[For this year’s
series on genuine American patriots, I wanted to focus on contemporary figures
who are doing the hard work of patriotism. If there’s a through-line to these
four, in addition to the ideas I discussed in my Patriot’s Day post, it’d be Howard
Zinn’s famous quote, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Please
share your own patriotic nominees, dissenters or otherwise, for a crowd-sourced
weekend post we can all be proud of!]
What’s new about
the hashtag activist, what’s not, and what’s perhaps most important.
In this
Thanksgiving 2014 post on Twitter, I highlighted the emerging community of
activists who have begun to use the social media platform for organizing and
protest, a trend that has come to be known in the years since as hashtag
activism. The phrase originated in part as a critique (similar to the
dismissive idea of “armchair warriors” in wartime), but has been fully adopted
by the participants in these movements as a reflection of the vital role played
by social media in forming, disseminating, and amplifying their messages and
actions. Without a doubt one of the most prominent and successful such hashtag
activisms has been the #BlackLivesMatter
movement, which was created in 2012 in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin
killing and George Zimmerman trial by three young activists:
Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. As Garza writes in this October
2014 herstory of the movement, everything about it was and remains deeply interconnected
with and indebted to 21st century digital spaces and technologies.
Yet a quick
glance at Garza’s biography at the end of that 2014 herstory piece reveals that
she likewise has deep roots in and connections to more traditional labor and social
activisms. She rose to prominence as the Executive Director of San Francisco’s People Organized to Win Employment
Rights (POWER), moved to her current role as Special Projects Director of the
National Domestic Workers Alliance
(NDWA), and has twice received the Bayard Rustin Community Activist award from
San Francisco’s Harvey Milk Democratic Club
for her anti-gentrification work and community organizing efforts in the city. Those
roles make clear the ways that hashtag activisms have built upon and
paralleled, at least as much as they have changed or contrasted with,
longstanding histories of organizing and protest, and how much the two forms
continue to evolve together (often with many of the same participants and
leaders). And they also remind us that issues of race and ethnicity, labor and
work, and neighborhood and community (among many others) are not now, as they
have never been, separate spheres that require thoroughly distinct protest
movements—indeed, there’s no more potent argument
for intersectionality than the necessary links between such movements.
If Garza thus
reflects many different forms of intersectionality, there’s one in particular
that I would highlight as illustrative of her 21st century
patriotism. Garza usually self-identifies, as she does in the #BlackLivesMatter
herstory, as a black queer woman, and the openness and centrality to her
activism of her sexuality is striking, especially in contrast to the challenges
that Bayard Rustin’s sexuality posed for her participation in the Civil
Rights Movement. But it’s not the historical shift that I want to emphasize, so
much as the vital new activist purpose to which both her public identity and
her hashtag movement connect. #BlackLivesMatter, that is, isn’t really a civil
rights movement, or even a rights movement at all—it’s a movement for the recognition
of all identities as equally American, human, and deserving of rights. Both Garza’s work and her own identity and
life exemplify that idea, one that (as
North Carolina has recently reminded us) remains far less widely shared
than it should be. And that makes her a genuine and inspiring 21st
century patriot.
Next patriot
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other figures you’d nominate?
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