On Black Boxes, Blackouts, and Performativity

I woke up this morning and in my feeble, drowsy state, realized I was running out of underwear. Another years old pair was shredded in my wardrobe, and I thought, I should probably buy more. I remember reading that Saxx was a good brand, so I went to the Saxx instagram page to see what it looked like, and I saw it for the first of a hundred times today: The inescapable black square. I blinked, and woke up, and I clicked into what I was looking at, and I giggled.

Coming right after a picture of a dad and his toddler in identical striped boxers, it’s hard to see the black square, now ubiquitous, now meaningless, and not feel the cynicism emanating from it. It’s probably the first time I had a genuine laugh in a few days. Of all the ridiculous ways one could imagine this particular stage of liberal democracy collapsing, an internet underwear brand posting, with the likes of Bratz, L’Oreal, and Amazon, statements on the value of black life is sorta unexpected yet inevitable. We never saw it coming, but we’re not shocked.

This isn’t a new take. There’s obviously a multitude of op-eds, articles, tweets, posts calling out brand hypocrisy. I’m sure it means something to someone.

This isn’t to make light of it, but there is a certain amount of functional currency that exists in the feedback loop of brand awareness and brand hypocrisy, a sort of ouroboros where you solidify your cache by performatively signalling that brand X is actually full of shit, while doing nothing of value.

Again, nothing new. There’s obviously a multitude of op-eds, articles, tweets, posts calling out virtue signalling. I’m sure it means something to someone.

But to call out virtue signalling is to denigrate the work that people who don’t have the emotional or physical capacity can do, i.e. signal boosting, raising awareness, writing and editorializing and building platforms to spread knowledge to everyone, to make sure they know, in 142 characters or less, that Twitter Personality/Justin Trudeau/Robert Downey Jr, are actually racist and don’t give a fuck.

I’m sure you’ve read this before. There’s obviously a multitude of op-eds, articles, tweets, posts calling out virtue signalling. I’m sure it means something to someone.

This isn’t a gotcha. I’m guilty of all of these things. Everyone is, to one degree or another. Everyone has a hot take about the USA, about Coronavirus, about how the riots are endorsed by corporations (still don’t quite understand this one) and are therefore capitalist recuperation, about class solidarity, about racial tension, and so it goes. 

Intentionally or not, we are all of us engaging in our own version of the shock doctrine, our own attempt to capitalize on a crisis for cache, for clout, for a political end. This occurs from the state, to the capitalist, to the individual. Brands are now judged by their stances on black life. Individual statements are particularly garnered to obtain a following. Through a process of obfuscation, the personal becomes the political, becomes the historical, and back to the top.

This is something you’ve probably seen someone post about. There’s obviously a multitude of op-eds, articles, tweets, posts calling out transparent self platforming. I’m sure it means something to someone. 

I’ll stop there.

A month ago, when I was holed up in my apartment, living between press conferences, I thought that I had never been more acutely aware of the speed at which information moves. I haven’t really slept in four days, watching the streams from every major American city till I can see daylight, and my feelings of being in history at the speed of light have only magnified. It is, genuinely, impossible to keep up. The relative lack of information about arrests, deaths, violence, and injury in any specifics over the last few days is proof of that. There’s no specifics in a post-truth, post-news, post-time media landscape. 

And it keeps moving. I’ve seen many posts about the black square. About its performativity, about how it actually harms and blocks organizers from seeing vital information, about how it’s a psy-op, etc. 

And all of a sudden, to hate the black square is metonymic with hating the system that brought us here. And to apply that like a pyramid, to carcerally dismantle and shame the individuals who perpetuate the black square is to dismantle the structure from the bottom up, or something. 

One of the most confounding, bizarre, and frustrating ways the exceptional speed of information has harmed us is this obfuscated, carceral approach to challenging power. To seize power is to lash at people, to parlay the gotcha, but not to build power in ways that are meaningful. Because if we are not reactive, the information we are bearing witness to will slide away, and be replaced by something else. Good faith approaches to dismantling empty allyship from sympathetic, unwoke people are difficult, and not as broad as we would like. To escalate the chain of power, Amazon seems so undefeatable that nothing except talking points about their empty talking points will do. I have my doubts as to the effectiveness of calling out black squares for not donating to a bail fund in a public forum, and then in return being signal-boosted by more white guilt. “Fellow white people: We need to have a conversation about this.” strikes me as narcissistic, as something fairly counterproductive to the omnipresent and effective and intimate 1-on-1 that’s foundational to the process of building power. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m the fucking cynic. 

I’m not saying criticism isn’t a vital, important part of our culture, and that it’s crucial for us to interrogate power. I’m not saying that widespread education around the crimes of the Amazons and the governments isn’t important. Our decentralized media landscape’s other function is the clarity of bearing witness - it both obfuscates and reveals in equal measure. Its potential for direct truth is equal only in its potential for misdirected emotion. There is a direct line of attack and unveiling of the mechanisms of state violence happening right now that is unprecedented in human history, at least as far as the western world is concerned. 

But criticism can’t be empty thrusts without a call to action. How many people talk about Justin Trudeau’s comments on racial justice and pair it with an emotional and outraged call out about his history of blackface and expect it to be meaningful. Yes, there is accountability and ways to identify that he is not accountable to his privilege. And then there is the lifesucking outrage attached to it, outrage that may be true, but may also be manufactured, and manufactured to achieve that currency which governs our social position. Our social condition is, like everything else under capitalism, a commodity. 

