Staging progressive dissensus and the politics of Black silence: Black Lives Matter, Bernie Sanders, and the August 2015 rally in Seattle

ABSTRACT In August 2015, Black Lives Matter activists Mara Willaford and Marissa Johnson interrupted a Seattle rally with a four-and-a-half-minute silent commemoration of Black teenager Michael Brown, preventing presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders from speaking. Using a Rancièrean political framework and a methodology of performance-inflected rhetorical criticism, I explore how this silent protest exemplifies what I call “voiced silence” and transfigures a tradition of tactical Black silence as both repression and resistance. I argue the activists staged a scene of dissensus, fracturing the false consensus of the progressive left’s post-racial façade and thereby revealing the presence of two worlds in one.