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ABSTRACT
The video of Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd sparked a wave of protests and civil unrest, leading white support of Black Lives Matter to reach an all-time high in 2020. During this time, the heightened visibility of Black death by police and public conversations about anti-racism prompted conversations about institutionalized whiteness, interracial solidarity, and meaningful social justice action. This participatory rhetorical study, based on our analysis of twenty-six interviews with protest participants, investigated how racially diverse participants narrated their experiences of attending and/or organizing protests. We argue that the protests produced rhetorically impactful instances of witnessing through embodied experiences of relationality and collective feeling. Considering the protests’ impacts along with critiques of white witnessing and performative allyship, we explore the rhetorical potentialities of protest for humanizing Black lives by increasing anti-racist emotions and contributing to coalitional interracial subjectivities. Our theorization of interracial witnessing extends rhetorical witnessing to specifically address how spatial reconfigurations of racialized materialities and emotions during protest create new forms of recognition. In addition, the use of participatory approaches also extends media witnessing through the use of interviewing as an inventive space for deepening the witnessing process.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank our interview participants, our reviewers, and editor Stacey Sowards for their time and ideas. We also thank community educator and activist Joyce Washington for feedback on an earlier version, and Tina Harris, Khadijah Costley White, and other scholars for a helpful exchange of ideas during a panel presentation at the 2022 International Communication Association (ICA) Conference. We are grateful to the undergraduate students in Roberta’s “Rhetoric and the Racialized ‘Other’” Honors seminar who conducted several participant interviews. We dedicate our labor here to the activists, protest organizers, and participants in the 2020 BLM protests, and those who continue to bear witness to and fight against racial injustices.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Elizabeth Alexander, “‘Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?’: Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” Public Culture 7 (1994): 90.
2 Sherene H. Razack, “Stealing the Pain of Others: Reflections on Canadian Humanitarian Responses,” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 29, no. 4 (2007): 375.
3 Sam Jones, “US Crisis Monitor Releases Full Data for Summer 2020,” The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, August 31, 2020. https://acleddata.com/2020/08/31/us-crisis-monitor-releases-full-data-for-summer-2020/
4 Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” The New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html
5 For a full list, see Li Cohen, “Police in the U.S. Killed 164 Black People in the First 8 Months of 2020,” CBS News, September 10, 2020, https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/black-people-killed-by-police-in-the-u-s-in-2020/3/
6 Throughout this essay, we use the language of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests to reference the 2020 protests and prior protests addressing police brutality, antiblackness, and racial justice. Because BLM, now associated with Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), is decentralized, protests are not necessarily associated with an official organization.
7 David A. Frank, “The Complicity of Racial and Rhetorical Pessimism: The Coherence and Promise of the Long Civil Rights Movement,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 23, no. 3 (2020): 575.
8 Frank, “Racial and Rhetorical Pessimism,” 575.
9 Lola E. Peters, “The Perils of ‘Helpful’ White People Shaken by Police Violence,” Crosscut, August 31, 2020, https://crosscut.com/opinion/2020/08/perils-helpful-white-people-shaken-police-violence
10 See, for example, Elizabeth F. Desnoyers-Colas, “The Proof Is in the Hovering: Disrupting Racism in White Spaces,” Women's Studies in Communication 44, no. 2 (2021): 138–41; and Cerise Glenn Manigault, “Allyship and Sustaining Systemic Change: Another Call to Action,” UNC Greensboro, July 13, 2020, https://aas.uncg.edu/allyship-and-sustaining-systemic-change-another-call-to-action/
11 Research approved by the Institutional Review Board of Middle Tennessee State University (Protocol ID 21-21187v).
12 Wendy S. Hesford, “Human Rights Rhetoric of Recognition,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2011): 284.
13 See, for example, Paige Alfonzo, “A Topology of Twitter Tactics: Tracing the Rhetorical Dimensions and Digital Labor of Networked Publics,” Social Media & Society 7, no. 2 (2021). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/20563051211025514; Rachel R. Mourão and Danielle K. Brown, “Black Lives Matter Coverage: How Protest News Frames and Attitudinal Change Affect Social Media Engagement,” Digital Journalism 10, no. 4 (2021): 626–46; Mark Nartey, “Centering Marginalized Voices: A Discourse Analytic Study of the Black Lives Matter Movement on Twitter,” Critical Discourse Studies 19, no. 5 (2022): 523–38.
14 For exceptions, see Breanne Fahs, “Friends or Foes? US Women’s Perceptions of Racial Justice and the Black Lives Matter Protests during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Journal of Women, Politics & Policy 43, no. 4 (2022): 446–62, and Aisha Powell, “Two-Step Flow and Protesters: Understanding What Influenced Participation in a George Floyd Protests,” Communication Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2022): 407–28.
