The developments of the early twenty-first century cannot be understood without reference to the transformations and intellectual debates of the post–Civil Rights era discussed in Chapter 6. The legacies of Black feminism, prison abolition, Afrocentrism, and reparations debates created the conceptual and cultural framework within which Obama’s presidency emerged. Whereas earlier generations of African American thought had wrestled with questions of collective uplift, racial identity, and systemic injustice, Obama’s pragmatism reflected both the achievements and limits of those debates. His careful balancing of racial consciousness with universalist appeals, his promotion of moderate reforms rather than structural change, and his emphasis on personal responsibility mirrored the compromises that had defined the post–Civil Rights political landscape. In many ways, Obama’s presidency can be seen as the culmination of decades of negotiation between radical visions of equality and the constraints imposed by neoliberal governance.

The rise of Black Lives Matter in 2020 further illustrates how the intellectual and political currents of the post–Civil Rights era continued to shape activism. Drawing explicitly on the insights of Black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolition, Black Lives Matter sought to address both historical injustices and contemporary forms of racialized state violence. Its decentralized, participatory structure echoed the horizontal organizing of SNCC, while also responding to the technological and social transformations of the twenty-first century. Unlike the spontaneous rebellions of the early 1990s or the top-down campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Lives Matter demonstrated how the conceptual frameworks developed in the decades after 1965 – around care, community, and systemic critique – could be operationalized in new forms of political engagement.

In the Philippines, the Catholic Church’s high levels of “moral authority” facilitated its local protective interventions. This chapter tests the generalizability of community protection to Brazil and the US, unique cases that nonetheless share key characteristics of populist state violence with Duterte’s Philippines. However, original data analysis replicating, as closely as possible, the analysis in the Philippines does not reveal strong protective effects. Neither is police violence in Rio de Janeiro related to the location of Catholic infrastructure, nor does clergy inclusion in police reform build support among American audiences. The chapter then explains this divergence with the Philippines by turning to lower levels of “moral authority” for religious leaders in Brazil and the US. Crucially, moral authority in those two cases is tied to powerful social cleavages (socioeconomics and race in Brazil, and partisanship in the US). In such environments, religious leaders may possess opportunities for narrower intervention, but will struggle to generate broader community protection.

This chapter outlines the more than century-long impact of the Left on African American poetry and vice versa from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Bolshevik Revolution in the early twentieth century to Black Lives Matter in the early twenty-first. This is an exchange with deep formal and thematic consequences for the development of Black poetry and a crucial mode for the circulation of Black Left ideas, practices, concerns, tropes, and so on, in US society, marking US politics and culture, and, to a significant degree, keeping the Left alive in the contemporary moment when the Left is more a sensibility and culture inspiring relatively loose and ephemeral association rather than consisting of stable and coherent parties and internationals.

Fairness norms operate in virtually every area of social endeavor. There are several common behavioral responses to exchanges between social actors. Exploitation and retaliation, both of which are threats to fairness, are closely associated with narcissism. Other behavioral responses include cooperation, reciprocity, acquiescence, withdrawal, and altruism. Social movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo are collective responses to profound unfairness.

The reawakening of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020 ignited a wave of racial and social consciousness that prompted many arts-based organizations to consider the larger implications of their programmatic visions. As a composer known to, but under-programmed in, the mainstream classical music establishment, the music of Florence Price was thrust into an even greater spotlight. This chapter considers what it means to meaningfully celebrate the rediscovery of Price’s manuscripts and her revival in the mainstream. It models discourse that ensures that more African American composers are recognized and that the communities that kept names and works alive are remembered in the historical record.

Do Black and non-Black elected officials differ in how much of their rhetorical outreach is centered on high-profile racial issues? We address this question in Chapter 4. We argue that discussions of high-profile racial topics represent a reactive form of outreach. In contrast, elected officials engage in proactive racial rhetorical representation when they discuss issues which are not politically salient. Using a combination of over 500 race-related terms and google trends data, we identify high-profile forms of racial outreach which include racial issues like voting rights and discussions of popular Black public figures like Rep. John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr, and Rosa Parks. We combine this analysis with our previously coded press releases and tweets to explore the percent of racial outreach which contains reference to a high-profile topic. We find that a smaller proportion of racial outreach from Black elected officials in press releases and on Twitter are centered on high-profile topics than racial outreach from White, Latino/a, and Asian American elected officials. We further test our hypothesis that Black elected officials will speak about lower profile topics by exploring whether discussions of police reform are greater during periods where Black Lives Matter is being searched more on google. We find that when Black Lives Matter is a high-profile topic, non-Black elected officials are more likely to speak out about police reform. The salience of Black Lives Matter in the public is a weaker predictor of these same discussions for Black elected officials. Overall, this chapter demonstrates than when Black elected officials speak about race, they are more likely to discuss topics which are not in the public eye.

