Resting in Peace? White Surveillance and the Co-optation of “Rest in Power”
“Rest in Power” is a common phrase used to eulogize those who have made large impacts on their industries and communities (cupofwater03, 2022). It’s a popular play on “Rest in Peace,” a saying meant to wish the deceased eternal rest. However, compared to the now common usage of “Rest in Power,” the phrase has a history rooted in activism and Black suffering.
The first utilization of “Rest in Power” was in 2000, used in a newsgroup to honor Mike “Dream” Francisco, a graffiti artist and political critic from the Bay Area killed in a robbery (Hampton, 2019). In 2005, the phrase was used in Bay Area graffiti tributes that emerged after the death of 19-year-old Meleia Wills-Starbuck ((Hill & Yang, 2005). As Twitter emerged and tweets became a popular way to commemorate death, “Rest in Power” was used in connection with hip-hop and Black culture, but the phrase didn’t become mainstream until 2014, a year that marked the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement due to the police-perpetrated murder of Michael Brown, a Black man (Hampton, 2019).
Once “Rest in Power” became a nationally-known phrase, it was used to describe unjust deaths — deaths where people couldn’t rest “in peace” until concrete change was made in society — in the beginning stages of its popularity. Specifically, it referred to the deaths of Black people killed by the police or those who died fighting for liberation in the Black or LGBTQ+ communities (Coghill, 2022). “Rest in Power” wasn’t just a way to bid farewell to the deceased who died too soon — it was a way to call for change and to rally people in the fight against injustice.
When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020, the American Bar Association published a eulogy titled “Rest in Power, Notorious RBG,” marking a stark departure from the original usage of the phrase (Cotter, 2020). By using a phrase meant to mourn the consequences of anti-Blackness to commemorate someone with a mixed record on race, utilizing “Rest in Power” for Ginsburg exemplifies how “Rest in Power” has been co-opted by the (white) mainstream (Staff, 2020).
Adorno and Horkheimer highlight how marginalized pop cultural artifacts are inevitably absorbed into the mainstream due to the nature of the culture industry — those who are deviants from the norm can only survive the culture industry by fitting in (Horkheimer et al., 2020, 5). Through this process, termed incorporation, the phrase “Rest in Power” could only gain popularity by allowing itself to become a part of white mainstream culture. This means that in order for “Rest in Power” and the movement that it symbolizes to draw national attention, it had to put itself at risk of co-optation from ignorant, passive consumers that may not realize the significance of the phrase. The commodification of “Rest in Power” has become increasingly clear over time, with t-shirts on Etsy bearing the phrase layered on portraits of deceased white people like Ginsburg. This sort of incorporation echoes Sarah Banet-Weiser’s concept of commodity feminism, where feminism becomes a product to consume rather than a series of complex movements to learn from (Weiser, 2015). Like commodity feminism, the widespread commodification of anti-racism involves commercially repackaging phrases and ideas like “Rest in Power” (that were once subversive and symbolized Black liberation) into products that consumers — who are mostly white — can easily buy and vainly enjoy.
By creating the illusion of “anti-racist” and “not anti-racist” products through consumer differentiation, it seems that white audiences derive joy from the commercialization of anti-racism because of the fact that buying t-shirts with “Rest in Power RBG” on them makes them seem “woke” or less racist compared to those who don’t consume these products (Adorno, 1941, 203). Consuming these products appears to be a way of assuaging white guilt and racial discomfort — it’s easier to buy a t-shirt than to engage in thoughtful conversations about race and white supremacy (Williams, 2020, 9). Due to the presence of these white consumers created by the commercialization of “Rest in Power,” the phrase has become increasingly surveilled by the people that the phrase intended to subvert, resulting in white surveillance over a phrase that once symbolized Black liberation (Williams, 2020, 8). Because of this, it appears that white people consume products that commodify “Rest in Power” in order to maintain involvement (and inevitably, control of) who the phrase is commemorating, leading to a more sanitized collective conception of what the phrase means. ”Rest in Power” is no longer a phrase used to call for Black liberation, but rather a phrase used for anyone who has been taken too soon — including people like Ginsburg who have arguably worsened the oppression of Black people in America or Queen Elizabeth II, who oversaw England’s violent colonization of communities of color in the 1900s (Coghill, 2022).
The words we use to mourn and characterize death are incredibly important to our conceptions of politics and society — the deaths of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin set off an entire movement centered around Black liberation and created important language such as “Rest in Power” and “Black Lives Matter” that undoubtedly changed international conceptions of race. Because of this, the white co-option of “Rest in Power” could potentially exemplify an ideological struggle for control over the politics of and the language used to describe Black death (Storey, 2009, 4). The transformation of what “Rest in Power” meant as it grew in popularity over time highlights how incorporating marginalized pop cultural artifacts into the mainstream isn’t just a way for elites to maintain control over the masses — it’s also a way to maintain and strengthen white supremacy.
Works Cited
Banet-Weiser, S. (2015). Popular misogyny. Culture Digitally
Coghill, A. (2022, September 14). People are telling the queen to "rest in power." let's not do that. Mother Jones. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/09/people-are-telling-the-queen-to-rest-in-power-lets-not-do-that/
Cotter, D. (2020, December 13). Rest in Power, Notorious RBG. Americanbar.org. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/rbgs-impact-on-civil-rights/rest-in-power/
cupofwater03. (2022, November 20). Rest in power, Jason David Frank. YouTube. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f3mQMl2yZo
Hampton, R. (2019, September 30). How "Rest in power" went from radical eulogy to kitschy twitter meme. Slate Magazine. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://slate.com/culture/2019/09/rest-in-power-phrase-history-appropriation-black-activists.html
Hill, A., & Yang, T. C. (2005, July 23). Willis-Starbuck's best friends recall her at Service. East Bay Times. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2005/07/23/willis-starbucks-best-friends-recall-her-at-service/
Horkheimer, M., Adorno, T. W., Jephcott, E., & Noeri, G. S. (2020). Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford University Press.
Staff, M. P. (2020, September 23). RBG's mixed record on Race and Criminal Justice. The Marshall Project. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/09/23/rbg-s-mixed-record-on-race-and-criminal-justice
Storey, J. (2009). What is popular culture? Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, pp. 1-16.
Williams, A. (2020). Black memes matter: #LivingWhileBlack with Becky and karen. Social Media + Society, 6(4), 205630512098104. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120981047
By Gabriel Jung
ReplyDeleteWhen thinking about incorporation and industries bringing marginalized things to the center, we often tend to revolve around products or physical objects. However, now that I begin to consider it, words and phrases can undoubtedly be brought from the margins into the mainstream. The phrase "Rest In Power" has undoubtedly been exploited by mass media corporations and advertisements ever since the explosion of BLM. What used to be a word to empower and commemorate is now almost used as a cheap scapegoat for companies to indicate they "agree" with the new hip, woke times. Often, as you mentioned, it can even be weaponized to detract from focuses like BLM to more commercialism. This also makes me think of Tonia Sutherlands's publication on images depicting black death. While these photos are initially used as a way to remember violent acts and resist them, they become appropriate to reinforce racial equality and demand conformity. However what makes this situation far more difficult is that while you can somewhat attempt to control how and where a photo is used, a phrase is a completely open-for-use element. Hence, it would be more difficult for people of color to combat when it is used to detract and devalue their movements. Yet, I believe that Tonia Sutherland's point on using history as evidence continues to stand. By observing and even recording these incidents where "Rest In Power" is vilified and misused, we can further emphasis the scope of systematic racial inequality within our culture industries and find new ways to combat and remove this and future incidents of misuse.