15 Jennifer L. Griffiths, Traumatic Possessions: The Body and Memory in African American Women’s Writing and Performance (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 16.
16 Bradford Vivian, Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 10.
17 See, for example, Wendy Hesford, “Documenting Violations: Rhetorical Witnessing and the Spectacle of Distant Suffering,” Biography 27, no. 1 (2004): 104–44; and Wendy Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). This understanding of the “crisis of witnessing” builds from Holocaust scholarship including Shoshana Felman’s and Dori Laub’s influential analysis of the impossibilities/inadequacies of communicating the traumas of genocide when the “event eliminat[es] its own witness” (p. 200). See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992).
18 Felman and Laub, Testimony.
19 Griffiths, Traumatic Possessions, 16.
20 Razack, “Stealing the Pain of Others.”
21 Griffiths, Traumatic Possessions, 16.
22 Mette Mortensen, “Connective Witnessing: Reconfiguring the Relationship between the Individual and the Collective,” Information, Communication, & Society 18, no. 1 (2015): 1393–406.
23 Richardson, Bearing Witness While Black.
24 Vivian, Commonplace Witnessing, 10.
25 Alexander, “‘Reading the Rodney King Video(s)’; Anthony Paul Farley, ‘The Black Body as Fetish Object’,” Oregon Law Review 76, no. 8 (1997): 457–536; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in 19th Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Debra Walker King, African Americans and the Culture of Pain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Ersula Ore, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019).
26 Ore, Lynching, 46.
27 King, African Americans and the Culture of Pain, 16.
28 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 3.
29 Farley, “The Black Body as Fetish Object,” 461.
30 Ersula Ore and Matthew Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation: Toward a Spatiotemporal Politics of Breathing,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 4 (2020): 443–58.
31 Ersula Ore, “Conspiring against White Pleasures,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107, no. 2 (2021): 250–1.
32 Francis Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), xx; see also Arabella Lyon and Lester C. Olson, “Special Issue on Human Rights Rhetoric: Traditions of Testifying and Witnessing,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2011); Hesford, “Documenting Violations,”; Wendy Kozol, “Radical Plurality and Visual Witnessing,” Explorations in Media Ecology 17, no. 4 (2018): 475–8; Alissa Richardson, Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
33 Hesford, “Documenting Violations,” 107, 118.
34 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Feeling Race: Theorizing the Racial Economy of Emotions,” American Sociological Review 84, no. 1 (2019): 1.
35 Bonilla-Silva, “Feeling Race,” 1.
36 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 119.
37 See, for example, Darrel Enck-Wanzer, “Trashing the System: Social Movement, Intersectional Rhetoric, and Collective Agency in the Young Lords Organization‘s Garbage Offensive,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 2 (2006): 174–201; Danielle Endres and Samantha Senda-Cook, “Location Matters: The Rhetoric of Place in Protest,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 3 (2011): 257–82; J. David Maxson, “‘Second Line to Bury White Supremacy’: Take ‘Em Down Nola, Monument Removal, and Residual Memory’,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 106, no. 1 (2020): 48–71; and Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Resisting ’National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and their Cultural Performances,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 345–65.
38 Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper, “Emotions and Social Movements,” in Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions, eds. Jan E. Stets and Jonathan H. Turner (New York: Springer, 2007), 618.
39 Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against Aids (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 3.
40 See, for example, Roberta Chevrette, Jenna Hanchey, Michael Lechuga, Aaron Hess, and Michael K. Middleton, “Rhetorical Field Methods/Rhetorical Ethnography,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication (2023). https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.1378; Michael K. Middleton, Aaron Hess, Danielle Endres, and Samantha Senda-Cook, Participatory Critical Rhetoric: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Studying Rhetoric in Situ (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015); Michael K. Middleton, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Danielle Endres, “Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods: Challenges and Tensions,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 386–406; Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard, Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press).
41 See, for example, Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Roberta Chevrette and Aaron Hess, “The FEMEN Body Can Do Everything: Generating the Agentic Bodies of Social Movement through Internal and External Rhetorics,” Communication Monographs 86, no. 4 (2019): 416–37; Amanda Nell Edgar and Andre Johnson, The Struggle over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter (Lexington, KY: Lexington Books, 2018); Phaedra Pezzulo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2007).
42 Middleton et al., Participatory Critical Rhetoric.
43 Interviews were conducted via Zoom by the first author in Spring 2021 with the assistance of students in her Undergraduate Honors Seminar, who also helped recruit some participants from their own networks. The study protocol was approved by the IRB at Middle Tennessee State University.
