Rest in power

Etymologist Barry Popik has traced the earliest use of the phrase to a newsgroup post on February 18, 2000 which paid tribute to Oakland, California graffiti artist Mike 'Dream' Francisco, who had been shot and killed during an armed robbery. Dream's graffiti art was political in tone, and his pieces often critiqued the United States government's treatment of poor and marginalized people.[2] The post to alt.graffiti, by a contributor identified only as "SPANK", ended with the words "REST IN POWER PLAYA".[3]

By the mid-2000s, the phrase began to appear in print, again linked to young people's premature, violent deaths. In a 2005 opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, Meredith Maran reflected on 19-year-old Meleia Willis-Starbuck, a Dartmouth College scholarship student who was home in Berkeley for the summer when she was shot and killed by an unknown assailant outside her apartment. Writing of the makeshift public altar set up to mourn Willis-Starbuck, Maran wrote, "I've never seen 'Rest in Power' written as a substitute for 'Rest in Peace.'"[4]

A September 29, 2005 article in the Ottawa Citizen, a Canadian newspaper, described a public graffiti memorial for teenage Ottawa murder victim Jennifer Teague that portrayed "a smiling Ms. Teague beneath the words, 'Rest in power'" and framed by "two black angels."[5]

"Rest in power" circulated on Twitter in the late 2000s and early 2010s in tributes to recently deceased people of color such as musicians Eartha Kitt[6] and Prince.[7]

After the 2014 suicide of Leelah Alcorn, "Rest in power" circulated widely on Twitter posts about Alcorn, both as a phrase[8][9][10] and a viral image meme and hashtag.[11][12][13]

"Rest in power" has since become widely used when mourning the premature deaths of trans people,[14][15] and is a rallying cry on the Transgender Day of Remembrance,[16] observed each year on November 20.[17]

The parents of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old African-American boy who was fatally shot by George Zimmerman in 2012, wrote a 2017 nonfiction book titled Rest in Power about their son's life and legacy. In 2018 the book was adapted into a six-part television documentary series titled Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story.

But it was the deaths of two more African-Americans in the summer of 2014 – Michael Brown, who was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, who was choked to death by police in New York City – that galvanised the broader visibility of "Rest in power", along with other phrases that had previously circulated in vernacular usage in minority communities and among activists, such as "Black lives matter" and "stay woke".[18][19]

In this context, "Rest in power" refers to any unjust deaths, past and present, due to systemic racist violence – including those who died in earlier civil-rights struggles and lynchings, such as Emmett Till.[20][21] In the song 'Rest in Power', the official theme for the 2018 documentary series of the same name, Black Thought raps: "To them it's real, sins of the father remembered still / For every Trayvon Martin, there was an Emmett Till".[22]

Much as other words and phrases first seen in activist social media have become used more broadly, and their specific meanings diluted, "rest in power" is now used to mark the deaths of any respected public figures who leave strong legacies, even if they are not known for their political activism. Slate writer Rachelle Hampton refers to "that familiar wash-rinse-repeat cycle wherein phrases once associated with black and queer communities enter the mainstream. And as usual, at the end of this co-opting churn, little of the language's history remains."[3]

"Rest in power" is also used to honour people who did not necessarily die violently or prematurely. As US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar observed of pioneering NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, who died in February 2020 aged 101, "If Katherine Johnson had let racial and gender barriers stop her, we may have never made it to the moon. She lived in power. May she now rest in power."[23]

However, the phrase cannot be used interchangeably with "rest in peace". It still reflects a history in which social and political power is asymmetrically distributed and hard-won. When the Women's March feminist organisation tweeted "Rest in peace and power, Barbara Bush"[24] to mark the 2018 death of the conservative political matriarch, Twitter users criticised the organisation harshly for abandoning its radical beginnings,[25][26] while others pointed out that in honouring a white woman who benefited from systemic power her entire life, the Women's March organisation was betraying its own lack of interest in fighting for non-white women.[27][28]

Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative religious commentator,[29] criticises the phrase's usage in the magazine Commentary: "As if the peddlers of identity politics hadn't done enough to poison Western culture in the here and now, they have now set their sights on the afterlife." For Ahmari, the expression attempts to extend the terrain of social justice "beyond the grave" and hence is "a reminder that liberal identity politics is a quasi-religious or quasi-spiritual movement. On Earth, it makes radical claims for group justice, even as it denies any universal standard of justice. In the realm beyond death, it restages the same old campus and Twitter battles against structures of oppression. Even in the afterlife, we are supposed to check our privileges, unpack our biases, and problematize and dismantle hierarchies. Even the afterlife is the battlefield of race against race, sex against sex, trans against cis, and so on."[30]

• Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin