#BLM Insurgent Discourse, White Structures of Feeling and the Fate of the 2020 "Racial Awakening"

Abstract

Working with Twitter data, this paper offers new findings on the #BlackLivesMatter movement and "racial awakening" of summer 2020. Framing methods to address this important moment, this paper contends that cultural studies and critical race studies can be enriched through an engagement with new computational approaches. We analyze how white and racial minority voices talked about race and track their fraught contestation for leadership of racial discourse over the summer of 2020. We uncover a surprising story of white colorblindness even in the midst of a "racial awakening," a story that questions claims that the Trump presidency and the summer of 2020 ushered in a new era of US racial consciousness. And we show how a Black and minority discourse with transformative potential surged and receded. For cultural studies, our data and analysis revise Raymond Williams's influential model of cultural evolution by introducing a new concept: the insurgent, a long-building minority cultural strain that surges to contest the dominant culture in a moment of crisis. For critical race studies, our findings revise prominent theorizations of colorblindness, racial ideology, and hegemony. By revealing the messy and unconscious feelings characterizing colorblindness, our data contest theorizations of colorblindness as an ideology and counter the focus on articulate beliefs in theories of racial hegemony. Ultimately, this paper shows that bringing data methods focused on moments of cultural contestation and mass communication into dialogue with field-specific theory and qualitative analyses can expand our models of how race, discourse, and culture operate.