- Alex Garland
Back in August, PechaKucha Seattle, Seattle People of Color Salon, and the Northwest African American Museum organized an event, #Ferguson, that happened in a wing of the museum and concerned the death of a black teenager, Michael Brown, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. One of the speakers at this event was Larry Mizell Jr., a hiphop artist, KEXP DJ, and columnist for this paper. One of the things Mizell pointed out during his talk, which was profoundly emotional, is that he wasn’t at all satisfied with the whole “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” thing that had become a central part of the nationwide demonstrations. What he saw in it, when compared with the more positive or affirmative raised fist of the Black Power movement of the 1960s, was a step backward rather than forward. Raised fists are active and threatening; “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” is an expression of powerlessness.
The same is also true of “I Can’t Breathe,” the last words of Eric Garner, a black American man who was choked to death because police officers thought he was selling “loosies” (single cigarettes). On December 3, 2014, a grand jury came to the conclusion that the officer who choked Garner, Daniel Pantaleo, did nothing that deserved a formal accusation, and this decision triggered a new wave of protests that placed at its center Garner’s final words. This weekend, professional athletes showed their solidarity with the protesters by wearing “I Can’t Breathe” shirts. And a week before, five members of the St. Louis Rams ran onto a football field with their hands up.
I, like Mizell, have deep reservations about these expressions, and not only because they are the words of black males in a state of defeat but also because I suspect their popularity is a consequence of a sentimentalism that has been hypertrophied by the selective pressures of our profit-seeking culture industries. As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello point out in their 1999 book The New Spirit of Capitalism, there is always in the kind of social and political critique that’s prompted by a “bad experience” an indignation that’s in part sentimental. No protest can ever escape this feeling. (There is also an intellectual component to indignation, but it addresses the deeper, historical, and more structural aspects of a “bad experience.”) However, sentimental indignation, unlike intellectual indignation, has the immediate power of the people (the protesters), but it also represents the selling-power of our celebrities—the power of the stories they tell after a game, the movies they sell on the big screen, the lyrics they sing on the radio. This is why it’s so easy for them to connect with these sentimental slogans. It is their bread and butter. And so not only are “Hands Up” and “I Can’t Breathe” expressions of powerlessness, they also lead us not forward but right back to the sentimental market.
Now, I’m not looking for a more authentic or untainted sentimentalism but a form of indignation that’s not a part of the system, and thereby is not condemned to be, like all cultural commodities on the market, transitory.
