The big wave of protests against police brutality, sparked by the viral video of the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, rekindled the 2012 Black Lives Matter movement (co-founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tomet) and the demonstrations of 2014 after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. While the world has been trying to fight the spread of Covid-19, and despite the widespread desire to call it quits and go back to normalcy, persistent racial inequalities have been brought back into focus, highlighted by the disproportionate ethnic and racial minority deaths during the pandemic and the rise of discrimination incidents.
Covid-19 has increased our awareness of health inequalities, but racialised minorities have been consistently outspoken about their criticism of other forms of structural inequalities impacting their everyday lives. Viral videos and images of police brutality have admittedly worked as the evidence of these injustices and spread like wildfire through social media, leading to on-the-ground and online demonstrations.
Social media such as Twitter have dramatically increased the visibility and influence of mobilising social change and solidarity. But precisely this visibility, and this influence, have given rise to other forms of visual expression, which have long been part of social movements (think of placards, conceptual art, billboards, performance, etc.) but which now gain a new role in the struggle against structures of inequality and systems of power. Emoji have held a central role in the public engagement, sharing of feelings, and online communication of the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM). Despite the anxieties around what it means for human communication when signs such as 🙄 or 😍 take up part of our language, emoji as symbols, characters, or images are used across our digital devices. Yet often, their definitions fall short of the ways in which popular culture appropriates them, and that becomes even more significant when we talk about how they are incorporated within protest culture.
Black Lives Matter & Emoji
Besides the obvious visual influence of emoji, here I want to highlight two additional factors that make them important to the digital expression of the Black Lives Matter movement. The first is that in their absence of phonetic connotation, emoji infuse the text they precede with extra meaning. This absence gives rise to a form of expression that denotes emoji with the role of emotional signifiers. The second factor is the widespread accessibility of emoji, which can give rise to a participatory culture.
Let’s consider first the emotional character of emoji. “Emoji”, as small digital images, share similar expressions to face-to-face communication and can add extra emotional or contextual meaning to our digital texts, make the message look more aesthetically pleasing, and help others understand the tone of our communication, so as to manage and maintain our interpersonal relationships. Replacing our playful, sarcastic, or serious tones of voice, emoji fill the need for non-verbal cues that help us express ourselves as we use our digital devices. Turning to the participatory culture of emoji, the vernacular expressions of emoji allow them to navigate and defy languages, creating informal nuances and grammars of shared culture and community, beyond geopolitical and cultural limitations.
In this dual context, emoji have been instrumental in spreading the messages of the Black Lives Matter movement. The most popular emoji used during the resurgence of the movement has been the Raised Fist emoji in all its variations, ✊🏿✊🏾✊🏽✊🏼✊🏻. The numerous combinations of these emoji, and their different skin tones, are attempts to create a participatory culture where the user expresses their solidarity with Black and other racialised people. And it is, of course, a nod at the long history of the raised fist as a symbol of black power, support, and solidarity. A gesture often linked to the 1960s and the rise of the Black Panther Party, the Black Power fist has been used as an emblem of Black liberation and a representation of the fight for Black civil rights. In one of its most famous moments at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics Games, during which the American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos won the gold and bronze medals respectively, both winners raised a black-gloved fist while the national anthem played during the medal ceremony. This led to the United States Olympic Committee, stripping them off their medals and declaring that they violated “the basic standards of good manners and sportsmanship, which are so highly valued in the United States.” Thirty years later, and during his release from prison, Nelson Mandela, raised his fist in celebration alongside his wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. A symbol of resistance and defiance, the raised fist has been prevalent in the majority of social media posts supporting BLM protests.
Other symbolism has also been central to the cultural significance of BLM, such as the 💯 Hundred Points, 🔥 Fire, 🙏🏾 Folded Hands: Medium-Dark Skin Tone, and the 😭 Loudly Crying Face, which have been used to show the intensity of the movement, their hope and support in its demands, but also to convey their grief and sadness for the killing and oppression of Black people. Above all of them though, the Black Heart emoji (🖤) and its variations (e.g.❤️💜 💚 💛 💙) have been used as an emblem of solidarity for the movement. As the symbol of love, the heart emoji has been undoubtedly used to show support and appreciation to the anti-racist practices and wide support to the movement. Similar to the variations of the Raised Fist, the different coloured Heart emoji are used together for wider representations of the Black, minority and ethnic communities, but also to celebrate the LGBTQ month of June, that commemorate the Stonewall riots that took place in June 1969, with one of its more prominent figures being a black transgender woman, Marsha P. Johnson.
The massive amounts of social media posts referring to Black Lives Matters and the use of specific emojis has revealed that by actively engaging in debates on race and social action, albeit social media ones, and by strategically using signs and language to direct the focus of public discourse to the social and racial issues at hand, can serve as a tool for expressing people’s experiences and opinions and attracting more support. While the world tried to control the worldwide spread of Covid-19, the Black Lives Matter movement took over much of our digital space to radically protest against, but also educate the wider public, about the struggles of Black people living in the USA and abroad.
Emoji & Surveillance
BLM has generated a coherent and large-scale response that did not go unnoticed by Twitter, who have customised a BLM emoji that appears next to the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. A combination of the medium skin tone, medium-dark skin tone and dark skin tone Raised Fist emoji, and placed so as to form a heart, Twitter has combined the two most popular emoji used to discuss the movement on their platform (the Raised Fist and the Heart), to "celebrate and encourage diverse perspectives." However, many have pointed to how this action can be perceived as an effort to replace the political narratives of Black Lives Matter with commercial narratives and corporate interests. Indeed, by humanising the platforms we use, emoji gain another dual role: they enable the social extension to our textual communication, but they are also turning our feelings into economic value for corporations such as Twitter.
Black Lives Matter supporters on social media, use emoji to depict their anxieties, support, or frustration, while also transforming their solidarity into new forms of big data. Many platforms, including Twitter, in collaboration with systems of policing, news organisations, and media outlets are extracting and analysing emoji as a source of insights into social movements. In early July news broke about the artificial intelligence start-up Dataminr, helping law enforcement digitally monitor the USA Black Lives Matter demonstrations, directing police to specific social media posts that informed protesters on planned actions, locations, and developments. Such surveillance tools and practices of digital tracking have been deployed against large populations for years, but their most significant impact has and is still felt by marginalised communities. Yet, activists are becoming increasingly savvy in dealing with surveillance and actively informing others about the dangers of sharing information that may harm individuals, communities, or activist organisations. Being aware of how public spaces such as social media intentionally or unintentionally impact and preserve structural and systemic racialised structures that sustain inequalities and marginalisations help social movements and push for equitable futures.
Beyond Emoji
While you may not think about it while you send the red heart emoji or the thumbs up emoji, emoji are as politically charged as any other form of text. Let's not forget that only after a sustained and persistent campaign, the Unicode Consortium, the Silicon Valley-based non-profit organisation who are in charge of emoji, updated the emoji keyboard to include racialised, minority, and culturally representative emoji, with different skin tones, food cultures, and religions. This existence and non-existence of emoji, both embolden and normalises cultural visibility or erasure, especially since currently the majority of emoji hint to western notions of living. While we are still far from equitable emoji representation, challenging racial injustices goes beyond the use of the Black Fist emoji. Engaging in protest culture, whether that is on the ground or online allows traditionally silenced and marginalised groups to be heard and be valued.