Black Lives Research Articles

The Fact of Anti-Blackness in South African Farms

This article uses the 2020 protest by a group of white farmers in Senekal as an entry point to the continuing anti-Black racist violence in South Africa’s white-owned farms. It argues that the key demand by the white farmers reflected the living violent history of white farmers, particularly as articulated in the country’s farmlands. The article contends that the history of white racial violence that produced the current racial disparities of land ownership in South Africa is, to an extent, kept alive by the ongoing exploitative and racist practices that have become a defining feature of white farming practices in South Africa. These exploitative and racist practices are well documented in the research on post-1994 white farms. As was the case in the past, anti-Black racist violence in contemporary South Africa relies on the narrative that historically constructed Blacks as subhuman and therefore were regarded as deserving of exploitation and unfair treatment. Blacks in this narrative are cast as not worthy of being treated with dignity and hence the dominant theme of this narrative portray Black life as insignificant, meaningless and disposable.

Reimagining Kinship Systems and Networks:

Aboriginal people in Australia continue to endure the ongoing effects of 250 years of colonisation. However, the social and ontological basis of their Kinship Systems and networks highlights their resilience and resistance against western hierarchies and ideologies. Kinship Systems and networks represent the relationships between culture and nature and do not distinguish between the human and non-human world. The basis of the Kinship Systems and networks extends seamlessly beyond the human into the Ancestral and spiritual realms. As part of the creation process, Land was created first, followed by people and then languages belonging to the Land. Languages are living entities, connecting people with their Country, Ancestors and culture while transmitting intergenerational knowledges within and across thousands of generations. It is impossible to separate one from the other. These entities coexist through and beyond notions of space and time. This inseparable relationship between Land, language, and the rights of Aboriginal People forms the cornerstone of their activism. For example, Aboriginal activists in the Black Lives Matter movement in Australia fight for racial [human] rights and environmental justice consistent with their symbiotic relationship. Drawing on interviews carried out in early 2023 with Aboriginal activists engaged in the revival of languages and Land rights, this paper will examine how the relationships between sustainability, care for Country and language are articulated in and through Kinship systems and networks. It will explain the deep reciprocity, identified by activists, focusing on environmental care and sustainability of Country, language revival and social justice efforts.

Social movements boosted online orders for US Black-owned restaurants after the murder of George Floyd.

We use the rise of Black Lives Matter and the sentiment of racial sympathy to examine the interplay between the social movement and citizens' sympathetic actions in supporting Black people. Using detailed food order flow information from one of the largest online food delivery platforms in the USA, we find that the total number of food orders from Black-owned restaurants increased by 39% relative to nearby non-Black-owned restaurants in the 140 days following the murder of George Floyd on the basis of a difference-in-difference model. The platform company's strategic traffic allocation acted as an accelerator, enhancing the sympathetic responses of individuals, but it did not drive the entire surge in food orders. Protests resulting in severe injuries and those linked to demands for defunding the police diminished the positive sympathetic responses, highlighting a potential risk associated with protests. Our study provides large-scale, micro-level evidence that social movements and increased sympathy can foster collective actions to support marginalized communities.

June Jordan’s Political Theory of Redesign

This essay examines June Jordan’s design writings to elaborate a political theory of redesign in her work. I show that Jordan’s redesign offers political principles for reimagining space at multiple scales and speaks to the question of how more livable, beautiful worlds may be wrought from the material contexts in which we presently live. Against the grain of the dismantling of public goods in the late twentieth century, Jordan re-envisioned public city spaces and housing with dignity and room for human flourishing. Her primary barometer for design was the fullest expression of human aliveness—she insisted that the built environment should “[cherish] as it amplifies the experience of being alive.” Jordan’s visionary pragmatism anticipates what Deva Woodly calls the “radical Black feminist pragmatism” of the twenty-first century’s Movement for Black Lives and speaks to contemporary abolitionist thought and struggles over the future of public goods.

Public attitudes toward athlete activism in sport: utilizing a multivariate list experiment to address social desirability bias in survey responses

ABSTRACT Research Question: This study investigates the degree of hidden racial hatred towards athlete protests within the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement by correcting for the Social Desirability Bias (SDB) in survey responses. Research Methods: Employing a multivariate list experiment on a nationally representative sample (n = 1,075), it assesses the extent of SDB and explores variations in support for on-field kneeling protests based on the race of the athlete, respondent demographics, and sport fan identification. Results and Findings: Findings reveal underreported disapproval for BLM-supportive athlete activism, particularly when the protesting athlete is identified as Black. Further analyses highlight hidden biases influenced by respondents’ race, region, political affiliation, and fan identification. Implications: Our findings offer valuable insight on applying list experiments to reduce social desirability biases in surveys, ensuring more accurate reflections of public opinion on contentious topics.

