Black Lives Matter

As the movement is still relatively new, the literature wrestling with Black Lives Matter is nascent. There is general agreement about the history – most argue that the movement began in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal of the murder of Trayvon Martin.Footnote ² There is also general agreement about what the movement stands for. Theoretically, the hashtag encapsulated both a normative desire – that Black lives should matter (even though, based on state practices – particularly state police practices – they didn’t seem to) – and a descriptive statement, that Black lives did matter, even if only to Black people. Further, as the movement often focused on working-class victims (predominantly Black men, which to a certain extent mirrors the disproportionate rate at which Black men are victimised by police actions) with weak connections to the economy and is led disproportionately by queer women, it describes a desire to enfold and recognise populations usually kept outside of the boundaries of Blackness.Footnote ³ Particularly in the United States, where Blacks in the South were disfranchised from the end of the 19th century to the mid-1960s, Black elites attempted to gain citizenship rights by getting black populations to adhere to mainstream norms and values, a strategy of respectability politics.Footnote ⁴ By claiming that figures such as Eric Garner (who was engaged in the illegal practice of selling individual cigarettes when he was murdered) were worth supporting and fighting for, the movement expresses an explicitly anti-respectability politics.Footnote ⁵

Although there are critics who posit that the movement’s lack of an anti-capitalist focus is damning,Footnote ⁶ there is general agreement about the movement’s results. Politically, the movement generated several electoral victories, sending activists into public office. It also generated local, state, and federal legislation designed to rein in police spending. It further forced the federal government to investigate a few large police departments. Indirectly, it led to trials of a number of police officers and brought more attention to police violence more broadly.Footnote ⁷ Further, as racism was viewed as a fundamental cause of police violence, it indirectly led to an interrogation of racism more broadly.

One of the key aspects that made the movement possible was technological advances.Footnote ⁸ Advances in social media technology made it possible to inexpensively and almost instantaneously communicate messages to tens of thousands of people across thousands of miles. Advances in computing technology – the rise of the smartphone specifically – made inexpensive high-quality video recordings possible. The first advances in technology made it possible for the reflections of two activists to become a mobilising tool. The second then made it possible to connect discrete instances of state-sponsored/sanctioned violence to the growing movement. Movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and Black Lives Matter do not happen without these advances. Social media platforms facilitate information vital to protest development, as well as the exchange of emotional content that generates the intensity required to develop and sustain movements.Footnote ⁹ However these advances in and of themselves do not explain one dynamic essential to Black Lives Matter specifically – its spread across the United States and the world in areas without significant numbers of Black citizens/denizens. Simply because it is possible to communicate with large numbers of people across the world (or across the United States) does not necessarily mean that such communication would generate the type of protests that we have seen.

I argue that one element of the transnational movement that has gone relatively uninterrogated is Black popular culture. US Black sports figures not only took symbolic actions (here US football player Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel rather than stand during the performance of the US national anthem stands out) but engaged in work stoppages (both the NBA and the WNBA as well as Major League Baseball postponed games due to player action, and US tennis player Naomi Osaka cancelled her appearance in a major tennis tournament).Footnote ¹⁰ These individuals used their platform to express support for the movement and its tenets and in doing so increased its legitimacy both domestically and internationally. Further, even before this we see one specific form of popular culture consistently articulate a critique of police action and support for its disproportionately Black, male, and working-class victims: hip hop.

International Relations and Black pop culture

In a seminal 2009 article Kyle Grayson, Matt Davies, and Simon Philpott carved out a new research agenda within International Relations, arguing that popular culture represents a critical but under-examined element of world politics.Footnote ¹¹ While institutional arrangements, interests, decision-making bureaucracies, and various state elites remain important in examining the relationships between state, market, and civil society, popular culture can often serve as a vehicle through which these relationships are articulated as well as a vehicle through which these relationships can be contested and/or disrupted. Along these lines, they argue that more attention should paid to the various and sundry ways that pop culture represents and constitutes politics. Following up on this, scholars have articulated a range of themes, from recognising pop culture as the product of a particular type of increasingly global political economy, to studying the popular as a site for mobilisation, to examining its representational aspects.Footnote ¹²

