Good evening, Frank family. Before I get started, I have a question for you. Do the names Gwendolyn Simmons, Lonnie King, or Doris Adelaide Derby Ringabelle? If you answered no, then you’re a lot like me. Seven years ago back in 2014 before I began this research project. Now let me ask you another question. Do you know Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, Patrice Cullors? Of course you do. And that’s the heart of what I want to discuss with you today. There’s a reason why you can rattle off the names of these powerful black women organizers. They have mastered the modern act of dismantling an ideology that once kept women like them on the fringes of social justice movements. And for the next few minutes, I want to share some of the communication strategies that black feminist or womanist activists use today. Their brilliant decision to do away with respectability politics has ushered in a new era of embodied protest, which pushes them from margin to center. So before I tell you about the demise of respectability politics, let me tell you what it was and what it originally tried to achieve. Respectability is a prim and proper performance of manners and morals, which believes that black women’s cleanliness and their godliness and sexual purity could engender support for racial equality. Now black women adopted a politics of respectability in the early 1800s, as the abolitionist movement picked up steam. And the idea was that free black women needed to help humanize enslaved black women after more than 300 years of being bought, sold, raped, forced to breed, and even exhibited as entertainment like Sarah Bartman. Now after slavery was abolished and reconstruction began, this ideology of modesty exploded. So we see a near 80 year stretch of club women and church ladies wearing their Sunday’s best to go protest. We see high necklines and pearls and coft hairdos like mine, rather than natural hair, and we hear crowds singing church hymns as they march. What we don’t see are queer black women, single moms, black women who are not Christian, that wasn’t considered so respectable. And so it’s around the time of the black power movement that some women began to use their bodies to protest in ways that departed from their ancestors ideas. And this is where my study picks up. I wanted to find out whether Dr. Brittany Cooper’s concept of embodied protest could be applied to evaluate the shifts that modern black women activists are making. And so the body protest is when black women activists assertively demand the frontline inclusion of all black female bodies, especially working class bodies, fat bodies, differently able bodies and queer bodies, and to signal this ethos visually today’s I want to do a few key things. I interviewed the dynamic group, Aisha Evans, Brittany Pharrell, Brittany Pachnick Cunningham, Alicia Garza, and Marissa Johnson between 2014 and 2017 bless them off and on, calling texting all kinds of things. They told me that they use their bodies to protest in three key ways. They make black love visible in all its forms. Two, they make savvy sartorial decisions. And three, they don’t wait for legacy media to document them they stage their own news events and film them. So to the first point, these women put black love on display. In this clip we see Brittany Pharrell embodying tenderness as she puts an arm around a young child, but she’s still in control with her bull horn in one hand. And in the upper right hand corner we see Brittany Pachnick embodying black joy is resistance that chair her husband is sitting in is a replica of Huey P Newton’s iconic seat. Yes that Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party. So it’s radical pick. In the bottom right hand corner we see Alexis Templeton proposing to Brittany Pharrell. The couple publicized their union to show young black queer girls that their leader didn’t always have to be a charismatic black man, nor did she have to hide. And the women also practice embodied protest through smart sartorial choices. Gone are the Sundays best. It’s like a come as you are kind of thing. And these women are making and wearing statement teas and hoodies. They launched fashion lines. They publicize the names of their organization to prevent erasure. And they wear their hair and natural styles on the front lines. The idea is to signal to their communities that they are from them and not above them. Lastly, these women practice and body protest by staging their own media spectacles and then documenting that labor. Brittany Pharrell can be seen here recording her wife Alexis’s speech, which is remarkable. Women couldn’t speak at the March on Washington and 63 weren’t allowed. Marissa Johnson is seen here in the upper right using Fannie Lou Hamer’s tactics of a few appealing to Democrats, while wearing a shirt that also pays homage to her. And then Iisha Evans told me she felt it was important for the world to see the juxtaposition of her in a sundress and the police in war gear, as she called it. So this is how the new politics of embody protests looks now. There are no white gloves, there are no pearls, but you will find plenty of heart. You’ll find queer black women working alongside cisgender black women, thin black women and thick ones, shy black women and bullhorn toting ones. And together these women created the largest social justice movement in American history. It cannot be overstated. And I can’t wait to tell you more of what they’re up to now but it’ll have to wait into the Q&A section because I’m out of time. Thanks for listening. Dr. Richardson, thank you so much for sharing this incredible work with us. What was the spark that inspired you to start asking these questions? The spark was actually something that Alicia mentioned when we were interviewing her. She said that