any major legislative proposals, but its ongoing agitation on college campuses, at political campaign events, and throughout city streets has upended the narrative that African American political activism for social egalitarianism died with the black freedom movements of the 1960s. Black Lives Matter refuses to embrace what the African American intellectual Cornel West argued in the early 1990s was the post–civil rights era’s black political quietism, which was caused by the problem of “black nihilism”—the disorientation and sense of political despair—and which cut against the tragicomic sense of hope that had once animated black political struggle.13
To be sure, vibrant political black activity has existed in several prominent examples over the past fifty years. But even those moments have left something to be desired in the pursuit of a radical democratic agenda. There was the black electorate’s involvement in Jesse Jackson’s 1984 bid for the White House, the Nation of Islam’s Million Man March on Washington, D.C., in 1995, and then, unexpectedly, the election of the first African American president, Barack Obama in 2008 and in 2012. But even these movements had pedestrian, if not deeply problematic, political objectives. Jackson and Obama were mainstream black Democrats who eschewed any commitment to racial egalitarianism—appearing as moderates on racial equality compared to someone like Martin Luther King Jr. in his least radical moments.14 The Nation of Islam, led by Louis Farrakhan, was not only openly sexist—the Million Man March was literally marketed toward and composed of black men trying to redeem their lost masculinity—but also homophobic and anti-Semitic, and it proffered a deeply conservative notion of picking oneself up by one’s bootstraps, reminiscent of earlier black nationalists including Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey.15
It is also striking that a sizeable portion of African American public intellectual life—notwithstanding obvious exceptions like West, Coates, Michael Eric Dyson, and Melissa Harris-Perry—has been dominated by black conservatives such as Shelby Steele, Bill Cosby, and John McWhorter. Though different in their arguments, they preach a secular vision of Farrakhan’s notion of black self-help and espouse a commitment to the American ideals of equality of opportunity and “colorblindness.” They call for ending affirmative-action programs and balk at any talk of state-led race-based redistributive efforts.16
Although Black Lives Matter has done most of its political work through direct actions and community organizing, we can already begin to see the glimmers of how the movement is an important intervention in the history of African American resistance. First, no black political movement in recent memory that has received so much public attention has made intersectional analysis so central to its politics. As activists declare: “We are guided by the fact that Black Lives Matter, all Black lives, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status or location.”17 Following the insights of queer black difference feminists such as the Combahee River Collective and the poet-philosopher Audre Lorde, Black Lives Matter has brought into relief an intersectional perspective on domination, understanding that the lived experience of differently oppressed identities creates unique obstacles for human flourishing and requires remedies that cannot be one-size-fits-all. Like Wells and Davis before them, BLM activists refuse to interpret domination in universal and abstract terms, while critiquing and bringing attention to the masculinism (which was at times espoused by Walker, Douglass, and Newton) and homophobia (which Newton sometimes expressed) that still saturates American culture. Furthermore, BLM brings into a contemporary context Wells’s insights about the link between chivalry, violence, and myths about femininity and Davis’s thinking about capitalism, prisons, imperialism, and gender inequality—at a moment when gender inequality is sustained through the national assault on reproductive rights, the intensification of a rape culture on college campuses, the continued assaults on socioeconomic programs for black women across the United States, and the demonization of many trans and gay citizens of color.
Second, BLM rejects the dichotomy between performance and politics. The movement’s declaration “Black Lives Matter” is often shouted when activists publicly intervene in unsanctioned and ephemeral ways. For example, BLM protestors interrupted the progressive Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders’s rally in Seattle, Washington, on August 8, 2015, to call upon attendees to acknowledge the ongoing structural racism in Seattle and to participate in a moment of silence for Michael Brown. On November 21, 2015, in a Birmingham, Alabama, rally for the conservative Republican hopeful Donald Trump, a BLM protestor intervened before being kicked and punched by the attendees, to the approval of the candidate—to draw attention to Trump’s overtly racist rhetoric and policy proposals.
