Safe Space Beyond Security States: How Black Freedom Movements Messages Matter

Session Submission Type: Virtual Roundtable

Session Description

This roundtable will explore the disjunctures and impasses in the uptake and institutionalization of language and ideas from the contemporary movements for Black Lives. From insurrectionists chanting “Whose Capital? Our Capital!” to Biden’s inaugural promise to end white supremacy in the U.S., the current political moment demands clarity in how we read reiterations of Black Lives Matter democratic visions of political recognition, redistribution, and justice. Confronting the operations of whitewashed, incorporative, deradicalized, and reversed meanings, this roundtable will examine the multiple texts and contexts of “safety,” “white supremacy,” “racial justice,” “unity,” and “dismantling systemic racism” as this language is deployed in the streets, in the media, in party politics, on the left, and on the right. Indeed, the contemporary and historic movements for Black Lives carry language and analyses that are designed to travel as an emergent strategy (brown, 2017). But as the rallying chants, demands, and framings of Black Lives Matter move out of the streets and into the mainstream, we ask what happens when the language changes hands. When movement messages travel beyond the bounds of the movements that created them, what, if any, part of the analysis and visions travel with them? As Black freedom movement spaces fight to mobilize the public around new ideas of the radical, how do meanings change in these transmissions from one place and time to another, from one political status to another? How does the popularization of racial justice movement messages matter?

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Jasmine Syedullah Vassar College

Presenters

• Jenn M. Jackson Syracuse University

• Malkia Devich-Cyril Media Justice

• Deva Woodly New School for Social Research

• Lisa Beard Western Washington University