The one thing I really admire about Marissa Johnson, the Black Lives Matter activist who is famous for disrupting a Bernie Sanders event in Westlake Park last summer, is how she makes language a core, key, and vivid feature of her activism. This has nothing to do with poetry; it's instead an understanding that recognizes the value of linguistic innovation in a liberatory program. One needs to invent or utilize a counter vocabulary and mode of expression to that of the establishment or the oppressor. Her recent essay "What Killer Mike Got Wrong About My Bernie Sanders Confrontation" for The Establishment is packed with innovations of this kind. Johnson reads a situation, names it, and then explains how it functions and reinforces racism, sexism, the patriarchy.
For example, in part of the essay, she charges Killer Mike—a rapper and celebrity supporter of Bernie Sanders—with "tone policing" her. What can this mean? The story: Before Killer Mike's recent visit to Seattle, Johnson wrote in a post that he had diluted the substance of her action at Westlake Park by stating on several occasions that Sanders had allowed her to speak at the rally. He was not upset. He was cool with it. He just stood there on the stage like it ain't no thing. This, of course, is not what happened. The man was visibly upset, and with good reason. He lost the mic and the situation was charged with emotion.
When Johnson tried to set the record straight with Killer Mike, he ignored her and instead, according to Johnson, twitted with other males about her. This made her angry and she began loudly insulting him on Twitter. She even called him a coon. Then it happened: Killer Mike explained that he would communicate with her if she used a more respectful language. This is tone policing. I learned the expression from Johnson.
How prevalent is this kind of thing? To get a good idea, you only need to listen to the way Barack Obama talked about the Black Lives Matter movement during a town hall event held in London this weekend. He stated that BLM was important but needed to lower its voice and be more accommodating. His words: "You can't just keep on yelling [at those in power] and you can't refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position."
This is tone policing. It has the function of making the one subjected to it look unreasonable and even crazy. You, the man, are cool, calm, and collected; she, the other, is not. The thing expelled by tone policing is precisely the reason for the yelling. We know that when something falls on your foot, nervous energy is expended or expressed with a shout of pain. Tone policing essentially isolates this shout from the source of the pain. It also deprives its subject of his/her power by rearranging the confrontation. It is now on, say, Obama's terms, and not on those of Black Lives Matter. It is now on Killer Mike's terms, and not on Marissa Johnson's.
The late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once spoke of the necessity for new weapons in the struggle against capitalism. Many of the weapons he had in mind are conceptual and linguistic. Johnson is a BLM activist who is constantly developing and deploying the latest linguistic weapons in the new struggle for black liberation.
