on slogans
"---- is an act of resistance"
Once upon a time—in an attempt at owning the libs—Jordan B. Peterson vented about the term “social justice”, smearing it as “a woke slogan”. He correctly traced the etymology of the word “slogan” to “sluagh-ghairm” before incorrectly identifying its origin as Welsh and smugly dropping the mic: “Meaning: battle cry of the dead.”
“Sluagh-ghairm” was a war-cry hailed by Scottish Highland clans. Each Sluagh-ghairm was unique to each clan and often referred to a shared mantra, a significant landmark or “the seat of the clan” — the territorial stronghold where chiefs gathered council for crucial decisions. Despite being a sonorous instrument of battle, a sluagh-ghairm would be hailed in celebration, too. These cries were inciting—passionate, vocal anchors to a clan’s ancestral ground.1
Where sluagh-ghairm were war-cries in heated battles, the modern usage of “slogan” has stripped the root word of its militant teeth, sending it down an evolutionary path that has inseparably tethered it to corporate advertising. To zombie-herd the masses towards buying stuff. Brady T. Hodges et al. capture this best in their consumer research essay, Intel Inside: The Linguistic Properties of Effective Slogans:
Firms spend millions creating and communicating slogans… Marketing communications, including slogans, are more likely to boost brand attitudes when consumers have a more favorable attitude towards the communication, and they are more likely to increase brand awareness when consumers remember the communication. Slogans, however, are distinct from other marketing communications (e.g., ad copy, social media posts, website text, etc.) because slogans often stand alone, tend to be more concise, are more closely and consistently tied to the brand, and are repeated more frequently than other communications.2
In contrast to its capitalistic refurbishment, the arena where the modern slogan retained a semblance of its warrior spirit is in its forked, evolutionary path in politics. In The Use of Slogans in Political Rhetoric, Cail Newsome explores how American presidents use slogans: “to thrill, exhort, and inspire is at the heart of persuading an audience.”3 Cécile Van De Velde’s essay, The power of slogans: using protest writings in social movement research looks at how slogans drive activism, stating “each and every slogan and protest writing is a public expression and speech in and of itself, whose summarising and visual strength conveys a political message.”4
Either way, I see slogans as spells. Enchantments embodying the very spirit of a movement, people or idea. A slogan should be simple, comprehensive, clear-hearted and internally electrifying. They are the first impression and the end goal. For that reason, I rigorously study their structural integrities.
Whenever a new slogan emerges, I observe its foundations and fault-lines. I think on all the ways its successful and how it could collapse, be taken out of context, be argued against, thwarted and co-opted. What message floats on the surface? What message lurks underneath? Corporations spend millions of dollars workshopping the exact wording that’ll pied-pipe millions into emptying their wallets. I wish we could afford that level of study but in lieu of such deep-pocketed patronage—I critically analyse, hoping that the hyper-vigilance of my screams into the void are picked up to fortify the cries of our causes as we look to ignite people into action against the imposing web of oppressive structures.
I have no academically meticulous way to say this but: when it comes to slogans, I am concerned with how they populate the metaphysical plane. As I’ve said before: we are transformed by words every single day. A slogan is imbued with the spiritual voltage of a world-changing hope. They have their own equilibrium. They carry energetic intentions—on their skin and deep within their genomes—and it is likely my vocation as a writer that compels me to deeply analyse their emotional body with such rigour.
Black Lives Matter grew from a #hashtag and a nausea rose in me alongside. I dared not share the nature of my sickness with anyone, lest I infect my fellow niggas with my pessimistic affliction/be considered an enemy of the movement/or worse… a coon. Still, the structural integrity of Black Lives Matter as a slogan unsettled me in its early conception and has continued to do so for nearly a decade.
I’d attend protests with crowds of kin around me, chanting Black Lives Matter! at the apex of their lungs, falling silent each time. I didn’t have the clearness of mind or deftness of tongue to articulate the tumults I felt then. Perhaps I never needed any of those things—just the bravery to speak my mind:
If slogans are descendents of Highland clan war-cries; if they are indeed spells imbued with the spiritual voltage of a world-changing hope—a slogan that sought to affirm our existence to a system that’s shown us gratuitous violence across every echelon of its structure was a mistake. (Metaphysical translation: I shudder at the thought of looking into the snarling jaws of a beast that’s made it bloodcurdlingly clear it wants to eat me and uttering the words “I matter”.)
