Black Lives Matter and Cosmopolitan Solidarity
Intan Paramaditha*
June 17, 2020
It is galvanizing, from where I am located, to see the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag being used alongside #AboriginalLivesMatter and #PapuanLivesMatter. Protests over the murder of George Floyd have amplified conversations around systemic racism and police violence not only in the United States but also across the world. The global resonance of the Black Lives Matter movement has encouraged new ways to think about cosmopolitan solidarity. What makes solidarity across borders possible? When discourses of race and social justice circulate in the global media landscape, which oppression is visible, and what escapes us? As an Indonesian writer living in Australia after spending a decade in the U.S., my own mobility has inspired reflections around how ideas travel and connect us. As some issues need to take a more circuitous road before they can be recognized at home, we need to ask ourselves critical questions and explore new paths of alliances.
Solidarity beyond the limits of national boundaries emerges out of shared experiences and universal concerns, yet what is regarded as ‘universal’ largely depends on Western discourses and global capital. People marched to show their solidarity for the French magazine Charlie Hebdo more quickly than responding to the terrorist attack that killed 140 children in Peshawar. #JeSuisCharlie was more relatable because it evoked the trauma of 9/11, viewed as a symbol of attacks on Western freedom and democracy. In the pre-social media world, 9/11 events also mobilized articulations of solidarity worldwide, and this global affinity was made possible by what Inderpal Grewal calls consumer citizenship. We relate to America and its dream, intact or broken, through transnational consumer and media culture.
Affinity structured by global capitalism has differentiated, to borrow from Judith Butler, the lives that are grievable from those not recognized as such. Created by three black women activists in 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement resists death politics. As society mourns the loss of certain lives and not others, the BLM insists on foregrounding marginalized black bodies as lives worth living. Armed with digital activism, it combats the exclusion of racism from global conversations. Scholars have observed that globalization tends to draw our attention to everything that flows in the global economy -- capital, people, ideas -- whereas problems of racism at home occupies the site of immobility. When the world celebrated Obama as the first African-American president, the idea of blackness traveled globally via the American dream narrative that depends on the immobility of less appealing narratives about race, poverty, and violence.
The BLM moved away from the progressive neoliberal frame and changed the discourse of global blackness. First, it has pushed conversations around the entanglement between racial oppression and capitalism in the US and different parts of the world. The logic of exceptionalism -- celebrating the success of a few people of color -- only conceals, if not exacerbates, the problems. Second, through #BlackLivesMatter, the movement has allowed strategic alliances. Activists have used the hashtag alongside specific hashtags to amplify issues of racism in their countries. #AboriginalLivesMatter in Australia and #PapuanLivesMatter in Indonesia exemplify how solidarity with oppression abroad is an important part of the politics of recognition at home.
Indigenous Australian writer Alison Whittaker has criticized the long-time bias regarding First-Nations deaths in Australia, particularly in terms of media representations and public responses. Non-Indigenous Australians are more familiar with police and prison violence in the US than some 432 Indigenous people who have died in custody since 1991. Black Lives Matter-inspired rallies, organized nationwide in Australia, have helped the public to confront silence and injustice, and to recognize voices of resistance from the Indigenous communities.
In Indonesia, activists used the hashtag #PapuanLivesMatter to raise awareness on how Papuans have been shot and arrested by the Indonesian police. Human rights activist Veronica Koman states that #PapuanLivesMatter became popular when #BlackLivesMatter was on the rise. The hashtags provide a counter-discourse when many Indonesians see the problems in Papua through the dominant lens prescribed by the government, as a problem of separatism instead of racism and economic exploitation.
While limited access to information about Papua is to blame, here is the harsh truth: For many Indonesians living in the urban centers, racism and state violence in Papua can only be rendered intelligible through a gentrified route: the American connection. People in Java relate more to what happens in the U.S. than in Eastern Indonesia via the American media and culture that they consume. Similarly, founder of IndigenousX Luke Pearson points out that although Indigenous Australians had been talking about systemic racism for a long time, people only started listening when Black Lives Matter globalized.
The global implications of the BLM have been uplifting and changes have taken place in the wake of the BLM protests. We have seen, among others, more donations to Indigenous organizations, increased international attention to Papuan prisoners, and more efforts decolonize reading lists in countries like the United States and the UK. However, we also need to critically assess our solidarity, what we care about, and what we do not see. How do we position ourselves concerning other struggles against oppression, for instance, in the case of Palestine? In Indonesia, massive demonstrations to support Palestine were organized mainly by Muslim conservative groups, narrowing it to an exclusively Muslim issue rather than an ongoing discussion of colonialism. In Australia, although alternative solidarity networks connecting indigenous and Palestinian struggles are growing, they have not been part of the mainstream imagination.
Indonesians and Australians strategically connect themselves with the Black Lives Matter, yet despite the closer distance, spaces for dialogue between Indigenous Australian and Papuan black struggles are still limited. Our solidarity still largely depends on the logic of circulation and visibility made possible by the global capital. We are fighting by tweaking what Audre Lorde calls “the master’s tools.” This does not mean that our grief, anger, and solidarity are not valid, but we need to be aware that the master’s tools -- available to use by anyone, including corporates attempting to boost their progressive image -- have their potential and limitation.
Cosmopolitanism has been seen as a vehicle of capitalism, but we need to reclaim it to reflect on how we are all implicated by global power structures. We need to think of cosmopolitan solidarity as a decolonial practice, allowing us to listen to others, empathize, and identify commonalities without erasing particular conditions that produce differences in experience, knowledge, and forms of resistance. The first thing to do is to question the mechanisms that allow discourses to travel, and from there, we can trace other routes that may seem untrodden but have opened up connections. These routes -- linkages and collective maps of oppressions and struggles – may have existed for a long time, and it is our task to look, explore, and amplify them.
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*Notes/ unpublished essay.
Ideas around cosmopolitan solidarity as a decolonial practice and new routes for connection led to some initiatives, including this panel on “Settler Colonialism and Transnational Solidarity.”