Outrage is a very particular weapon, and one that is rarely used effectively. Too much of the disingenuous outrage we trade in really does dull the effective power of true, genuine, material rage that is being articulated in streets all over America. In moments, it feels as though there’s almost as much ink being spilled about the futility of individual or brand allyship as there is about police violence. The nature of our criticism, as it relates to the culture war - an equally impotent and vital part of how we interpret and relate to the world - cannot be currency, because it ultimately defeats the struggle. 

Every contrarian leftist talking about how the riots are actually counterrevolutionary, every person whose idea of activism is tied to education through outrage (even though it’s totally not their job to educate you), and every self platforming “organizer” (As witnessed everywhere from Portland to Edmonton) is ultimately at odds with the idea of emancipation, of socialism (A political ideology that I broadly prescribe largely because its governing trait is its empathy), and particularly of abolition. Ultimately, these behaviours are an ugly byproduct of the same alienation that touches all of us in different ways. I refer back to Fanon on this: “The neurotic structure of an individual is simply the elaboration, the formation, the eruption within the ego, of conflictual clusters arising in part out of the environment and in part out of the purely personal way in which that individual reacts to these influences”

What differentiates these empty gestures of allyship is that they exist on the extreme oppositional end of the behaviour they criticize and see themselves as immune to being challenged, except when challenged by outrage similar to their own, which they can then be leveraged into further gestures of outrage, allyship, and performative guilt. Maybe the speed of information’s greatest quality is revealing the immutable cycles that govern the micro to the macro.

In our current moment, the state has never seemed quite so possible to tear down. The systems that materially make the lives of our most at risk worse, may, at the end of this, be at the very least slightly less harmful. And you’re allowed to fight for that, even though you may be inadvertently taking part in a counterrevolutionary process, or whatever.

Given the peril of our current moment, of the injustice done to racialized and in particular, black and indigenous people in our society, there is little value to choosing to speak on Amazon rather than police brutality. To get mad at black squares instead of marching. There is value to reaching out privately to someone you know and saying “Hey, I’ve been reading a little bit about why the black square might not be great...”

Ultimately, revolution and social change doesn’t live and die by the state, because the state has played its entire hand, both domestically, and across every country touched by imperialism, and in every country that ever repressed an uprising. Revolution and social change will live and die by the quality of its allyship. By donations, by solidarity marches, and by difficult conversations worth a lot more than outrage about black squares. What I’m describing isn’t uniform. Allyship of this quality has never been more explicit, more vital, but given the scope of the peril, it still may not be enough.

I haven’t meaningfully left my house since the beginning of the year. I’m tired of my own inhospitality and my perceived inhospitality of others. I’m burned out on the social fraughtness of being in circles of activism, and I’m burned out on a discourse that in particular poorly governs the relationship between the marginalized and the majority. Different types of harmful behaviours constitute different degrees of harm, and it feels like the other outcome of the emptiest parts of our moral outrage is the erasure of understanding - understanding what harm is, and what accountability looks like on the basis of what actual harm is caused. I’m tired of perspectives that decry reposting videos of George Floyd’s death as triggering in one sentence while going off on some liberal celebrity in the next. We live in a system that asks us not to bear witness to its cruelty, and to only bear witness to the meaningless transgressions of others. Many of us accept those asks outright, without a critical examination of who and why someone is asking us that, and especially of whether or not their intentions are selfishly wanting to be listened to, or because they actually believe it’s a positive thing.

I go back to the take on people saying the black square with the #BlackLivesMatter is denying other vital sources of life saving, up to date information. Why you were relying on the broadest, most international of racial justice hashtags to seek out vital information rather than, say, BLMDC, or BLMPhilly, or BLMNYC, I don’t know. That’s pretty silly. Are you sure someone didn’t just say this so they could personally feel good about capitalizing and having an effect on the current moment? Is it perhaps worth interrogating for a moment? Does that make you a bad ally? I guess it’s the easiest thing in the world to delete the black square, but that means there’s still 28 million other black squares currently on Instagram. Is this all a big distraction from the fact that police are actively murdering black and brown people on the streets of every major city, and that thousands of people are getting arrested and perhaps the discourse on one black square means nothing in the scope of signal boosting on the ground actions from cities so that they become more visible? Are we scared of the moral backlash we will receive for even questioning the request to take down your black box?

No one is exempt from a culture of meaningless, carceral moral superiority. It transgresses lines of race, gender, sexuality, heritage, and age. It is the ultimate currency in a world that has starved us of good material conditions, and it has reconstructed the desires of our material well being into social objects we can buy, sell, trade and invest in. It seeks only to tamp down others, and to tamp down the actual indignation of movements that seek to emancipate themselves from capitalism. Movements that are often hijacked by it, movements that are commodified by it, movements that are metabolized into thinkpiece thinktanks instead of actual, grounded, powerful, material work. It is a social capitalism subdominant to the material capitalism that governs and oppresses us, to a history of violent and mercantile injustice towards people of color that will likely never experience material reparations in their or their children's lifetimes. 

Do I sound like an asshole, or am I making an iota of sense, because I can’t even tell at this point. Of course, everything is more complex than I’m articulating. Good allyship is everywhere, but as a cunning outcome of a cunning system, we see it much more rarely than we see the other stuff.

These are always the questions on my mind as I settle into another night of watching people take on the state from a fairly privileged position in Canada’s north, alternating between crying, trying to read, and considering the outcome that this may all lead to. One thing is furthest from my mind though, and that’s Saxx Underwear’s black square.