With each instance of police brutality, further war was waged; a war many misguidedly thought was over with the election of a Black president. But each death clarified my understanding about the steepness of the battlefield’s hill and with each grainy video this slogan forced me to argue unreasonable whataboutisms. It may have been inevitable no matter what slogan was popularised. Nevertheless, explaining to white people that you simply fucking matter felt like such a humiliating base position.
I dreamt of the Māori’s Haka. Ceremonial enchantments of the body exhibiting celebratory pride and unfuckwitable strength. I awoke to find my gaze fixed back on Black Lives Matter, hope waning off. I felt the ceded emotional ground. I sensed an undercurrent of pacification pretending it was as an electrified charge. The rusty blade of a vicious enemy pressed on the nape of my neck and in three fucking words, waterlogged pleas lurked under the surface. Black Lives Matter (let us live, I beg you.)
At my most pent up, my gasket would blow. “Niggas used to shout Black Power!”
When I look to the metaphysical plane, Black Power feels so perfect.
Symmetrical. Succinct. A robust, ideological foundation with fertile soil to propagate so many different ideas. Coupled with the iconic raised fist—a universal symbol of combative force but a specific emblem to Black people as a salutation—the spiritual charge is undeniable.
“Black power is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations and to support those organizations. It is a call to reject the
racist institutions and values of this society”— Kwame Ture
Black Power summoned an energetic wellspring—portraying an intimate belief in Black people’s self-determination while also being frank-tongued about the infernal nature of the racist structure. In the punch of its words there is the ambition for self-governance, self-acceptance radiating outwards, a conviction to seek dominion over circumstance. Over-explanation of its intention was unnecessary as the social scientist Michael Banton wrote, “those who have raised the cry are not worried by the charge that they are cultivating "black racism" because they are sure their doctrine can never do as much harm as white racism.”5
Despite helping popularise the term with his book Black Power: Politics of Liberation in America, some of Kwame Ture’s ideas about the transformative capacity of Black Power didn’t land. “A black sheriff can end police brutality”6 seems overly optimistic considering the corruptive miasma of the US police state—the same institutional body Baldwin famously commented on just a year earlier: “In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.”7
In that sense, I’m not trying to get caught slipping on the slick surface of nostalgia. The sixties were a time of electrifying resistance yet, Black intellectual powerhouses and community leaders were not above disagreeing with one another over the slogan.
Martin Luther King Jr’s disagreement with it is well documented, perhaps excessively so. Yes, his penchant for nonviolent demonstration put him at odds with the rhetorics of self-defensive violent resistance that were uttered in Black Power’s name by more militant actors. But just as one should consider the sneaky manipulation of over-portraying King in black and white photos to make his struggle seem further back in time than it was; one should also have a healthy suspicion towards information that omits King’s political evolutions—especially when those evolutions contributed so thoroughly to his demise.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute presents King’s perspective on Black Power by pulling quotes from 1966 with no mention of the later writing where King not only embraces the electrifying potential of the term but also calls for an evolutionary expansion of it.
In a 1967 New York Times article, King expresses desire to progress Black Power to the strengthening of worker’s unions, class-conscious solidarity between the Black and white working class in the key industries of “truck transportation, steel, auto and food industries” and the importance of elevating Black political leaders who are “impressive or illustrious to their constituents”. He also indulges a critical lens of the nonviolent approach that is so stereotypically associated with his legacy:
We must frankly acknowledge that in past years our creativity and imagination were not employed in learning how to develop power. We found a method in nonviolent protest that worked, and we employed it enthusiastically. We did not have leisure to probe for a deeper understanding of its laws and lines of development. Although - our actions were bold and crowned with successes, they were substantially improvised and spontaneous. They attained the goals set for them but carried the blemishes of our inexperience.8
Black Power had an incomparable global impact but I fear my gravitation to it as a rallying cry may be too enamoured with its spiritual voltage and too fingers-in-the-ears dismissive of its ramifications.
People are always shocked when I tell them Malcolm X’s grandson suffered from schizophrenia so severe that it lead him to set a house fire that killed Betty Shabazz. That sort of tragedy isn’t isolated—it is trauma descending down ancestry; simply one example of the racially charged nuclear fallout from an aggressive structure that devastated Black Power movement leaders via assassinations, predawn police raids, bombings, ruthless carceral measures and forced political exiles.
