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 26th, 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
