Even if the alt doesn’t, the ballot does.

Social media explodes with more of the same: posters, slogans, photographs, and video clips all documenting the new social movement that is intent on eradicating, once and for all, racial inequality and all other forms of discriminatory practices. Minority groups form Zoom-enabled alliances, and every supporter quickly proclaims heartfelt encouragement through enthusiastic social media posts advertising the movement’s trendy catchphrases: “Black Lives Matter,” “White Silence is Violence,” or “I Can’t Breathe,” which becomes an ironic pun when coupled with the mandatory face mask. No longer interesting, no longer new, the global virus is thrown off the stage in favor of a widespread virtual uprising intent on reinstating justice. In the age of the hyperreal, and of course during the pandemic, one is not required to actually march the streets with the angry crowds or even leave the house at all. Joining the movement is made easy by attaching the right hashtags to Facebook and Instagram posts, donating to the cause (the Black Lives Matter website accepts all major credit cards as well as PayPal), and buying the official merchandise, which includes T-shirts, sweatshirts, tote bags, coffee mugs, yard signs, bumper stickers, baseball caps, and—of course—face masks. In addition, to be an antiracist, one is expected to shop at businesses owned by people of color and catch up on appropriate entertainment by choosing to watch social-justice-themed films and television shows (Netflix immediately started advertising special lists of recommended must-see productions).

The appropriation and commodification of black lives and the visual representations of social struggle are not a new phenomenon. Leigh Raiford’s (2011) examination of photography as a tool of resistance used by grass roots African American movements reveals the uneasy dynamics by which self-defining images intended to challenge the dominant order are taken up, publicized, and commercialized by the very mainstream culture they originally attempt to counter. Photography, Raiford argues, was used with careful intention by early twentieth century anti-lynching campaigns as well as the civil rights and the black power movements to mobilize participants, define goals, narrate histories, and construct visible identities for marginalized individuals and groups marked for racial exclusion. While visual self-representation “offered activists a seemingly democratic and versatile medium through which they could visually reference, reframe, or reject dominant political categories” (9), it only partially succeeded in reclaiming and remaking black identity. Because, as Roland Barthes ([1957] 1980) suggests, the subject in a visual representation merges with the object that is the photograph and becomes one with the medium, the distinction between signifier and signified becomes unclear. The human eye perceives things as they appear in their simulated depiction, and as the medium itself (of photography or any other visual recording) does not offer or encourage critique, it is the viewer, the observer, the interpreter, who must subvert the convincing façade of mediated documentation. Following Barthes’ commentary on photography’s stifling, fixing quality—the “death mask” that images carry as they suspend subjects in time as unchanging presences—the pictures, video footage, manifestos, merchandise, and catchy slogans of social movements appear to emancipate as they simultaneously capture and pin identities, reinforce racial hegemonies, and hold subjects imprisoned in history and memory. Within the contradictory tensions between liberation and entrenched captivity (now aggravated and accelerated by digital media), the struggle itself seems to collapse into a vortex of endless regurgitation of defunct verbal and visual information that advertises resistance, protest, or dissent, but ultimately fails to achieve lasting change.

According to the logic of advertising and consumer culture, the self-congratulatory actions of purchasing politically correct products, flaunting the right gear, and planting the appropriate sign in the front yard are apparently sufficient to end centuries of racial inequality and move on into a bright and promising future. “Now We Transform,” as the home page of the Black Lives Matter website declares. In the society of the spectacle, enhanced by the wonders of technology and the confinements of the pandemic, theatricality seems to be the only currency that holds value. “Since it is no longer possible to base any claim on one’s own existence” writes Baudrillard ([1990] 1993), “there is nothing for it but to perform an appearing act without concerning oneself with being.” The main thing about social change in the postmodern era, according to the logic of the hyperreal, is the appearance of the change; the ability to promote, advertise, endorse, and consume justice as a fetishized commodity. When manufacturers of fashion accessories equate advertising as activism, customers are taught to recognize and purchase popular products that will allow them to build, in their own homes, ready-to-wear, made-in-China, one-size-fits-all antiracist ideologies and identities.

In her critique of white liberals who take it upon themselves to represent and speak for the marginalized other, Gayatri Spivak (1988) questions the motives and forces behind such rescue missions. What drives the elite left, for example, to fight passionately alongside the downtrodden proletariat? “The link to the workers’ struggle,” she proposes, “is located in the desire to blow up power at any point of its application” (67). Such solidarity, then, has less to do with the specific, everyday conditions and hardships of the actual working class, as those remain securely removed from the experience of the upper-class activist, and more to do with elegantly jumping on the rolling wagon of resistance. Thus, as this joining of forces “is apparently based on the simple valorization of any desire destructive of any power” (67), in this meeting point of objectives the subaltern’s authentic longing for the end of suffering becomes a conduit for the generalized liberal’s ideological desire to overthrow the government. And while on the surface there is nothing wrong with such a merging of aspirational forces, the actual result is a perpetuation of the victim role the marginalized are expected to perform, and a full endorsement of what Spivak terms “strategic essentialism”— the political deployment of reductive group identities as a means of mobilizing a resistance movement. Black Lives Matter is a contemporary case in point, as it loudly calls attention to the very visual racial distinctions the movement proclaims to adamantly oppose. Through the technologically-enhanced emphasis on appearance, spectacle, and the drama of protest, the non-white other ceases to exist as an individual as it is elevated to a symbolic level, becoming—willingly or unwillingly—a recruited representative of the oppressed. Depending on the context, the shell of symbolic representation can signify suffering, rage, defiance, martyrdom, etc., and the particular lives of individuals matter only to the extent that they lend themselves to the symbolic functions of both injustice and resistance.

At a time when a novel virus, a colorless and color-blind microorganism that kills without discrimination, that, like classic science fiction aliens, does not differentiate or prioritize its killing, the resurgence of racial upheaval is, perhaps, a comforting familiar alternative. To bring the focus back to the human other may be an understandable reaction to the terror of more radical forms of alterity. The color line, after all, has been around much longer than the Corona virus, and it is where the human species gets to exercise discernment, categorization, and calculated taxonomies of visual difference—powers the novel virus does not possess. Like the monster in the original 1978 Alien movie, the Corona virus is, as the admiring android scientist, Ash, observes, “the perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility… A survivor ... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality” (1:26). It is precisely its purely utilitarian, undiscriminating nature that makes the alien creature, as well as the virus, into a form of alterity so incomprehensible it is, apparently, intolerable. If attention is directed to clearly visible, tried and true racial divides, the new resistance movement seems to say, then there might be hope for subverting the equalizing threat of the virus and regaining control over the question of difference. Once more the human other is absorbed into an efficient system of representation that diffuses its potential ethical inquiry. Black Lives Matter rises as a promising insurgent force in cyber space, takes social media by storm, and people respond with all the excitement of new hope for change. And then, just as quickly, the riots are quelled, the gatherings disperse, and the noise subsides. The medium has absorbed the message, devoured and neutralized it, and the world goes on with its racial structures intact and uninterrupted.