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• 1 2023-11-18T12:13:00-08:00 Introduction: The Unbridled Chaos Amongst The Cloudy Skies 23 plain 2024-03-08T14:11:49-08:00 2020 marks itself as a watershed year in America; a tumultuous year bookended with great loss, coupled with feverish anxiety, and a sense of collective confusion. We were still reeling from January when the Black Mamba's loss made time stand still. Even as we watched the purple and red ticker tape on newscasts annotate the impending crimson wave of spike proteins attacking generations of people, we still tried to find sunlight amongst the grayish clouds.
  
  In March, after enjoying spring recess in the DistriCt, I watched as a contagious virus started to spread and induce panic amongst the faculty and student population of my university, along with my friends and family, and the global community. I couldn’t help but feeling my world crumble as COVID closed the doors of the Mecca. The world was starting to tear itself apart from mass panic and the “commander-in-chief’s” response to the crisis, was “putting some type of ultraviolet light through the body” or “injecting some disinfectant through the bloodstream” to keep us away from imminent danger.
  Amidst the chaos of sold-out toilet paper and grocery store lines longer than 2012 Jordan shoe releases, the entire world shook in late May when they murdered our uncle George on the small screen. For more than nine-and-a-quarter minutes, we watched a soulless lawman crush the life force out of a man who called out to his late mother for help. We observed hastily, turning away and back towards the screen again, as we stared at the blank, ghoulish face feeling satisfied after his work. The heavy, hard as a rock knee implanted into our brother's neck as his spirit ascended to the afterlife. Memories of Rodney King enter the brain, but this time, I don't think we can all get along. Not now. This was different.
  What happened in the next couple of days and weeks are almost unexplainable. Out of that incessant rage came an emotional response from the streets where Dave Chappelle in his unfiltered comedic statement, 8:46, stated that the protests were the last stronghold for civil discourse.
  Protest visuals continued to be disseminated on mainstream media platforms and the restless thoughts kept flowing. Much like Queen Audre, I was rendered silent, and mentally exhausted. So, I turned the TV off, and mindlessly scrolled on my phone looking at the memoriams and the raucous responses circulating on social media, and I listened to the streets as they spoke out with rage, resistance, and resilience.
  
  I watched and listened and started thinking about how our storied histories and rich traditions of triumph, sacrifice, and protest were being expressed in ways that layer narrative and metanarrative. These narratives illustrated lived experiences and learned truths about our resilience. The multimodal messages cataloged our responses and testimonies in addition to providing symbolic memories that speak back to our collective critical histories. I realized I could speak because these visuals were showing me how. The protest videos, laced with music or with the voices of Martin Luther King, Jr., Dick Gregory, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and others were narrating some of the montages. Memories of the protest traditions started to bridge the gaps between then and now. So, the language of the visuals narrated a social movement that provided a living context to the histories that we archive.