#Polarized: Gauging Potential Policy Bargaining Ranges Between Opposing Social Movements of Black Lives Matter and Police Lives Matter

(1) Background: Since the death of George Floyd, the social movement Black Lives Matter continues to dominate the American political psyche, not only advancing a public dialogue but also escalating the polarization of supported solutions for policing and systemic discrimination. (2) Methods: Using a qualitative context analysis approach, we assessed over 350 sources related to social justice literature and policy-relevant documents to identify key policy solutions supported by the American Black Lives Matter movement compared to the Blue Lives Matter movement. We applied Fearon’s bargaining range of war model to analyze the extent to which the policy recommendations of these two opposing movements may overlap. The purpose was to identify and categorize agreement alternatives across various sectors. This research presents top policy solutions, assessing their bargaining ranges. (3) Results: 32 of the 36 top policy reform alternatives at the national level have sufficient bargaining ranges. This analysis indicates the importance of supporting various sectors like mental health/psychosocial policies and programs, which can (1) serve as a focal point of agreement between contending movements, and (2) decrease racial injustice through strategic bargaining. (4) Conclusions: In a divisively political landscape, it is crucial to identify starting points for negotiation among contending actors. Identifying bargaining opportunities can help seed a dialogue that may benefit all parties involved.

The Internationalization of #BlackLivesMatter: Solidarity From Minneapolis to Gaza

This article aims to better understand the contemporary nature of Black-Palestinian solidarity by directly speaking to activists and explain why US-based Anti-Police Brutality Movements, like Black Lives Matter, share a sense of common solidarity with Palestinians. We argue that solidarity by US-based anti-police brutality movement activists with Palestinians has become more salient since the 2014 Ferguson Protests and especially since the 2020 George Floyd protests that started in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Interviews with activists in Minnesota reveal that interviewees tend to highlight a shared sense of oppression with Palestinians, which is largely perceived through symbolic images and videos shared on social media. Moreover, we find that the Covid-19 pandemic served as a catalyst for the unprecedented mass mobilization that followed the murder of George Floyd. The Covid-19 pandemic, the simultaneous struggle with similar injustice frames occurring in both Ferguson and Gaza, and the powerful images and videos of oppression and police brutality all influenced increasing solidarity and connections among these two disparate struggles.

Review: Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest, by Ian C. Hartman and David Reamer

Review: <i>Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest</i>, by Ian C. Hartman and David Reamer

Apartheid in the digital outdoors? An analysis of the Instagram content of outdoor brands in the US, UK and Scandinavia

The outdoors offers widely understood health and wellbeing benefits and provides an unparalleled resource for the realization and projection of identity, from the personal to the national. Yet access to the outdoors in the countries of the global North is manifestly unequal, with BIPOC communities typically much less likely than their white counterparts to participate in outdoor leisure activities such as hiking, trail running, cycling, climbing, etc. This study revisits the hypothesis that outdoors media plays a central role in perpetuating what Martin (2004) terms “apartheid in the Great Outdoors” by performing a content analysis of the Instagram posts of the top 10 outdoor brands in the US, Scandinavia and UK between the spring and summer seasons of 2020 – a period when the global pandemic restricted access to the outdoors at the same time as the Black Lives Matter movement raised awareness of systemic racial inequalities. The analysis reveals that whilst there is a purposeful response to calls to diversify the outdoors in the representational strategies of US outdoor brands, this is not the case in the UK and Scandinavia. In these locations the digital outdoors and its associated leisure identities remain overwhelmingly white, young, straight, and able-bodied.

From Black squares to White guilt: The influence of Black Lives Matter on non-Indigenous views of the Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia

This article examines the impact of the global Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement on decolonization efforts in Australia, focusing on non-Indigenous Australians’ attitudes towards the Voice to Parliament (VtP). This study utilized surveys (122 respondents) and interviews (11) with predominantly non-Indigenous Australians, conducted before the October 2023 VtP referendum. We found that the BLM movement did not bridge the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Instead, the research highlights a highly polarized environment, particularly evident in the discourse surrounding the VtP referendum. Factors such as the lack of truth-telling regarding Australia's colonial history, media bias, community segregation and political polarization created a complex association between BLM and stances on the VtP. A promising result is that individuals who recognized the link between BLM and challenges faced by Indigenous Australians were more likely to support the VtP. The overall findings indicate that Australia has a way to go towards true reconciliation.

