Cracking the Codes of Black Power Struggles: Hacking, Hacked, and Black Lives Matter (original) (raw)

A hmad Greene-Hayes: "Black Lives Matter" is one of the most recent iterations of the Black Liberation Movement, with an unapologetic Black queer feminist politic led by women-identified, queer, trans*, gender-nonconforming, workingclass folks calling for an end to anti-Black state-sanctioned violence. Black Lives Matter (BLM), both the network and the movement, uses pro-Black technological and philosophical terminologies to hack anti-Black, Western, white supremacist binaries. Of central importance is deconstructing archaic conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality, and reimagining what "Black life" means in a world that does not love Black people. This political project calls into question "the politics of respectability," as coined by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and teases out the complexities of "anti-Black racism," as popularized by Afro-Pessimists such as Frank Wilderson. 1 According to Alicia Garza, one of the three co-founders of BLM, 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. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. It is a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement. 2