Virginia Weaver, Senior Staff Writer 

Microwaved Beef is a column by Virginia Weaver that reflects on flashpoints from the last few years in the culture wars. The rapid pace of contemporary discourse makes it easy to forget critical moments and trends that have defined our current social and academic lives. Microwaved Beef brings those moments back into the spotlight.   

During the first half of 2020, activist efforts erupted in the streets and online in response to widely publicized incidents of fatal police violence against black victims. As part of this renewed wave of activism on behalf of racial justice, two prominent black women executives in the music industry, Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang, introduced the idea of Blackout Tuesday. On their website and associated social media accounts, Thomas and Agyemang encouraged music professionals to interrupt their usual workweek on Tuesday, June 2, 2020, to force a day of reflection on racial inequality in their industry. 

Major news outlets and online magazines jointly published dozens of articles about Blackout Tuesday. Myriad corporations and celebrities supported the movement. Paul Monckton explained for Forbes on June 2, 2020:  

Among the many supporters of Blackout Tuesday on Instagram are musicians, Rihanna, Drake, Katy Perry, Mariah Carey, Jamie Foxx, and Ariana Grande. However, the movement has spread far beyond the music industry, gaining the backing of tech companies such as Apple and Netflix, and dominating picture feeds across the globe. 

Per Jessica Bursztynsky’s and Sarah Witten’s reporting on Blackout Tuesday for CNBC, still more celebrities and corporations threw their weight behind the initiative: 

Among those supporting the Blackout Tuesday message are: Warner Music Group, Interscope Records, RCA Records, Columbia Records, Capitol Music Group and Republic Records. Additionally, artists like the Rolling Stones, Quincy Jones and Billie Eilish said they would observe the day. A number of other artists have cancelled listening parties and fan events…. Additionally, media company ViacomCBS, which owns MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures, Pop, VH1, TV Land, among others, also joined this call to action. On Monday, the company’s networks all went off the air for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the length of time that an officer in Minneapolis pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck. 

Although “eight minutes and 46 seconds” proliferated as a symbol for police brutality in mid-2020, particularly due to its prominence during Blackout Tuesday, the number was based on faulty reporting. A few months later, footage revealed that police officer Derek Chauvin had knelt on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. 

On Blackout Tuesday, Apple Music interrupted its music recommendation features to share a message in support of Black Lives Matter and suggest that its users listen to black artists.

Image from MacRumors. 

Lanre Bakare and Caroline Davies reported for The Guardian: 

TikTok said it was “standing in solidarity with the Black community and the music industry” by turning off its playlists to mark what it called “the extraordinary recurrence of injustice the Black community is experiencing in the long fight against inequality, racism and violence”. 

Despite the massive corporate and celebrity support behind Blackout Tuesday, June 2, 2020, is chiefly remembered for its trend of black squares. On social media platforms, most famously Instagram, users who supported Blackout Tuesday posted black squares with the hashtag #blackouttuesday. For white online activists, the goal of posting a black square was often to signal that they would keep quiet to let black posters take a more central role in the online discourse. Along with #blackouttuesday, users frequently included the hashtags #BLM and #blacklivesmatter with their black squares. 

The frequent inclusion of these latter two hashtags led to immediate backlash. When searching #BLM or #blacklivesmatter on social media platforms on Blackout Tuesday, users were met with a wall of black squares and nothing else. Posting the squares created noise, not silence. Katie Herzog, at the popular political podcast Blocked & Reported, describes the fate of black square posting as a series of memes: first, a meme spread that said allies should post the squares; then a new meme said to delete the hashtags; then a new meme called on users to delete the black square posts, not just the hashtags in them.  

Aside from its impractical use of hashtags, other criticisms have been leveled at the trend of posting black squares. As Bakare and Davies reported, some artists who participated, “including UK rapper Awate [in a now-deleted tweet], said the move was undemocratic and enforced on artists.” Some scholarly work, along with much popular writing, has argued that the black square posts were an example of “performative allyship.”  

As Herzog notes, after Blackout Tuesday came a wave of apologies by online activists for having posted black squares. Some of these apologies were posted on personal social media accounts; some were published. Noor Noman, who had posted and deleted a black square, described for NBC four days later how she had learned that posting a black square “actually helped occlude black voices rather than elevate them.” Noman argues that Blackout Tuesday was “a teachable moment.”