EUROPEAN SCEPTICISM AND ANTI-AMERICANISM IN THE EURO-ATLANTIC POLITICAL PROCESS IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

The article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the development of European scepticism and anti-Americanism in the public political process in the United States and the European Union. In the countries of the European Union, the term European scepticism refers to a negative attitude towards the process of European integration and its functional result in the form of the European Union. In the United States, mostly in ultra-conservative circles, European scepticism refers to a critical attitude towards the EU as the embodiment of the liberal democracy project. Anti-Americanism as an ideological attitude is present not only in European far-left political circles, but also in European far-right political circles. In the United States, the ideology of anti-Americanism was clearly manifested in the Black Lives Matter movement. European scepticism and anti-Americanism are actively used by Russian and Chinese propaganda as signs of an allegedly inevitable crisis of the ‘collective West’ and a ‘natural transition’ to a multipolar world in which Western democracies will not be crucial for further development. The conclusions emphasise that populist diseases of liberal democracies are actively used by autocracies to discredit the democratic experience of political life. At the same time, Russia, Iran, and China are trying to take advantage of discourses on scenarios of the US isolation from active foreign policy and the European Union's self-restrictions in pursuing its own common foreign policy and impose their own versions of ‘hybrid wars’, pushing Western influence out of key regions of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. In view of this, the transfer of ideas of anti-Americanism and European scepticism from the circle of leading trends in public political life to its deep periphery can actually ensure greater stability not only for liberal democracies, but also for modern international relations.

Rehistoricizing Black Masculinity in The Wonder Years Reboot

Popular entertainment remains one of the last places where Black history lives on despite the recent political erasure of U.S. Black struggles. The 2021 reboot of The Wonder Years, reframing Black masculinity through the young eyes of main character Dean Williams, rehistoricizes modern notions of Black families in the post-Civil Rights Movement. The purpose of this study is to explore Black masculinity media representations within reboot culture as a means to rehistoricize Black struggle and civil rights. Based on discourse analysis, the authors found the following three discourses: Reimagining Black Excellence, Recontextualizing Black Masculinity, and Revisiting Respectability Politics.

“You can't ignore us”: Multiliteracies and disruption in youth activism

AbstractThis article examines the activism of student protesters in a rural Rust Belt community's Black Lives Matter protest, challenging prevailing stereotypes about civic engagement, literacies, and youth involvement in rural settings. Utilizing critical ethnography and nexus analysis to examine disruptions of discourses in place and interview student participants about their activism, findings showcase how students strategically practiced multiliteracies to upturn power dynamics and assume leadership roles within a socio‐spatial landscape. Examining youth protest literacies can inform education partners of the ways students already engage in civic discourse and how understanding their co‐construction of space can inform practices across learning communities.

THE TYBEE ISLAND, GEORGIA BLACK HISTORY TRAIL: A COMMUNITY APPROACH to BLACK GEOGRAPHIES

ABSTRACT Tybee Island, Georgia, was a colonial borderland between Spanish and British America before evolving into a middle-class, seaside resort in the 1800s. It continued as a popular vacation spot in the twentieth century. However, research has highlighted the island’s troubling history of racial segregation, particularly surrounding events like the Orange Crush Beach Party. Previous studies also underscored the Historical Society ignoring the island’s Black history in its exhibits. Building on this, a collaborative project emerged in 2021 involving a Georgia Southern University faculty member and undergraduate student, Tybee MLK Human Rights Organization, and Tybee Island Historical Society. The goal was to create a Black History Trail highlighting a rich yet ignored Black history and culture on the island and addressing the exclusion of Tybee’s Black population from museums and markers. This project integrates community geography, focusing on resolving problems like social exclusion, and exploring spatialities of Black life, social oppressions, and resistance. Utilizing archival research, oral history interviews, and ArcGIS, the project developed a 13-stop virtual tour using ESRI Story Maps. We conclude our paper by highlighting the lessons learned during the trail’s development, the multitude of ways the trail embodies the theory of Black geographies in practice, and the broader challenges in honoring Tybee’s Black geographies. Keywords: community geography, Black geographies, Tybee Island, tourism, memory

“I can’t tell you what freedom is ’cause I’ve never seen it”: Addressing the Omission of Liberation Narratives in Sociology

ABSTRACT While liberation, or the process of freeing marginalized individuals and groups from societal oppression and domination, is referenced across many sub-disciplines of sociology, it surprisingly remains under-conceptualized in sociological literature. To address this omission, the present study responds to the following query: how, if at all, do Black individuals conceive of a Black liberated future? I draw on data from 65 in-depth interviews with Black Millennials during Black Lives Matter to capture their imaginings of a Black liberated future. Findings reveal that participants construct four types of liberation narratives when detailing their perceptions of Black freedom: 1) Liberation via Reformation, 2) Liberation via Reconstruction, 3) Liberation via Afrocentrism, and 4) Liberation as Inconceivable. I ultimately argue that liberation narratives function as resistant knowledge projects and, as such, are significant socio-political artifacts and resources for future generations of change agents, community organizers, and social movements actors. Altogether, this study demonstrates how rectifying the omission of liberation narratives magnifies our sociological knowledge about marginalized groups and deepens our analytic capacity to make sense of their ontological approaches toward politics of liberation and imaginings of their collective futures.