This line of research is intellectually and politically fruitful, as it helps us understand the thinking behind Ronald Reagan’s 1983 articulation of his Strategic Defense Initiative as ‘Star Wars’ (even though the initiative itself had little to do with the film), as well as the Bush administration’s reliance on the character Jack Bauer (of US television show 24 fame) to both develop and defend its counter-terrorism policy.Footnote ¹³ Popular culture can serve as a vehicle through which broader publics understand international phenomena, it can serve as a site for certain types of mobilisation, and inasmuch as it is an international commodity, it is both shaped by and shapes political economy. But there are gaps, and I will focus on three. The first is its focus on the visual and relatedly the textual as opposed to the aural.Footnote ¹⁴ The second is its relative inattention to the role of race and racial politics.Footnote ¹⁵ The third is the relative absence of pop culture figures as elites capable of producing politics themselves. The consequence of the first is that we ignore other possible means of transmission, production, and consumption of geopolitical conceptions, and further that in ignoring other potential means we further reify an optic regime. The consequence of the second is that we double down on long-standing Eurocentric imaginings by locating agency and power primarily if not solely in the West (articulated racially as ‘white’). The consequence of the third is that we miss a range of elites who have the capacity to significantly shape international attitudes and politics.

I would suggest that to a certain extent the sonic gap is not a gap that comes from the relative lack of scholarly attention paid to sound, but rather a gap that comes from not recognising pre-existing work. For example, Marilyn Franklin’s work explicitly examining the sound politics of International Relations was published before the attempts to carve out a research agenda,Footnote ¹⁶ and in it we see a range of careful attempts to examine the role of music. I would also suggest that the body of work that examines the racial politics of popular culture (and the international politics of sport) is extensive (and too long to list here). As we can conceive of Popular Culture in World Politics as an attempt to integrate a range of fields then, I would suggest that there are two fields that can bear further integration: the growing field of sonic studies and the field of Black studies. Below, I draw on the work of two scholars, Errol Henderson and Richard Iton, in order to trace a few potential lines of inquiry that help us think through the relationship between Black pop culture and Black Lives Matter domestically and internationally.

Normative and descriptive assessments of Black popular culture and politics

Although as I note above the research that examines the relationship between racial politics and pop culture is extensive, two recent works stand out in particular in examining the relationship between pop culture and Black politics specifically, Richard Iton’s 2008 In Search of the Black Fantastic and Errol Henderson’s 2019 The Revolution Will Not Be Theorized. While the two seek to answer two different questions (what is the relationship between Black popular culture and politics? What should be the relationship between Black pop culture and politics?), they both suggest that the unique history of African Americans made culture a specifically political space for the articulation and generation of domestic and international politics. They make three sets of claims.

As African Americans were either explicitly disfranchised (in the American South through Jim Crow laws) or implicitly disfranchised (in the American North largely through rendering white populations incapable of voting for non-white candidates) for much of the twentieth century, the capacity they did have to make durable changes in American politics were politically limited. However, the cultural terrain was a different animal. American popular culture not only relied disproportionately on African American talent, many of the genres associated with American popular culture were created by African Americans.Footnote ¹⁷ As Iton notes this led to very specific relationships between ‘extra-state mobilization … state-focused protest organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) … and the media of religiosity and popular culture’.Footnote ¹⁸ In part because Blacks were disfranchised from political participation and hence unable to elect political representation, Black artists themselves often acted in a political capacity, using their artistic platform to speak out against racial discrimination. In the Civil Rights/Black Power era, artists such as John Coltrane and Nina Simone used Black popular music to articulate visceral critiques of racist state violence in works like ‘Alabama’ and ‘Mississippi Goddamn’ respectively, and figures such as Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier used their resources to directly aid the Civil Rights Movement. Further, there is a significant institutional element here, as in specific moments Black cultural institutions have served to organise Black political capacity in inflection points such as the US Civil War.Footnote ¹⁹

Though as I note both are particularly interested in African American politics, they suggest that the work Black popular culture performed was not only domestic but transnational in nature. As race was not simply politically constructed domestically but transnationally,Footnote ²⁰ US Blacks tended to understand and construct their circumstances as linked to black populations across the globe. As Black popular culture genres like jazz circulate, politics often circulate through them. The United States used jazz and artists such as Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie to contest Communist claims of American hypocrisy and develop ties in the growing Third World. In turn, both artists used these opportunities to push the United States on domestic issues.Footnote ²¹ In this instance, we see both Black cultural production itself functioning to spread ideas and ideals about American democracy and Black artists acting as ambassadors (for the US government) on the one hand and as informal political representatives (for African American constituencies) on the other. And this dynamic is multidirectional. As the Third World asserts itself (in instances through the actions of Black elites educated in historically Black colleges and universities), Black US artists shift artistically and politically – beat poet Amiri Baraka (née Leroi Jones) develops and tests theories of cultural revolution in Newark, New Jersey after protesting the murder of Amilcar Cabral and in 1972 is one of the leaders of the National Black Political Assembly (the first post–civil rights era attempt to bring together African American elected officials and African American political activists for the purpose of creating a unified African American political agenda).Footnote ²² In this latter instance, the content of his poetry changes, and then his own political behaviour changes.