The battle-cries of Black Power were met with sanitised bloodshed obscured in history books. The observable and unknown tragedies it wrought are fucking scary.
Beyond setting alight the lives of radical leaders, there has been a concerted effort to stamp out any semblance of revolutionary spirit, making it clear the only viable resistance is a palatable one. The western structure has only grown more bloated, more heinous, more subterranean and the boot that bore down on the Black Power movement was swift, steely and never picked up to see the mess under the sole.
With all this in mind… Can we be surprised that Black Lives Matter is the natural successor in the afterlife of Black Power ? That it has visibly less teeth? That it hums with the pacified undertones of a plea?
Non-violent direct action will continue to be a significant source of power until it is made irrelevant by the presence of justice — Martin Luther King Jr.
Make America Great Again may’ve been repurposed from Reagan by Trump’s presidential campaign—but if you know how integral Black exploitation is to the functionality of America (the whole world, if we’re honest), it’s clear that MAGA doubles up as a counter-insurgency to Black Lives Matter. The unwavering pride in blood-soaked land built with enslaved labour and the declaration its gone to shit (rather than the realisation that it always was). MAGA is a hallucinatory spell, promising return to an exceptionalist former glory with the hushed understanding that such glory requires violence. It insists action. There is a spiritual charge in its intention that’s easily transferable. Energy doesn’t care if its used for good or evil—it simply demands motion.
Perhaps, recognising the voltage of Make America Great Again and the static palatability of Black Lives Matter is what makes me recoil at the phrases—Joy is resistance/rest is resistance.
I look at who occupies the White House. I look at the genocidal violence the previous occupants oversaw. I see no effective or coherently organised challenges. I see adjacent echo-chambers shout and alienate one another much more than they fight the common enemy. Resisting as an act of resistance is more necessary than ever yet more absent than any of us truly want to admit.
As a slogan in and of itself, I understand the context behind rest as resistance. As a means of rejecting the infliction of Black women’s labour, how rest is necessary for Black people under kyriarchy but specifically for Black women (or others Joy James would name “Captive Maternals9”) who have also been expected to toil intra-communally. I resonate with the realities it was rebelling against while still feeling like its structural integrity was always shaky.
Resistance is a word inseparable from radical struggle—it is how revolutionaries articulate their fight against oppressors. Resistance requires the activity of confronting injustice, it requires a spiritual voltage that’ll grant its inhabitants the courage to look snarling beasts in the face while fear quakes in their chest and so I believe slogans balancing equations such as rest as resistance are a pacifiers.
A call-to-action that calls for inaction is no call at all. Equating resistance with virtues like joy/rest/love do all of the concepts involved a painful disservice to each other.
The metaphorical equation of joy is resistance is conceptual displacement. Muddying and conflating the necessary act of resistance with other actions has set a precedent where any act of happiness can be reasoned as resisting.
Tongue-in-cheek, of course.
Yet, I can see how the declaration of joy is resistance has propagated this idea that individual acts of perceived misbehaviour, in and of themselves, are resistance.
If a slogan is imbued with the spiritual voltage of a world-changing hope then the root of my discomfort with these notions is that they read less like radical ambitions and more like coping mechanisms.
I do not hope for joy to be resistance. I hope that by resisting I may reclaim the joy this monstrous system has stolen from us. I do not hope for rest to be resistance, I hope resisting lets me reclaim the rest that has been existentially deprive me of. I’m not trying to go to bed thinking, “this sleep will piss off the white man.” Resistance is about confronting vaster enemies but I care for my joy too much to make it about them. In that respect, I honour Zi Corley’s contribution and would much rather tap into the emotional voltage of reclamation for these virtues.
Joy as a reclamation of what was always mine.
Rest as a reclamation of what is owed to me.
Love as a reclamation of what I’ve always deserved.
There’s much to reclaim and much to resist, it’d help to be clear-hearted on which is which.
For those already engaged in bonafide resistance efforts and have found utility in any of the terms I’ve reflected on—none of this should hamper you. The work is the work and nothing I say about slogans is a character judgement of those who use them. I’m much more concerned with wider phenomenas, as these contemporary slogans become more individualised and personalised in reflection of more diverse globalised audiences and varied causes—how can they be imbued with the spiritual charge necessary for unity? Legible to many? Effectively mobilising?
