Assistant Professor of Dance Anusha Kedhar

Assistant Professor of Dance Anusha Kedhar

By now, you know this phrase well. It has become the rallying cry of those protesting the killing of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Mo., earlier this year. Like other memorable activist slogans — “Hell no! We won’t go!” and “No justice? No peace!”— it captures the essence of collective anger in response to injustice.

Unlike other slogans, though, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” is not just voiced. It is also embodied. The phrase is both a plea not to shoot, as well as the bodily imperative to lift one’s hands. Since Michael Brown’s death, we’ve seen photos of young black men and women in Ferguson, Tibetan monks from India, black Harvard law students, schoolchildren in Missouri, young people in Moscow, and a church congregation in New York City with their hands up. Some stand, some kneel, some bend their heads, some stare straight ahead. Each one symbolizes a bodily act of solidarity with Michael Brown and victims of oppression of state-over-citizen around the world. As Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce comments, the hands-up gesture “has been transformed into a different kind of weapon.”

What does this gesture mean for the different bodies that enact it? How do protesters assign new meanings to such a codified bodily gesture? How can we read these protests as choreographic tactics and gestures of resistance? Why is the deployment of the body in the Ferguson protests so significant?

I offer five ways of reading this gesture in the following list, which is by no means exhaustive:

1. A Habitus: Arms rise and extend high in the air to reveal open, empty, unarmed palms. A silent scream, this gesture pleads with its spectator: I am innocent. I am unarmed. I am not a threat. I surrender. I submit. Submission and fear have become embedded in the black body, a part of its daily habitus. According to sociologist Loïc Wacquant, “habitus,” a term attributed to sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, is “the way society becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel and act in determinant ways, which then guide them.”

Young black men and women in the U.S. learn this gesture of submission early on when dealing with police. Black parents teach their children that if they get pulled over, for example, they should move slowly and deliberately and dictate their actions to the officer, offering a kind of play-by-play of their body’s movements. I am unfastening my seatbelt. I am reaching into the glove compartment. I am handing you my registration. In a society where the presence of black bodies in public spaces is seen as de facto threatening, unruly, and “out of place,” black men and women are forced to justify their everyday movements, to make their bodies legible to structures and institutions of power. Even the body’s most mundane actions — walking home in the case of Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin, knocking on someone’s door in the case of Renisha McBride, or adjusting a waistband in the case of Kimani Gray — are questioned, challenged, and deemed suspicious. Through repeated enactments, the “hands up don’t shoot” gesture has become part of the black body’s repertoire of survival.

2. A Failed Sign: What happens when this universal sign is not respected? When this bodily act of submission is not seen or heard? Michael Brown’s sign of surrender was ignored by police officer Darren Wilson. Brown’s “hands up don’t shoot” gesture failed to communicate across the chasm between state and citizen, officer and subject, white and black. As the literature professor and blogger Keguro Macharia notes, Michael Brown’s death “indexes the failure of this bodily vernacular when performed by a black body, a killable body [. . .] Blackness becomes the break in this global bodily vernacular, the error that makes this bodily action illegible, the disposability that renders the gesture irrelevant. [It is read as] always already threatening, even when that movement says, ‘I surrender.’ ” In short, blackness is what lays bare the limits of this kinesthetic sign, what turns this universal gesture of submission into a gesture of guilt, criminality, and culpability. This bodily act was supposed to signify surrender, but it failed. It could not save Michael Brown.

3. A Gesture of Innocence: Alive, blackness was all the “proof” Wilson needed to ascertain Michael Brown’s guilt. He shot Michael Brown not once, not twice, but at least six times (presumably) in order to make sure “he was really dead.” My colleague Paul Buckley, director of The Butler Center at Colorado College, refers to this as the “overkilling of black bodies.” Now, in death, Michael Brown’s black skin must be opened up and turned inside out in order to prove his innocence. He must be repeatedly autopsied, sliced open not once, not twice, but three times in order to make sure “he was really innocent.” Were the bullet wounds to the top of his head not enough? Was the fact that he was unarmed not enough? Were the eyewitnesses who said he had his hands up and said “don’t shoot” not enough? The overkilling and the over-autopsying of black bodies are not unrelated. If guilt is skin deep, then it follows that innocence can only be found under the skin. So, even in death, it is the black body that is charged with carrying the heavy and unrelenting burden of proof.

By raising their hands in the air, the protesters remind us over and over that all the bodily proof we need of Michael Brown’s innocence is the position of his body when he died. The gesture reminds us that Michael Brown was shot while he was kneeling, with his head down and his arms up. It reminds us that the police violated the code not to shoot when a person’s hands are up. It reminds us that the black body is never presumed innocent moving in white spaces. That space itself is white.

The “hands up don’t shoot” slogan implores the protestor not only to stand in solidarity with Michael Brown by re-enacting his last movements, but also to empathize by embodying his final corporeal act of agency. As a collective gesture, it compels us to take note of and publicly acknowledge the bodily proof of Michael Brown’s innocence.

4. A Choreographic Tactic: As choreographer, dancer, and scholar Susan Leigh Foster writes, protest is conceptualized either “as a practice that erupts out of a bodily anger over which there is no control” or “as a practice that uses the body only as an efficacious instrument that can assist in maximizing efficiency. Neither hypothesizes the body as an articulate signifying agent, and neither seriously considers the tactics implemented in the protest itself.” I suggest that analyzing the protests as choreographic tactics disrupts the popular, media-fed view of the Ferguson protesters as mobs of black bodies, which are unruly, lawless, and unpredictable. The actions of the protesters are carefully rehearsed and choreographed; they are intentional gestural acts deployed to protest the status quo and effect change. By protesting peacefully with hands up, Foster writes, they “refut[e] in the act of protest the stereotypes on which prejudice against them was rationalized.” The bodies of protesters often “refuse to comply with the bodies of those in positions of authority,” but in the case of the Ferguson protesters, it is actually through the ultimate and most recognizable gesture of cooperation that these protesting bodies tactically perform non-cooperation with an unjust and racist state.