In the conclusion, we speak about the growing significance of racial rhetorical representation in demonstrating that elected officials are working on behalf of their constituents in an era of increasing political gridlock. We also connect our findings to the continued importance of Black representation in a period where the salience of race and racial inequality has grown. Not only do we find that Black legislators provide Black people with the most rhetorical representation on race, we also find that they are more proactive, speaking out on issues that are not widely known and pursuing interests that are not yet part of the national agenda. Black elected officials continue to play a crucial role in advocating for Black interests, and they appear necessary for the full and equal representation of Black people. We then discuss why this advocacy is particularly important in a period where debates over crucial policies face political reckonings. For example, the advocacy behind the 1965 Voting Rights Act which has been challenged in court and expires in 2032 will likely shape Black politics into the future. We also address whether racial rhetoric will continue to be enough to voters of underrepresented groups who yearn for federal legislation to address critical societal disparities. We conclude the chapter by discussing how the Democratic Party notably has liberalized with regards to race since the 1990s and we contend that the racial advocacy by Black members of Congress is behind this liberalization.

In The Secret Life of Copyright, copyright law meets Black Lives Matter and #MeToo in a provocative examination of how our legal regime governing creative production unexpectedly perpetuates inequalities along racial, gender, and socioeconomic lines while undermining progress in the arts. Drawing on numerous case studies – Harvard’s slave daguerreotypes, celebrity sex tapes, famous Wall Street statues, beloved musicals, and dictator copyrights – the book argues that, despite their purported neutrality, key rules governing copyrights – from the authorship, derivative rights, and fair use doctrines to copyright’s First Amendment immunity – systematically disadvantage individuals from traditionally marginalized communities. Since laws regulating the use of creative content increasingly mediate participation and privilege in the digital world, The Secret Life of Copyright provides a template for a more robust copyright system that better addresses egalitarian concerns and serves the interests of creativity.

The chapter focusses on schematisation – the image-schematic structuring of events in conceptualisation. Image schemas are defined as representations of recurrent patterns of experience which are called up in discourse to constitute our basic understanding of the situation or event described. The different domains of experience in which image schemas arise are considered alongside their ideological role in the discursive construction of events. Two case studies are presented. The first examines the motion event in media discourses of immigration. It highlights a number of conceptual parameters along which conceptualisations of immigration may depart from a basic model of motion, including in manner of motion and configuration of the ground, quantification and plexity in the figure, and the rate and iteration of the motion encoded, and considers the implications of these departures for ideology and the legitimation of hostile immigration policies. The second focusses on schematisation in media coverage of a Black Lives Matter protest. In a comparative analysis of two texts it shows the patterns of conceptualisation implicated in realising the protest paradigm in media reporting.

The chapter applies the theoretical resources discussed in the first two chapters to provide a first justification of the idea that internet access should be a human right. This justification is based on the claim that today internet access is practically indispensable for having adequate opportunities for the exercise and enjoyment of political human rights (e.g. the freedoms of expression, free assembly, and information) and civil human rights (e.g. right to life and security of person). Numerous practical examples such as the #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movements, international political protests and boycotts, and open source intelligence crowdsourcing show that a person without internet access is unfairly limited in their chances to exercise these rights in digitalised societies. Rather, our human rights are greatly enhanced if a person can access the internet. Moreover, because the internet provides a modern, digital public sphere, not having online access is a form of political exclusion. The chapter also responds to the important objection that no new human right to internet access is needed because internet access is sufficiently protected by other human rights.

The book concludes with a meditation on the movement to remove statues of Confederate veterans and officers from public spaces throughout the South. This development is seen as an extension of the theory of amputation promulgated throughout the book: that removal is both a reminder of a white supremacist past and a repudiation of it, as well as a hopeful projection of an antiracist future.