WOMEN’S STUDIES IN COMMUNICATION

2016, VOL. 39, NO. 4, 375–379

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2016.1226654

(Re)Imagining Intersectional Democracy from Black Feminism

to Hashtag Activism
Sarah J. Jackson
Communication Studies Department, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

To say that Black lives matter1 has become both a technological and cultural phenomenon in
the United States is an understatement. The hashtag and those discursively linked to it have
been used more than 100 million times, and the visibility and persistence of Black lives
matter activists—from highway shutdowns in America’s largest cities to the takeover of
presidential candidates’ political rallies—have led to widespread social and political debate
about what has been dubbed “the new civil rights movement” (Freelon et al.; Jackson and
Foucault Welles, “#Ferguson”). Yet there seems to be considerable consternation among
academics, journalists, and politicians about how to incorporate the standpoints of a new
generation of activists into our national politics. In this essay I discuss how these activists
have manifested Black feminist impulses through social media and beyond, and suggest it
is the responsibility of those invested in (re)imagining a more democratic process to closely
consider the radically intersectional lessons of the current movement.
The Black lives matter movement can be traced to the legacy of the larger Black freedom
movement, but also more recently to the work of millennial Black activist organizations
like the Dream Defenders and the Black Youth Project 100 (Cohen and Jackson). Members
of these organizations and the young people who align themselves with their work have
come of age in a country overwhelmingly celebratory of its racial progress but silent on
the lasting impact of its racial sins. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, among others, has detailed
how neoliberal color-blind politics have dangerously entrenched the American impulse
to reject explicit political critiques of white supremacy as unnecessary or outmoded.
Similarly, millennials have borne witness to an America claiming postfeminism alongside
seemingly constant attacks on women’s bodies and bodily autonomy, and a country
simultaneously moving toward greater lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer
(LGBTQ) inclusion while silencing queer critiques and bodies that do not mold to the
mainstream (McRobbie; Walters). Today’s racial justice activists have responded to these
political contradictions with discourse and tactics both familiar and unfamiliar to members
of the old guard. In particular, millennial activists have rejected the respectability politics
that guided much of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and have turned to
new technologies as tools for the promulgation and solidification of messages, nurturing a
counterpublic community that centers the voices of those most often at the margins.
Black Lives Matter’s organizational founders, and other members of the larger
Movement for Black Lives collective, have insisted on discourses of intersectionality that
value and center all Black lives, including, among others, Black women, femmes, and queer

CONTACT Sarah J. Jackson [email protected] Communication Studies Department, Northeastern University,

204 Lake Hall, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
© 2016 The Organization for Research on Women and Communication
376 S. J. JACKSON

and trans folk.2 This stands in contrast to the impulses of the historical Black freedom
movement, which chose to center cisgender Black men in racial justice struggles, intention-
ally and strategically marginalizing cisgender Black women and queer folks who might be
seen as unworthy of rights within the logics of capitalist heteropatriarchy (Smith). As Alicia
Garza explains in “Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement” (among other public
interviews and writing), the phrase and hashtag were first publicly used in 2013 as a
response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the 2012 murder of teenager Trayvon
Martin, but represent an idea much larger than that singular case or moment.
Along with other Black Lives Matters founders Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, Garza
has long insisted on the radical intersectionality of the phrase, writing:
Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black
people by police and vigilantes. It goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent
within some Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black
and buy Black, keeping straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters,
queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all. Black Lives
Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented
folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. (Garza)

It matters that Garza, Tometi, and Cullors are women, Garza and Cullors are queer, and
Tometi is the daughter of immigrants; their activism prior to and since the founding of
Black Lives Matter includes organizing domestic workers, immigration activism, criminal
justice reform, advocating for victims of domestic violence, and health care rights. Thus,
the founders of Black Lives Matter not only live intersectional lives but have long been
engaged with intersectional activism. For Garza, Cullors, and Tometi, the personal and
political are truly intertwined and the political is unquestionably intersectional.
Of course, contemporary activists have not succeeded in centering intersectional
concerns from within a void. Decades of work—particularly by Black and queer feminist
academics and activists like Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks,
and Patricia Hill Collins, plus the painfully slow but increasing inclusion of Americans who
experience gender, race, and/or class oppression in institutions of higher education—have
exposed a growing number of young Americans to academic theories of intersectionality
early in their politicization and education. Further, grassroots community-organizing
traditions that have been practiced and refined for decades by Black women like Fannie
Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Marsha P. Johnson have empowered new generations of Black
women to demand their experiences be made central to community concerns. Thus, the
aspiration of the new radical Black politic is for Black teenage mothers, homeless Black
trans people, and queer Black androgynes to matter in our national political consciousness
as much as anyone else.
The visibility of these efforts is unsurprisingly mired in an evolving ideological battle
between the margins, where intersectional concerns are centered, and the mainstream,
where politics simultaneously make minute accommodations of intersectional frameworks
while silencing larger critiques. Pushback against the contemporary politics of radical
intersectionality comes from many sites, some painfully close. Primarily, mainstream insti-
tutions and elites, through discursive absences, have erased intersectional concerns from
the most visible accounts of and responses to contemporary activism. This erasure has been
perpetuated by those the movement would like to consider allies, like President Barack
 WOMEN’S STUDIES IN COMMUNICATION 377