5. A Choreopolitics of Freedom: André Lepecki, associate professor of performance studies at New York University, recently wrote about “choreopolicing” and “choreopolitics.” He defines choreopolitics as the choreography of protest, or even simply the freedom to move freely, which he claims is the ultimate expression of the political. He defines choreopolicing as the way in which “the police determine the space of circulation for protesters and ensure that everyone is in their permissible place” — imposing blockades, dispersing crowds, dragging bodies. The purpose of choreopolicing, he argues, is “to de-mobilize political action by means of implementing a certain kind of movement that prevents any formation and expression of the political.” Lepecki then asks what are the relations between political demonstrations as expressions of freedom, and police counter-moves as implementations of obedience? How do the choreopolitics of protest and the choreopolicing of the state interact?

In Ferguson, we saw ample evidence of choreopolicing — police lined up in military-like formations, charging suddenly or marching steadily forward as in battle. Even their tactic of dispersing through Ferguson’s streets was a kind of choreographed chaos meant to break up groups and induce panic. If police formations and blockades in Ferguson are choreopolicing strategies of an increasingly militarized police force, the “hands up don’t shoot” gesture has become a choreopolitical tactic of defiance. Demonstrators walk toward police officers with their hands up, challenging the police officers to shoot, daring them to respond, to reckon with the officers’ culpability, to remind them of their culpability. The protesters’ movements defy structures of state power which restrict where, when, how, and with whom black bodies can move in public spaces. When young men like Michael Brown can be harassed and killed for walking in the middle of the street, the mere act of walking in a group through Ferguson constitutes an act of defiance, a choreopolitics of freedom.

I come back to a question I posed earlier: Why is the deployment of the body in the case of the Ferguson protests so significant? The black body in the U.S. is seen as disposable, inhuman, valueless. The fact that police left Michael Brown’s body in the street for four hours is proof. As journalist Charles P. Pierce points out, “Bodies do not lie in the street for four hours. Not in an advanced society. Bodies lie in the street for four hours in small countries where they have perpetual civil war [. . .] Bodies are not left in the streets of leafy suburbs.” The “hands up don’t shoot” protests takes those same bodies that are surveilled, disciplined, controlled, and killed and infuses them with power and a voice. It resurrects those dead bodies left in the street and asks us, compels us to confront the alive-ness of the black body as a force of power and resistance.

Lepecki argues that if to be political is the ability to move freely, then the ideal political subject is the “dancer.” To me, the Ferguson protesters are quintessential dancers who, even in the most policed spaces, “the tightest of choreographic scores” as he so beautifully puts it, can transform a space of control, in which their movements are restricted, into a space of freedom, in which their movements are defiant, bold, and empowered — a space in which they have the ability to move freely. With their hands up, the protesters reclaim a space for mobility not just for Michael Brown, but also Trayvon Martin and all those named and unnamed black men and women who, in one way or another, raised their hands and said ——— .

This essay went to print the day after the grand jury decision was announced. I was asked by the editors if there was anything I would like to update or reconsider in my essay. The truth is, I am at a loss for words. All I feel is pain and disappointment. It didn’t seem to matter then that Michael Brown’s hands were up; and it doesn’t seem to matter now that protesters raised their hands up for 109 days. In this moment, the words of Martin Luther King Jr. are the only ones that feel true: “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
 
Despite my disillusionment, I was moved by the protest organized by the Colorado College Black Student Union. On Nov. 25, we blocked Cascade Avenue and marched downtown, holding posters with frozen fingers and chanting until our voices were hoarse. Some bystanders spat, some flipped us off, while others stood in solidarity, raising their clenched fists in the air or adding their voice from the sidelines. The protest felt utterly futile and incredibly urgent at the same time. My faith in the power of peaceful protests to effect institutional change has been shaken, but I was proud of our students for showing solidarity with black communities and for voicing their commitment to justice.

A version of this essay was published in The Feminist Wire on Oct. 6, 2014. thefeministwire.com/2014/10/protest-in-ferguson/

Anusha Kedhar is an assistant professor of dance at Colorado College. Her teaching interests include South Asian dance history, diaspora and postcolonialism, dance ethnography, and critical dance studies. Her research addresses the interconnections between race, labor, neoliberalism, and the dancing body. She currently is working on an ethnographic book project which chronicles the lives of South Asian dancers in the UK and India and the effects of globalization on their bodies and bodily practices.

Works Cited

Foster, Susan. “Choreographies of Protest,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 55, No. 3, (2003), pp. 395-412.

Macharia, Keguro, “hands up don’t shoot,” Gukira: With(out) Predicates. August 15, 2014. http://gukira.wordpress.com/2014/08/15/hands-up-dont-shoot/

Lepecki, André. “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics; or the task of the dancer” The Drama Review, Vol. 57, No. 4, Winter (2013), pp. 13-27.

Pearce, Matt. “Protesters use hands up gesture defiantly after Michael Brown shooting,” Los Angeles Times. August 13, 2014. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-hands-up-20140813-story.html

Pierce, Charles P. “The Body in the Street,” The Politics Blog. Esquire Magazine, August 22, 2014. http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Body_In_The_Street

Wacquant, Loïc. “Habitus”, in Jens Becket and Zafirovski Milan (eds), International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 315-319.