Abstract

This chapter explores the content and strategy of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) by describing the speech that sustains and promotes the movement. It explicates the content of the movement through the protest chants and other communicative tools M4BL has borrowed from past black liberatory movements. After a brief discussion of some of the challenges facing the movement, it describes four more novel communicative tools associated with M4BL—the hashtag and slogan #BlackLivesMatter, videos of police violence, naming the dead, and stereotype engineering. Each of these tools helps address some challenge, and also bears on some questions of independent philosophical interest—how to remedy testimonial injustice, what it means to engineer a concept, what makes a mental state a moral attitude. It concludes with a brief discussion of the limitations of some of these tools.