44 Ore, “Conspiring against White Pleasures,” 250.
45 Ore, Lynching, 28.
46 Although a full discussion exceeds the scope of this article, we recognize that the COVID-19 pandemic created unique conditions, including shelter-in-place orders and a massive increase of people working from home. This provided many people across the globe with more media exposure and, in some cases, free time, thereby facilitating the participation in digital and physical resistance. For more on how this crisis context opened space for racial discourse, see Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Color-Blind Racism in Pandemic Times,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 8, no. 3 (2022): 343–54.
47 Cohen, “Police in the US Killed 164 Black People in the First 8 Months of 2020.”
48 Angela Onwuachi-Willig, “The Trauma of Awakening to Racism: Did the Tragic Killing of George Floyd Result in Cultural Trauma for Whites?,” Houston Law Review 58, no. 4 (2021). https://houstonlawreview.org/article/22269-the-trauma-of-awakening-to-racism-did-the-tragic-killing-of-george-floyd-result-in-cultural-trauma-for-whites
49 Glenn Manigault, “Allyship and Sustaining Systemic Change.”
50 Ore, “Conspiring against White Pleasures,” 250.
51 This was also true for interviewees who were in relationships with Black men, and/or were parents to Black and biracial children.
52 Matthew Houdek and Ersula Ore, “Cultivating Otherwise Worlds and Breathable Futures,” Rhetoric, Politics, & Culture 1, no. 1 (2021): 88.
53 Matthew Houdek, “Recontextualizing Responsibility for Justice: The Lynching Trope, Racialized Temporalities, and Cultivating Breathable Futures,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18, no. 2 (2021): 140, 142.
54 Elizabeth Flynn and Ira Allen, in introduction to Flynn and Allen (eds.), “Symposium: Rhetorical Witnessing in Global Contexts,” Special Symposium, Rhetoric Review 39, no. 4 (2020): 371.
55 Griffiths, Traumatic Possessions, 13.
56 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 21.
57 King, African Americans and the Culture of Pain, 134.
58 Harrison M. Lucas III, “On the Use and Abuse of Violence for Life: Affect, Witnessing, and Protest” (MA thesis, Syracuse University, 2022), 101.
59 Desnoyers-Colas, “The Proof Is in the Hovering,” 139.
60 Danielle Endres and Mary Gould, “‘I Am Also in the Position to Use My Whiteness to Help Them Out’: The Communication of Whiteness in Service Learning,” Western Journal of Communication 73, no. 4 (2009): 430.
61 Razack, “Stealing the Pain of Others,” 378.
62 Thomas Ross, “The Rhetorical Tapestry of Race: White Innocence and Black Abstraction,” William & Mary Law Review 32, no. 1 (1990): 1.
63 Endres and Gould, “I Am Also in the Position to Use My Whiteness,” 428.
64 Razack, “Stealing the Pain of Others,” 376.
65 Flynn and Allen (eds.), “Rhetorical Witnessing in Global Contexts,” Symposium.
66 Lisa Corrigan, “On Rhetorical Criticism, Performativity, and White Fragility,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 86–8.
67 Chávez, Queer Migration Politics; Karma R. Chávez and Cindy L. Griffin, “Power, Feminisms, and Coalitional Agency: Inviting and Enacting Difficult Dialogues,” Women’s Studies in Communication 32, no. 1 (2009): 1–11; Chevrette and Hess, “The FEMEN Body”; Aimee Carillo Rowe, Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2008.
68 Carillo Rowe, Power Lines, 9.
69 Chávez and Griffin, “Power, Feminisms, and Coalitional Agency,” 8.
70 Chevrette and Hess, “The FEMEN Body,” 425.
71 Brent Malin, “Communication with Feeling: Emotion, Publicness, and Embodiment,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87, no. 2 (2001): 217.
72 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion; Bonilla-Silva, “Feeling Race”; Lisa Corrigan, Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties (University Press of Mississippi, 2020); Houdek, “Recontextualizing Responsibility”; Arun Saldanha, Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Arun Saldanha, “Reontologising Race: The Machinic Geography of Phenotype,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (2006): 9–24.
73 Casey Ryan Kelly, “White Pain,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107, no. 2 (2021): 211.
74 To further clarify how this differs from the consumption of “blackpain” previously discussed, the emotions participants described feeling in the context of protest differed from both the spectacular modes of viewing that fail to disrupt antiblackness and from the emotional outbursts from white allies that have been critiqued as white tears (See, for example, Lamiyah Bahrainwala, “Responding to White Fragility: A Manifesta of Screams,” Feral Feminisms no. 9 (2019): 21–5). While white sympathy, fragility, and tears serve to refocus attention on white individuals, the emotions we discuss in this section specifically emerged from feelings of connection and recognition across racial difference.
