Containing visions of justice: on the assimilation, alienization, and disappearance of Black Lives Matter in Scandal’s “The Lawn Chair”

Abstract

ABSTRACT When the primetime television show Scandal aired its Ferguson-inspired episode “The Lawn Chair” in March 2015, they sought out to envision what racial justice “should” mean. This vision assimilated Black Lives Matter’s (BLM) radical systemic critique of white supremacy into a binary logic of guilt and innocence, alienized the political power of black anger, and disappeared Black queer women from the narrative, projecting an image of activists as ineffectual and an image of white political actors as the arbiters of social change. Through critical rhetorical analysis, I argue that “The Lawn Chair” effectively functions to contain the liberatory potential of BLM, bounding the movement’s intersectional critique within the liberal fantasy of inclusion and recognition. In so doing, I map out what I call the three dominant forms of rhetorical containment—assimilation, alienization, and disappearance—to better understand how the force of containment both recurs and accumulates within the dominant cultural memory and the social imaginary.