We’ve Been Framed! A Focus on Identity and Interaction for a Better Vision of Racialized Social Movements

Abstract

Social movement scholarship has historically focused on both relative deprivation and resource mobilization theories. In recent years, the field has shifted attention to concentrate on “framing.” Despite this move, less attention has been paid to both racialized scripts of microlevel interaction and the processes of identity formation that constitute the nuance of everyday lived experiences of collective action. Drawing from comparative ethnographic studies with a white nationalist organization and a white antiracist organization, I demonstrate how a conventional frame analysis—in which both movements construct a problem and assign blame, propose a prognostic strategy and tactic, and offer a rationale for action—would leave us with a bifurcated picture of two distinct and antagonistic movements and actors that share little in common. By shifting attention to interactional scripts and identity formation, we are better positioned to specify the empirical mechanisms by which collective action occurs; clarify the operation of racism (rather than simply describe its effects); avoid reification of frames; circumvent the reduction of structural dynamics to cognitive dilemmas, and accurately depict the intersubjectively shared scenarios, dramaturgical rules, and collective processes of group boundary making that constitute the everyday experience of movement actors. Importantly, we can then reveal patterned similarities between two groups that framing analysis would depict as incommensurate and antagonistic but that together ultimately rationalize and legitimate the reproduction of white supremacy regardless of resource attainment, political ideology, or frame alignment.