Finally, recognising that the cultural arena itself was shaped by political economy, they suggest that the specific political content was overdetermined by the institutional and technological arrangements that dictated how popular culture was produced and circulated. For Iton, the technological shift that made the visual more important in Black popular culture and also increased the number of avenues through which Black popular culture could circulate (here the development of cable television stands out) both generates changes in Black popular culture and also renders it more fraught in important ways because it became increasingly public (that is, available to populations that were not African American). Henderson, relying on the work of Harold Cruse, suggested that the lack of ownership of the means of production had significant consequences for the revolutionary potential of Black popular culture.Footnote ²³ Inasmuch as the cultural apparatus became a more critical aspect of the nation’s economy, the economic benefits of cultural production would accrue increasingly to Black communities themselves (as opposed to the white owners of the means of cultural production), and owning the means of production would likely create the cultural shift in Black and white attitudes alike that would generate the conditions for revolution.

These three aspects speak to the core themes identified by Popular Culture and World Politics (PCWP) and popular geopolitics scholars. PCWP and popular geopolitics scholars believe that pop culture represents a core site of political production, and we see this in Black Fantastic and Revolution (and by extension in the work on Black popular culture and politics more broadly). Black popular culture serves as a powerful vehicle of political production and political critique. PCWP and popular geopolitics scholars are interested in the ways that various political actors use pop culture to generate political support, and we see this in the work on the politics of Black popular culture. Finally, PCWP and geopolitics scholars are attentive to the role political economy plays in these dynamics, and we see this in the work on Black popular culture as well. But given the unique history of African Americans, we see much more of a focus on artists and culture workers themselves, and much more of a focus on the sonic. How might we use these insights to reflect upon Black Lives Matter organising?

As Henderson published Revolution in 2019, he was able to examine Black Lives Matter protests up to but not including the George Floyd protests of 2020 (unfortunately, Richard Iton passed away in 2013). He suggested that advances in social media technology that enabled Black Lives Matter make a Crusean strategy of Black cultural revolution far more possible. He notes that Black Lives Matter activism has generated a shift in cultural production (hip hop and sports in particular) that works as a force multiplier. However, in part because he was interested in US dynamics specifically, he did not focus on the particular role Black popular culture and Black Lives Matter activism plays in shifting international politics as opposed to domestic US politics.

Hip hop and the neoliberal turn

Scholars and activists alike have investigated the role neoliberalisation plays in the contemporary moment. Most situate its beginnings in the early seventies, and in the United States the successful enforcement of austerity on New York City looms large.Footnote ²⁴ It is not a coincidence that most historians also locate the beginnings of hip hop in the Bronx in 1972. While President Ford did not metaphorically tell New York City to ‘drop dead’ (in response to pleas from administrators to provide federal funds to deal with municipal debt) until 1975, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (then counsellor to President Richard Nixon) had suggested a policy of ‘benign neglect’ on race in 1970 that had already begun to shape the policy that would decimate the Bronx, the borough most associated with hip hop’s development.Footnote ²⁵ If the core elements of what we now know as hip hop (MCing, breakdancing, DJing, and graffiti) come together in the mid-seventies in New York, the core policy elements of what we associate with neoliberalism (reduced labour rights, a reduction in the ability to collect taxes, a reduction in social service provision, an increase in privatisation, and in increase in punitive approaches to crime) come together in the same space at around the same time.

