Doing the work : the Black Lives Matter Movement in Austin, Texas

This dissertation explores the tension in Black political thought between redemptive and revolutionary frameworks for social change. The following study, the first ethnography of the Black Lives Matter Movement (BLMM), situates this longstanding debate within the context of our present moment. While political theorists form a consensus that the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) holds the potential to perfect or radicalize U.S. democracy, they have not yet reckoned with the country’s enduring and implicit antiblack bias. The lack of critical attention paid to how antiblackness operates within racial justice movements limits activists’ capacity to create much needed transformative social change. In “Doing the Work” I address this gap in research by conducting an activist ethnography of Black Lives Matter organizing in Austin, Texas during the final year of the Obama presidency and the first year of the Trump administration. Through participant observation of vigils, city council meetings, cop watches, and sanctuary movement rallies I found a pattern wherein antiblack violence is recognized (by the state and the coalition), but only in comfortable or self-affirming ways. Again and again I observed nonblack empathy turn to self-congratulation, small concessions from city officials become huge celebrations, and mass outrage directed at the family separation crisis mutate into a disavowal of the war being waged against Black families. Additionally, I noticed a tendency among organizers to police radical and revolutionary political desire, no matter how benign or incipient. In other words, this study examines how an enduring and antiblack unconscious operates in Austin’s BLM movement spaces regardless of one’s politics or intentionality. This portrait of contemporary antiracist praxis suggests the master’s tools (Lorde 1979) that present the greatest danger to Black Liberation struggles are not autonomy and self-defense, but rather the politics of recognition, intersectionality and historical materialism. Ultimately, I argue that it is Black anger, and not the Sisyphean model of Black love/forgiveness, that offers the most compelling speculative work for the future of Black Studies and Black movements.African and African Diaspora Studie