Hear Us, See Us

Tiara Bertram

Final Exam ENGL306

Dr. Stephanie Brown

6 May 2016

It’s hard to ignore something that demands your attention.

For most of American history, the plight of Black people has been ignored. History classes in primary school briefly go over the terrors of slavery, but then push it away with the air of “this is the bad thing America did, but it’s over now and no longer needs to be talked about”. We honor the endurance of the Civil Rights movement with great shopping discounts on Martin Luther King Day. However, the daily experience of marginalization is often justified by an intricate system of multi-layered oppression, or otherwise ignored.

The Black Student Union decided that they would not stand for this societal dismissal, and organized the “Hear Us, See Us” Rally, a protest demonstrated that identifies itself under the umbrella of the Black Lives Matter protest movement, in memoriam of Trayvon Martin.

On the night of February 26th, 2012, Trayvon Martin, a 17 year old black boy living in Florida, was shot down while heading home from a convenience store by a neighborhood vigilante [maniac] George Zimmerman. Trayvon’s family, devastated and angry about the blatant racism that led to his death, held a press conference to publicize the story and demand that Zimmerman be brought to justice and charged with an actual crime instead of getting away with a “self defense” plea. The story struck a chord with the Black community, for this incident is not an anomaly, but a regular occurrence. It is a part of the Black American experience; an unarmed young Black male is killed by law enforcement (whether actual or imagined, as is the case with Zimmerman) for a ‘perceived threat’. The perceived threat is, more often than not, the color of his skin.

Thus, the Black Lives Matter protest was born. The goal of the movement is to vocally publicize the pervasiveness racism in the legal systems we deem as objective, and to demand that this treatment stop (Lawrence 2015). Of course, in the modern age of high-speed internet and social media, to publicly vocalize an issue is to hashtag it. This computational turn is really what caused the events that sparked the movement to gain publicity and for the movement itself to go forward (Trere 2015).

While #BlackLivesMatter became a national movement, it’s driven by local efforts, often by college students at various campuses (Lawrence 2015). At the U of A, the Black Student Union (along with the African American Student Affairs interns) took up the cause, and organized the “Hear Us, See Us” Rally. The rally was designed to be part silent protest, part memoriam. It was set for 5pm on Thursday, February 26th. About twenty people assembled. For the first half hour, the Black Student Union and the AASA interns assembled on the Admin Plaza, wearing all black and black hoodies, and stood silently while holding signs with slogans such as “BLACK LIVES MATTER” “REST IN POWER, TRAYVON” and “HEAR US, SEE US” written in large letters. A handful of people walked by and noticed the assembly, but did not say anything. More students who were part of the planning joined and stood in silence and solidarity with us. Those who didn’t have signs would often hold up their hands in the “Don’t Shoot” pose, hoodie’s pulled low over their faces.

After the extended moment of silence, the BSU co-president Kevyn Butler had the protesters (many of whom were still arriving) reconfigure in a circle in the walkway. The other co-president, Trinity Goss, then went on to read a somber spoken word piece of resilience. Small slips of paper, containing the names of other Black people who were murdered by law enforcement, circulated around the group to be read out loud. By the end, the protest was about 40 members strong.

This protest relied on three main rhetorical strategies: pathos, kairos, and body rhetoric. Pathos was overwhelmingly the most important one, with the program in place for the protest event relying heavily on emotional response. For one, many White Americans automatically feel uneasy when there’s a gathering of Black people in public spaces, especially in that sort of “gangsta” attire of oversized, dark colored hoodies, and University of Arizona is a majority Wite school. The thirty-minute moment of silence is intended to make the observer think about what the person in the protest is saying with their poster or body language. The reading out loud the spoken word poetry and the names of all those who were killed elicit empathy and pity, perhaps indignation at the injustice of it all.

The rally also used Kairos; that is, timing. The time element of the moment of silence portion was pretty attention-grabbing in and of itself, to have a group of people standing silently sometimes says more than to have everyone yelling some sort of slogan. The date, February 26^th, was the third year anniversary of Trayvon’s death. Also, the rally was held at 5pm, which was supposed to be a time when there would be students headed towards the union for dinner and the rally would be visible.

Body Rhetoric was also an important aspect of the rally. One of the controversies of the issue is that Blacks are shot for the police claiming they ‘perceived threat’ even when the Black person has clearly indicated that they are surrendering, such as with Eric Garner’s “I can’t breathe” and the widely recognized “Don’t shoot!” hands up pose. Many protesters who were not holding signs raised their arms that way, which is a clear symbolic action that made the protest recognizable.

The Black Student Union declared the event a success. However, the goal and namesake of the protest-- to be seen and heard--was not quite accomplished. There wasn’t the same rush for dinner as there is for lunch at the union, so visibility was mediocre. Of those who did walk by, only three people outside of the BSU/AASA community stopped to hear what was being said during the memoriam part of the protest. Finally, even though there is a new hastagged name every few months with a new viral story of a Black life unjustly taken, these stories don’t stay at the forefront of for very long, and nothing has actually changed. Without meaning to, this protest, and it’s larger umbrella protest of Black Lives Matter, might be fading into the consummation stage of the Protest life cycle.

An effort that might help bring this movement to a more active state is by perhaps choosing a different location for it. Heany and Rojas discuss how location can be a powerful way to frame a protest. “The invocation of place sparks a mobilization of myriad actors who seek to lay claim to the proper interpretation of place” (246). One location that would be a good place to stage a protest in this movement would be at the Fruitvale metro station of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, the site of Oscar Grant III’s murder in 2009.  Of course, this isn’t feasible for the University of Arizona protest organizers, who are more or less tied to campus as this protest happens while class is in session. The Admin Plaza on the U of A campus is a recognized location for public discourse, and many student-led protest activities have occurred there, so by also being there, HUSU could easily be read as a protest. However, perhaps having the protest in the union would have actually garnered more of the response and engagement from other members in the student body.

What really needs to happen is mobilization behind getting a law passed that requires body cameras on police officers, and directs funding towards implementing that in police departments that serve large minority populations first, and then on to hopefully every police force in America. . The only reason Oscar Grant’s murderer was actually convicted of criminal charges is because so many people had recorded the incident on their cell phones and were able to record the event from numerous angles.

            In conclusion, the BLM movement and the HUSU movement have a lot of work to do still, and perhaps a refreshing of strategy will reactivate this campaign for justice.

Works Cited

Lawrence, Charles R. "The Fire This Time: Black Lives Matter, Abolitionist Pedagogy and the Law." Journal of Legal Education, vol 65 issue 2, 1 Nov 2015. Hein Online. 2016.

Treré, Emiliano "Information, Communciation & Society". Taylor and Francis Group. 2015