Obama and sympathetic journalists who often exclude women, girls, and trans and queer
folk on the still too rare occasions they directly address racialized state violence; and by
demagogues on the right who have proudly declared themselves enemies of the movement
they denigrate using old narratives of Black pathology and new ones of a mythical color
blindness.
Further, some old-guard members of the civil rights movement, many of whom represent
a middle-class, churchgoing, Black elite, have themselves erased the intersectional concerns
of contemporary activists by clinging to values of respectability, and members of both
the feminist and LGBTQ establishment have suggested the tactics, politics, and style of
Black lives matter activists are divisive. And finally, the cultural impulse toward centering
male activists has created some rupture in the movement over the rising celebrity of
figures like DeRay McKesson instead of women organizers like Garza, Tometi, and
Cullors (Cobb).
Yet I suggest it is twenty-first-century activists, as exemplified by the Black lives matter
movement, who have finally succeeded in making intersectional issues of racial oppression
visible to mainstream America. Their tools have been both the networked counterpublics
which nourish them and the physical shedding of respectability in how they interrupt and
take up space in the political and cultural places that have too long included them only if
they willingly remain at the margins. The latter has been illustrated repeatedly in 2015 and
2016 as Black lives matter activists have insisted on the right to space, speech, and critique
at Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders events. As I write, queer Black lives matter activists
have gained national attention by withdrawing from the San Francisco Pride parade to
protest increased police presence and are holding a sit-in at Toronto Pride, demanding
the exclusion of police and the inclusion of resources for queer disabled people and queer
Black youth.
The hashtags that have arisen alongside and in collusion with #BlackLivesMatter are
similarly reflective of this unrepentantly intersectional Black liberation politic. In online
counterpublic networks, Black women—cis and trans, some everyday citizens with little
access to institutional power and others media personalities, some queer, some straight,
some poor and disabled—have played an outsized role in shaping recent national conversa-
tions about everything from police brutality to gender identity to popular culture, with the
creation of hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter, #GirlsLikeUs, and #OscarsSoWhite (Bailey and
Gossett; Jackson and Foucault Welles, “Hijacking”). Among others, Black women have
created and popularized hashtags that observe the raced aspects of street harassment,
center the experiences of incarcerated Black trans women, offer interventions to mainstream
white feminist erasures of Black women’s experiences, and critique the appropriation and
commodification of Black women’s styles.
Certainly there are limits to the democratic possibilities of online engagement.
The mainstream logics of scholarly research, journalism, and politics have sometimes
reinterpreted the counterpublic discourses created online in ways that strip them of their
meanings and make their context and creators invisible (Kingston Mann). Further, the
internet itself, including the technological architecture of social media spaces, has complex
ties to projects of militarism, advertising, and surveillance that tip the scales of power
against counterpublics (Foster and McChesney). Yet hashtags arising from a Black feminist
politic take advantage of this architecture to perform the two basic functions of
378 S. J. JACKSON

counterpublic discourse: reflect the experiences and needs of a marginalized community

and call on mainstream politics to listen and respond.
In June 2016, for example, the hashtag #GirlIGuessImWithHer spread quickly across
the Twittersphere as voters disenchanted with the limited possibilities of the current
democratic process resigned themselves to supporting Hillary Clinton. Like the other
hashtags noted here, #GirlIGuessImWithHer was started by a Black woman in what both
scholars and the media have come to refer to as “Black Twitter” (Sharma; Florini). In its
very language, the underlying ability of “Girl I Guess” to laugh, snark, and sigh at being
in an always-exhausting position of not having one’s full interests represented in politics
reflects a unique form of communication typified by Black women’s speech (Bailey and
Gumbs; Houston). The hashtag, which almost immediately was picked up by a diversity
of Twitter users, intentionally rearticulated the Clinton political slogan #ImWithHer,
generating discussion and debate with those engaged in mainstream politics. Those using
#GirlIGuessImWithHer cited intersectional concerns regarding Hillary Clinton’s role in
the 1994 Crime Bill, welfare reform, and more recent policy initiatives they believe have
had a deleterious impact on women and people of color globally.
The impulse to dismiss communication that arises from a counterpublic centering
millennial Black feminist thought can be seen in how media outlets initially reported
on #GirlIGuessImWithHer as simply a disgruntled eruption from Sanders supporters,
despite the complexity of political frameworks motivating those who started it (Rigueur).
In considering hashtags like #GirlIGuessImWithHer, scholars face the challenge of not
reproducing limited constructions of democracy and democratic engagement that have
legitimized our less than representative—and certainly not radically inclusive—academic
institutions and national politics. Ultimately, hashtags and other forms of situated
knowledge arising from networked counterpublics and embraced by a new generation
of Black activists should be treated as important contributions to the democratic process.
They are a call to include nuanced issues of identity in activist spaces and in national
political conversations. They are a call to recognize the value of political thought that
arises from the margins and that just might transform our democracy, if we let it.

Notes
1. In this essay I use the lowercase “Black lives matter movement” to refer to the contemporary
iteration of the Black freedom movement, I capitalize Black Lives Matter when referring to the
formal organization of the same name or in the context of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, in
which it is generally capitalized for ease of reading.
2. The platform and policy demands of the Movement for Black Lives can be found at https://policy.
m4bl.org/platform/.

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