In the Embers of Black Critique: Dismantling the Icon of Black Lives Matter

Chapter 2 “In the Embers of Black Critique: Dismantling the Icon of Black Lives Matter” performs an iconoclastic genealogy of Black Lives Matter’s (BLM) evolution into the Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN) by focusing on emerging critiques from the BLM10, Mass Action for Black Liberation (MABL), and BLM Grassroots. While many have offered wholesale rejections of BLM and/or uncritical celebrations which iconize BLMGN and its co-founders, an iconoclastic genealogy grapples with the moments of fracture and transition surrounding the BLM movement. Centering these fault lines also reveals that there is no singular BLM. There have been and continue to be multiple responses to #BlackLivesMatter encompassing a wide range of political orientations and activist strategies. Rather than reading BLM as a unitary movement which was once iconoclastic and is now iconographic, Black iconoclasm focuses on the fractures around the shared BLM moniker to wrestle with the multiple trajectories—iconoclastic and iconographic—enabled by the Ferguson Uprising. The co-option of certain political trajectories surrounding the BLM moniker cannot be reduced to a neat cycle given that Black people continue to engage in iconoclastic theories and practices surrounding the BLM moniker despite such co-option.