#ArchivesForBlackLives: Building a Community Archives of Police Violence in Cleveland

The irony of our panel is that its title, Archives for Black Lives, originated on Twitter as a hashtag, but if you search for it with Twitter’s basic or advanced search — go ahead, do it right now — you will find just a small fraction of the tweets posted with this hashtag. I don’t know what explains this erasure, but the irony is that in my preparation to give a brief account of #ArchivesForBlackLives I was unable to discover and access the full volume and variety of content that’s been shared with this hashtag, which, if it isn’t obvious, has been shared overwhelmingly by black archivists. Most worrisome is that the only people who would be aware of this absence are the very people who 1) shared the content in the first place, 2) remembered that they shared the content, and 3) attempted to search for the content.