This Is an Eventful Era: Exploring Event-Oriented Approaches to Organizational Research

This special issue explores the transformative role of discrete events in fostering changes at different organizational levels, challenging traditional feature-oriented approaches that focus on stable attributes of individuals, groups, and organizations. Joining the growing body of event-oriented research in diverse settings, the nine published articles evoke a novel theoretical lens (i.e., Event System Theory) to examine a number of discrete events (e.g., everyday change events, organizational downsizing, merger, corporate scandal, technology implementation, the U.S.–China trade war, the Black Lives Matter movement). Their findings demonstrate the interesting ways discrete events disrupt routines, prompt adaptation, and impact individual and collective behaviors across various levels within organizations. Our further analysis underscores the importance of adopting an event-oriented perspective for a better understanding of management issues, offering new insights and directions for future research. We hope this special issue provides a robust foundation for integrating event-centric research approaches into organizational theory, emphasizing the need for continued empirical investigation and theoretical refinement in a variety of management research domains, such as strategic management, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, and human resource management.

Ain’t I a Migrant?: Global Blackness and the Future of Migration Studies

In the wake of recent interventions to better connect the subfields of international migration and race and ethnicity through a sociology of racialized immigration, we push this further by arguing for the necessity of a global Blackness perspective on global migration. Such a focus does not just reflect the role of race in the dynamics of migration, and vice versa, but more importantly shifts assumptions about this relationship. So, it is not enough to say that race matters in migration but rather that blackness and Black lives matter in how migration unfolds. Using global blackness as a starting point in our analyses of migration reveals a clearer and closer entanglement of race, racism, colonialism, and migration. We argue that global Blackness structures notions of who migrates and under what conditions, as well as our ideas regarding migrants and their descendants and use the examples of New York City, Paris, and France as paradigmatic sites for understanding this relationship.

A Tale of Two Divestments: South Africa, Sudan, and Howard University

Abstract The anti-apartheid movement and Save Darfur campaign were important moments of African American activism towards Africa. Howard University played a central role by divesting from both South Africa and Sudan. This article examines each divestment within Howard University’s history of engagement with Africa. While each divestment was linked by a concern to support oppressed African peoples, the roles of race and racism operated differently in each action. Such an analytic provides space to reconsider the role of US higher education in African-facing human rights activism during the age of Black Lives Matter.

“Tax Amazon, Not Working People”: Left Populism and Labor Organizing in Seattle

Abstract This paper examines the role of labor and community left populist organizing in the Tax Amazon campaign based in Seattle, WA, USA. As a case study within a larger project that examines manifestations of both right-wing and left-wing populism in urban spaces, the paper presents a lens through which urban populism may be examined in relation to new forms of labor organizing, with a specific focus on the dynamics of left populist resistance. The Tax Amazon campaign is situated within a longer trajectory of contemporary left populist organizing in Seattle. Emerging from a previous campaign that resulted in Seattle City Council instituting a $15 minimum wage, the Tax Amazon campaign brought together labor and community organizations to pressure Seattle City Council to introduce a corporate tax to generate funding for affordable housing initiatives. The campaign was met with resistance from the local business community, as well as some local trade unions. Being a leading corporate figure in this opposition, Amazon emerged as a key target of the left populist campaign. Through this study, we ask, what role did labor-community coalitions play in shaping the emergence of a broader left populist politics at the municipal scale in Seattle? Building from the experience of the Tax Amazon campaign, the paper reflects on the dynamics of resistance to corporate power through labor- and community-based left populist organizing. Reflecting a shift in U.S. politics at the municipal scale, Seattle offers a key case through which to assess whether and how urban populism may give rise to new forms of labor organizing. The paper also considers the ways in which the simultaneity of the Tax Amazon campaign and the Movement for Black Lives to ‘Defund the Police’ expanded the scope of political demands in the context of Seattle’s racialized urban precarity. In its conclusion, the paper draws from the analysis to reflect on both the broader prospects and limitations of left populist organising.

From Kent State to Black Lives Matter: Student Affairs’ Relationship With Campus Activism

Kent State University (KSU) has been associated with campus activism history since May 4, 1970. Using a case study approach, we interrogated if and how KSU student affairs administrators’ approach to activism has changed in the intervening decades and how the legacy of the shootings informed their practice during the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020. We found administrators’ bedrock values and approach were consistent across the two periods. However, their tactics for working with activists shifted in line with the growth and evolution of the field of student affairs, available technologies, and the social and news media climate.