Much more so than Walker, Douglass, Wells, Newton, and Davis, BLM transforms public space into a theater meant to educate and alienate an audience from their most deeply cherished beliefs. Like French avant-garde artist-activist-intellectuals in the 1960s, the so-called situationists, who were directly involved in and whose ideas helped inspire the May ’68 student movements in France,18 BLM understands the way public spectacle (BLM protestors have also worn T-shirts and placed duct tape on their mouths with the movement’s declaration) commands attention and disrupts notions of civility. So too does the very utterance “Black Lives Matter!” subversively articulate the normative value of black life in a society that continues to deny it; it also calls attention to the fact that there is still a need to articulate this claim—at a moment many white Americans see as “postracial,” where racism is only occasional and no longer deeply ingrained in American culture nor latently present in American politics.
Third, and perhaps most important, BLM political resistance is as physical as it is virtual—enacted through Internet-based social-networking tools such as Facebook, the messaging service Twitter, and the image-sharing service Instagram. By connecting a community of citizens who might otherwise not have been politicized in traditional ways—like community meetings, rallies, marches, protests, petitions, canvassing—BLM social-media activism realizes Walker’s and Douglass’s idea that a community is ephemeral and constantly evolving. By using a short Tweet, a Facebook message, or some kind of mobile application to mobilize potential protesters in a matter of hours, BLM creates spontaneous and disruptive direct actions that would have been embraced by Newton and the Panthers.
BLM tries to make social media into a platform of serious contestation about divergent political discourse. They do this through a kind of micropolitics, which dramatizes what the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called a “rhizomatic” structure of politics, where loosely connected and disparate political activities would replace those with firmly defined hierarchies, strategies, directives, rules, and organizational structures.19
But what makes BLM’s use of social media so valuable can also have deleterious effects. Identifying with a movement’s message virtually can serve as a substitute for real-world action, and micropolitical acts can lack macropolitical demands. Furthermore, although social media can mobilize political emotion—doing digitally what Wells did through print and what Newton and the Panthers did through policing the police—these emotions can never be fully contained in the social sphere. BLM indignation about the degradation of black life only heightens some black Americans’ sense of despair about the possibility of substantive change, while inspiring some white Americans to declare a love of white as well as black life—“All Lives Matter”—an assertion that obviously misses both the intentional irony of BLM’s slogan and responds with hostility toward its race consciousness.
Yet BLM could benefit from embracing the political ideas of earlier African American resisters. Knowing how state power deprives citizens of a sense of creativity and self-worth to lead fulfilling lives can bolster BLM thinking about the scope of racial injustice. Words like “neoslavery” or “racial terrorism” can help activists draw public attention to the way the state is implicated in eroding freedom and in creating fear in black populations. Cultivating an embodied form of political thinking that maintains empathy toward a plural range of experiences and that engages opposing worldviews can deepen the practice of democratic judgment. Appreciating the way action is about accepting new political possibilities and coalitions and allowing these to disclose things that would alter one’s perceptions of reality can help activists struggle in more creative, democratic, and sustainable ways. Subverting discourses of American exceptionalism and not shying away from deploying emotions in public, to encourage moral outrage or to politicize further a reality that appears incontestable, can deepen BLM political rhetoric.
The tactics of black politics have always been contested: Booker T. Washington endorsed social accommodation and rugged individualism, Martin Delany and Malcolm X called for black separatism, and Du Bois and King called for political agitation. Yet the overarching concern of black politics across the ideological divide has been the quest for black dignity and self-determination amid white supremacy. The continued existence of racial inequality will encourage dissatisfaction and dissent, critique and direct action. Political hope may come from knowing that the next resistance movement is around the corner. But the crucial political task is to translate the ideas and demands that emerge from resistance into a coherent program that would create a more democratic nation in which all Americans would want to live.