Early scholarship on hip hop posited it as a direct response to the neoliberal turn and suggested that the generation of Black youth growing up under and with it were shaped politically by consuming it. Further they suggested a unique politics associated with it.Footnote ²⁶ Hip-hop artists seek to ‘represent’ and in so doing make their realist representations reflect and stand in for African American life writ large. In my own work I found empirical support for these claims.Footnote ²⁷ Realist examinations of urban life constituted a significant element of rap and hip hop produced during the nineties and into the 21st century, with a descriptive realist component that attempted to draw the listener/viewer into a world depicted without filter (or critique) and an argumentative realist component that, while drawing the listener/viewer in, provides a critique of that selfsame world. While in complicated ways I found that rap and hip hop tended to reproduce the neoliberal turn in Black politics rather than contest it, the one critical exception to this complicated rendering was in its approach to the police and police violence. NWA’s (Niggaz With Attitudes) ‘Fuck Tha Police’ and Ice T.’s ‘Cop Killer’ were the important records here, clearly articulating how police tend to function in working-class communities; however, they were by no means the only ones. Indeed, both aurally and visually (as rap and hip hop began to circulate through music videos and through film and television) we see rap and hip hop serve as perhaps the one consistent space in which we see a rich critique of police violence. By way of comparison, the 1993 National Black Politics Study, one of the most important surveys of Black American attitudes conducted in the early nineties, contained only one question examining the police (asking respondents whether police were an important means of stopping gang violence or too much like another gang themselves to stop gang violence – note that both focus on gang violence rather than police violence itself).Footnote ²⁸

Now when hip hop first develops, it is part of ‘the black counterpublic’,Footnote ²⁹ and it functions both as a vehicle of popular entertainment (to be sure there is variation here – even though graffiti is a critical component of hip hop it does not circulate in quite the same way as rap does as it is not commodified in the same way) and as a vehicle of intra-racial political communication and critique. However hip hop circulates, not only through music but also through music videos, movies and television, fashion, and sports, it becomes far more public. First-person realist narratives create an affinity between the listener and the artist. With critical exceptions, the individuals harmed through violent encounters either with police or with individuals acting like police, were – as early hip-hop MCs represent themselves – Black and working-class men. The more these images (and the ideas associated with them) circulate, the more individuals outside of communities like Compton, California can sympathise with them. Further even as standard narratives focus on ‘crime scripts’ that reproduce ideas that police solve rather than produce crimeFootnote ³⁰ and as television police procedurals (which have for decades constituted the highest-rated television shows in America) tend to overemphasise police professionalism and underemphasise police violence,Footnote ³¹ it was arguably hip hop that consistently articulated a counter-hegemonic concept of policing. Further, although its gender politics are incredibly complicated, it is hip hop that particularly in its early decades articulated what could be called an anti-respectability politics, a politics that I suggest Black Lives Matter activists drew upon in their organising.

This increased the degree to which black populations themselves were prone to understand the tragic deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown as well as that of Trayvon Martin as linked to one another and linked to their own lives (even President Obama noted that what happened to Martin could have happened to his own children if he had had boys rather than girls), hip hop worked to prime non-Black audiences to think in similar ways. When activists used social media to mobilise populations, the populations they tended to mobilise were populations already most likely to receive, accept, and respond favourably to the anti-policing argument.

But what explains the international dynamic?

Hip-hop serves to reproduce ideas about urban space during the neoliberal turn. This reproduction has political consequences organisationally and attitudinally. But with the growing way that populations and culture travels across borders, particularly within and through metropolitan areas such as New York, Paris, and Tokyo, hip hop now circulates globally. And with its circulation a few different things happen. People are exposed to the ideas embedded in hip hop. These ideas communicate notions of race, space, and time that are uniquely American. But these notions have the capacity to then be translated and ‘glocalised’.Footnote ³² The early literature on hip hop and rap in Eastern Europe,Footnote ³³ England,Footnote ³⁴ Southern Europe,Footnote ³⁵ Australia,Footnote ³⁶ Japan,Footnote ³⁷ and CubaFootnote ³⁸ focused on how hip hop shaped processes of local identity formation. However, I suggest that we can understand hip hop not only as a vehicle by which youth develop their own identities but also as a vehicle of transnational political production. To an extent, particularly because hip hop is understood as a Black American export, as an art form that was largely created by and for Black working-class youth, marginalised populations have used it to engage in political critique.

The beginnings of rap music in France reveal the power of American media circulation through a variety of domestic and international routes. Fab Freddy included a French rap track as the B-side of a 12” recording he released in the United States in 1979. Later that same year Chagrin d’Amour released an album in France that French artists today largely consider to be the first French rap album. During the same general period, Afrika Bambaataa introduced rap and breakdancing to French youth by establishing a branch of the Zulu Nation in a Parisian banlieue.Footnote ³⁹ French rap was largely an underground phenomenon during its early years, with very little airplay on the radio and little to no coverage on television.