people were telling the story of Black Lives Matter without the women who founded it. And as a journalist and as a PhD student at the time, this is happening the first year of my PhD program, I had to admit that I was looking for that blue vest, if you know what I mean. I was looking for the young man who was telling us all about Black Lives Matter and thinking that DeRay and his team were in charge, so to speak. And she said everyone was kind of looking for that Martin and Malcolm and Brittany Farel said the same thing. And so I took a class as a PhD student with the iconic Elsa Barkley Brown who had a class Black Women in Civil Rights, and then Patricia Hill Collins had a class called Black Social Movements happening that same semester. So those two together really opened my eyes to just how respectability had pushed these black women to the margins for so long. So one of the key themes in your paper is this concept of embodied discourse. Can you kind of define that concept for the audience and tell us what that looks like in action? Sure, it’s using one’s body to send a message and using that, and using that message as a form of protest. So whether you’re wanting to normalize black love or humanize someone for whom violence has been mapped onto their image by virtue of mass media and these things. It becomes really essential to use one’s body in a very careful strategic way. And so these t-shirts aren’t accidents. The fact that everyone was wearing braids during these things aren’t accidents. And so I had that hunch and I would see them somewhere on a news broadcast and then I would because we built that relationship, email them and ask them what was the meaning behind that, what were you going for there. And that was always a greater story. So the embodied protest is one which makes sure that you’re using all of your physical, corporal visual things that people can see to make a statement without saying a word. I love that because I feel like with a lot of these movements, people seem to think that things just happen. But you’re showing no, these black women had a plan they’re making conscious choices. This is strategic. This is wonderful. Um, so one of the themes that keeps popping up with all of these papers is that kind of narrative power starts in these counter spaces where activists and communities have power over what that narrative is. So can you talk about what that looked like in your paper. Absolutely. Brittany Packnett really helped me see that a ton when she is a self described day one on the front lines of Ferguson. And she said she would see stories about, for example, looting of the McDonald’s and she would go up to CNN reporters and say, we went into the McDonald’s to ask for milk which is an antidote for tear gas. And so she said, you need to correct that on air. And she’s saying these things as people are on air so that she’s unavoidable. She’s in the frame. And that now has earned her a spot on MSNBC as a commentator because she just did so much correction and counter narrative during that time that quite frankly it made journalists feel embarrassed. Whoa, how do we miss that. And so counter narrative is a way of doing the work of those ancestors to make sure you’re reframing black womanhood, but not being trapped in checking those boxes that respectability used to make you have to check to participate. Awesome. So for all of those in the audience thinking about how to bring your work into their own spaces and the work that they do. What are your suggestions. Two big ones, I would say especially in the wake of this verdict that we’ve seen, we’ve got to believe black women the first time. I mean we had a 17 year old black girl in this instance, who changed the world with a smartphone video, right, we wouldn’t know what happened to George Floyd without her shining a light on that. And there were people before her like diamond Reynolds who was trying to show us what happened with Philando Castile when she live streamed his death on camera. And I can think of so many other instances Stacy Abrams where she tried to tell us years ago, something fishy is going on here with voting in Georgia, and we just kind of had on it and so we’ve got to trust when black women are kicking up dust and telling us that there is something to investigate here that we trust that testimony. The second thing is that we fund black women though, a lot of black women have their own nonprofits their own organizations, and all of the women that I talked to in my study were really frustrated that people want to pick their brain for things for strategy without payment, and that payment usually goes to their own legal defense fund security donations to families that they have built relationships with. So it’s never just a selfish or kind of greedy game. So I think that believing black women is essential going forward and paying them what they’re worth for their extraordinary expertise is essential. So what’s next for you what’s coming up in the research pipeline what should the Franksters be keeping an eye out for. I’m really excited that I’m writing a new book, I’m just signed a contract for a canceled it’s called canceled how smartphones and social media democratize public shaming, and it talks about the good in terms of what we’ve seen. It talks about the bad in terms of like the Amy Cooper videos where smartphones help save someone’s life, possibly, but also the bad in terms of people then using that term cancel culture because they want to escape accountability. So those two things don’t go together they’re two different phenomenon I want to parse that out in this next book. Oh, I can’t wait to read it. So you do such amazing work. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. Everyone in the audience. Let’s give Dr Richardson some zoom love. Thank you.