The structural integrity of these slogans determines whether they’ll be easily co-opted or—as is the case with Abolish the Police—completely overwritten by something more easy on the stomach like Defund the Police. Their necessity remains—to be both entry points and endgames to energise people into standing up for what they believe in.
But perhaps, what I expect from a slogan operates under the assumption that they need to be solicitations of strength and spells of incitement. The Sluagh-ghairms of the Highlands may have been battle-cries but the idea their modern counterparts must also be centred around conflict may be too patriarchal a viewpoint. Still, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out how unwilling to physically resist the average westerner is—for ourselves, let alone the freedoms outside of us. We march peacefully in our tens of thousands for Palestinians who, suffering loss of limb will throw rocks at deadly drones as their last act of resistance. We applaud their courage and fight by demonstrating, boycotting, sharing and witnessing. Then we get to turn the TV off. In the words of Kendrick Duckworth Lamar, it’s not enough.
We know it. And sometimes, I believe our slogans reveal it, too.
I always think the strongest slogans are the ones which become stronger when their opponents try to subvert them— to me, all the attempts to do that for Black Lives Matter just made its opponents look like shits.
I expect the people who “Make America Great Again” was for felt similar about me— either I might go “it wasn’t ever great” or “it’s very great now as you starve in poverty,” both of which are antagonistic in different ways.
I’ve been thinking about how some communications is designed to degrade over time, to become weaponised? Like often someone will say something horrible with a qualifier, and go “look at what I really said; I put a qualifier in!” But the qualifier is dropped in the version of the message that spreads, and that’s why it’s effective even if no one involved in the production of it realises. So I guess it’s about the decomposed slogan, for me? I keep thinking about how a cat’s piss is odourless when it’s released, but gets smellier and smellier as the chemicals in it degrades. “Communication is like a cat’s piss!” I shout, as people edge away from me frightened
You’re absolutely right that slogans like “rest is resistance” or “joy is resistance” can serve as entry points for people who are new to the ideas of liberation and resistance as we discussed before. However, as you elaborately pointed out: slogans are inherently limited. They are oversimplified and are co-opted or misinterpreted, especially when divorced from the deeper context of struggle. “Resist” is a more direct and unambiguous call to action, but it requires a collective understanding of what resistance entails. Whether that's through direct action, community building, or dismantling the system.
The danger, as you noted, lies in conflating resistance with passive acts of self-care or joy. While rest and joy are vital for sustaining the movement, they are not, in themselves, acts of resistance unless they are consciously tied to the broader struggle against oppression. This is where accountability and collective action come into play.
You wrote: "A call-to-action that calls for inaction is no call at all. Equating resistance with virtues like joy/rest/love do all of the concepts involved a painful disservice to each other.
The metaphorical equation of joy is resistance is conceptual displacement. Muddying and conflating the necessary act of resistance with other actions has set a precedent where any act of happiness can be reasoned as resisting."
This is where it got a little choppy for me. I don't think it's a call to action to those who know better. When bell hooks wrote about love as resistance it it didn't feel like conceptual displacement or conflating because hooks’ emphasis on love as a revolutionary act was never about passivity; it was about creating a foundation of care and humanity that sustains the movement. Rest and joy can be seen as sustaining forces, but they must be understood within the context of the larger struggle. Rest becomes an act of resistance when you are deliberate about the reclaiming of time and energy that oppressive systems seek to exploit—especially for Black and Indigenous people. Tricia Hersey highlights this in her book 'Rest is Resistance' in which she talks about her personal struggle with the "grind culture" and advocated for community care. Here I am reclaiming "rest and love is resistance" for hooks and Hersey.
I guess I say all this to say: objectively, at the end of the day slogans are limited. Words are spells, but, ACTIONS AND FEELINGS are the stronger spells. I think it really depends on what the collective is feeling, believing, and doing as whole that creates our collective reality. You can say "I am happy" but if you don't believe it or feel it, you can say it til you're blue and that word spell won't work. Right now, the collective is not unified in our feelings or actions - if we're going to speak metaphysically - that's going to be stronger than the word spells we're hearing or saying on any given day. So do they really actually matter that much *other than a point of entry* in the context of where we are in our current struggle? The revolution will definitely not be on the internet, I know that for sure (hello hyper surveillance).
Personally I think energy is better placed at discussing practical skills or actions on how to get over the hurdle of actually unifying our local communities to be more deeply engaged politically in direct actions (together) and raising political consciousness/literacy/education -- which I see you doing here. Well written piece.