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In 2013 when activist Alicia Garza created the hashtag "#blacklivesmatter" on the social media platform Twitter, it was unlikely that she knew the phrase would evolve into the most transcendent political slogan of the early twenty-first century United States. At the time, she was waging a one-woman protest against the killing of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, a black teenager gunned down by a white vigilante ostensibly for walking through a predominantly white neighborhood. In less than two years, the hashtag transformed to a political organization that affirmed the lives of a "global Black family" who continued to suffer extrajudicial killings at the hands of white supremacists and law enforcement agents of states that seemed to devalue black lives. At the same time, "Black Lives Matter" became a foil for critics of black American activists as well as the proponents of deracialized humanitarianism. The specter of the DuBoisian color-line resurfaced as the major problem, now, of the twenty-first century.1 Racial self-affirmation resulted, on one hand, in the unification of social justice advocates fighting antiblack racism and terrorism around the world and, on the other hand, in deepening divisions between black and nonblack Americans seeking to uphold United States political values like freedom and equality. One tweet, as it were, interpellated the kaleidoscopic racial identities of a global community and their complicity in the nefarious, and seemingly never-ending, world history of antiblack racism.
The language that activists use to wage war against injustice and inequality can both galvanize constituencies to unify as well as demotivate and derogate those same activists' efforts to affect social justice. In Collateral Language, Global Studies scholars John Collins and Ross Glover explained that "language matters in the most concrete, immediate way possible: its use, by political and military leaders, leads directly to violence in the form of war, mass murder (including genocide), the physical destruction of human communities, and the devastation of the natural environment... every act of political violence...is intimately linked with the use of language."2 In the case of "Black Lives Matter," the very racial self-affirmation that activists declared in response to extrajudicial killings in the United States - though they be reasonable and warranted declaration - ultimately served to undermine the cross-racial solidarity required to address racial inequality and injustice....