The first French response to rap was threefold, with state officials recognising it, French cultural conservatives demeaning it, and French consumers supporting it. The Ministry of Culture under Jack Lang recognised both rap and graffiti. This did not increase its consumption but served as a symbolic gesture. French conservatives on the other hand argued against this move, noting that recognising rap, graffiti, and other more popular forms of culture in effect rendered the term ‘culture’ meaningless. But French consumers supported the art form, and by 1989 French rap was so popular within the country that French artists were able to release an all-French rap anthology (Rapattitudes).Footnote ⁴⁰ By the early 1990s, not only had rap become one of the most popular forms of music within France (particularly among French youth) but like its American counterpart, its production and circulation had become infused with an aggressive political critique.

One of the first political institutions to come under critique was the French police. In an article comparing the repression of hip hop in France and in the United States, Prévos cites Ministere AMER’s ‘Sacrifice de poulets’ (‘Sacrifice of Chickens’ – Prévos notes that ‘chickens’ operates in France the way that ‘pig’ does in the United States vis à vis the police) as one example.Footnote ⁴¹ Ministere AMER was one of the more prominent French rap groups of the early nineties, their name being an acronym (A.M.E.R. stands for ‘Action Musique et Rap’ or ‘Action Music and Rap’) that alludes to combining political action and hip hop. There are three aspects of this particular track that are important. The first is that thematically it shares a great deal with Ice T.’s ‘Cop Killer’, not only in its trenchant critique of the police – who operated with regard to immigrant suburban youth in similar ways as their American counterparts – but also in its prescription (hence the term ‘sacrifice’).

The second is that this track’s production was also designed to aid in the circulation of another cultural production that dealt with immigrant youth in French banlieues – the French film La Haine (The Hate).Footnote ⁴² The third is the political response it engendered. Although the track and the album met with critical acclaim, members of the police union viewed the track to be an incitement to attack the police. Again, this is similar to the way that ‘Cop Killer’ and ‘Fuck Tha Police’ and the artists associated with them were treated by American law enforcement. But in the French case speech outside of the bounds of cultural production urging attacks on the police is not protected. The song ‘Sacrifice de poulets’ can call for all manner of attacks on the police with no sanction – but making comments outside of the confines of the recording studio (or concert performance) is another matter. Ministere AMER made a number of critical comments allegedly calling for youth to defend themselves against the police, and these comments were used by the police union to prosecute the group, who were later found guilty of having called for the killing of police officers and of insulting them and were condemned to pay over FF330,000 (approximately $59,000).Footnote ⁴³

The group Supreme NTM (NTM is an acronym for ‘Nique Ta Mère’ or ‘Fuck Your Mother’) also has a history of combining social action and hip hop using its music to engage in critiques of the police and other aspects of the French state and French civil society on the one hand and actually engaging in political activity on the other. Songs like ‘Qui paiera les dégâts’ (‘Who Will Pay for the Damages’), which deals with the penalties associated with the French abandonment of (immigrant) youth, and ‘Police’, both taken from the 1993 album J’appuie sur la gâchette (I Squeeze the Trigger) set the stage for much of the more aggressive French rap that followed. When the ultra-right political party Front National were able to elect a number of mayors to cities with large North African immigrant populations on anti-immigrant (and anti-pop culture) platforms fuelled by anxiety, former Minister of Culture Jack Lang along with a number of opposing political forces organised a concert at which Supreme NTM performed. Between tracks the group allegedly referred to the police as fascists. In response to their presence in general, and to the language they used to refer to police between performances, they too were punished by the French penal system.Footnote ⁴⁴

Black Lives Matter activists within the United States were able to reorient how US Black and non-black populations alike thought about police and the disproportionately Black victims of police violence. Arguably, they did so by drawing upon ideas of police and policing generated in part by Black popular culture in general and by hip hop in particular. As hip hop circulates internationally we see youth increasingly use it to not only articulate their identity but also to articulate a critique of state-sanctioned police violence. Just as we can attribute the spread of domestic Black Lives Matter protests in places with little to no black populations to the spread of Black popular culture, I suggest we can attribute a part of the expansion of Black Lives Matter protests internationally to its spread as well.