75 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 28.
76 Allen, “Rhetorical Witnessing,” 62, emphasis added.
77 Corrigan, Black Feelings, xxiii.
78 Corrigan, Black Feelings, xxiii.
79 Eric King Watts, Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Politics of the New Negro Movement (University of Alabama Press, 2012).
80 Allen, “Rhetorical Witnessing,” 62, emphasis added.
81 Michelle Rodino-Colocino, “Me too, #MeToo: Countering Cruelty with Empathy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2018): 97.
82 Chevrette and Hess, “The FEMEN Body,” 433; see also Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
83 Chevrette and Hess, “The FEMEN Body,” 424.
84 King, African Americans and the Culture of Pain, 131.
85 Sra Ristovska, “Witnessing and the Failure of Communication,” The Communication Review 17 (2014): 154.
86 Page and Arcy, “Politics of Collective Healing,” 338.
87 Peters, “The Perils of ‘Helpful’ White People,” paragraph 2.
88 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 31.
89 Teresa Macias, “‘Tortured Bodies’: The Biopolitics of Torture and Truth in Chile,” The International Journal of Human Rights 17, no. 1 (2013): 124.
90 This question was raised by Khadijah Costley White when an earlier version of this manuscript was presented on the panel “Black Lives Matter: Activism against Racist Violence and Hatespeech” at the International Communication Association Conference in 2022. Additional audience feedback from scholars including Tina Harris influenced the ways we consider whiteness, activism, and witnessing in this manuscript.
91 Razack, “Stealing the Pain of Others,” 378; see also Hartman, Scenes of Subjection.
92 Hesford, “Documenting Violations,” 107.
93 Hesford, “Documenting Violations,” 118.
94 Aaron Castelán Cargile, “Prejudice and Openness to the Other: Investigating Responses to Testimonies of Race-Based Suffering,” Race and Social Problems 7 (2015): 200.
95 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 6.
96 Dori Laub, “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Trauma 48, no. 1 (1991): 76.
97 See Cayo Gamber, “There Were Four Chimneys in Birkenau: Oral Histories as Rhetorical Acts of Witness,” in Rhetorical Witnessing in Global Contexts, eds. Flynn and Allen (Symposium), 382–93.
98 See also Aaron Hess, “Competing Perspectives: Using Ethnographic Methods to Study Embodied and Emplaced Rhetorics,” in Rhetorical Audiences and Reception of Rhetoric, ed. Jens E. Kjeldsen (London, UK: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2018), 220.
99 Brian T. H. Keum, “Does Witnessing Racism Online Promote Individual and Institutional Anti-Racism Advocacy among White Individuals? The Role of White Empathy, White Guilt, and White Fear of Other Races,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 24, no. 11 (2021): 757.
100 King, African Americans and the Culture of Pain, 59.
101 King, African Americans and the Culture of Pain, 59.
102 King, African Americans and the Culture of Pain, 80.
103 Dennis A. Lynch, “Rhetorics of Proximity: Empathy in Temple Grandin and Cornel West,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1998): 6.
104 Bonnie Ruberg, “Empathy and Its Alternatives: Deconstructing the Rhetoric of ‘Empathy’ in Video Games,” Communication, Culture, and Critique 13, no. 1 (2020): 66–7.
105 Laura Kwak, “Introduction to Section One,” in At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour on Terror, eds. Suvendrini Perera and Sherene H. Razack (University of Toronto Press, 2014), 22.
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Roberta Chevrette
Roberta Chevrette (PhD, Arizona State University, Tempe) is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. Her research interrogates relationships among rhetoric and popular culture, identity, and social justice using queer, feminist, anti-racist, and postcolonial frameworks. Along with numerous articles and book chapters, she is coauthor of the book Dangerous Dames: Representing Female-Bodied Empowerment in Postfeminist Media (Peter Lang Publishing).
Aaron Hess
Aaron Hess (PhD, Arizona State University, Tempe) is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communication in the School of Applied Sciences and Arts on the Downtown Phoenix campus of Arizona State University. His research interests include participatory methods in rhetoric, digital rhetoric, and ethos. He is the co-author of Participatory Critical Rhetoric: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Studying Rhetoric in Situ (Lexington Press) and co-editor of Theorizing Digital Rhetoric (Routledge).