Black Lives Matter Protests Research Articles

National nostalgia and prostalgia predict support toward the Black Lives Matter movement and creating a new normal following the pandemic

AbstractThe Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and the COVID‐19 pandemic are two distinct forces that have introduced cultural change around the world by respectively challenging or amplifying the status quo. Past research demonstrates that cultural change can be perceived as threatening. Thus, the change brought upon by the BLM movement and the pandemic may be reducing support toward the BLM movement and reducing support for creating a new normal following the pandemic (i.e., creating new social norms). Based on the Cultural Inertia Model, we predicted that highlighting the BLM protests and the COVID‐19 pandemic as agents of change would hinder support toward each agent of change. In essence, two agents of change might be too much change. We also hypothesized that national nostalgia and prostalgia would serve as psychological anchors or propellers that hinder or facilitate support toward each agent of change. Our findings demonstrated that highlighting the BLM protests and the pandemic as agents of change did not cause differences in support toward the BLM movement or creating a new normal. However, national nostalgia and prostalgia served as individual difference measures that respectively reduced and facilitated support toward the BLM movement and the creation of new social norms.

Presidential Responsiveness to Black Interests From Grant to Biden: The Power of the Vote, the Power of Protest

The Biden administration is the most responsive to Black interests since the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. This article places the administration's responsiveness in historical perspective by examining presidential responsiveness to Black interests, beginning with the presidency of Ulysses Grant, and focusing on the role of Black protest and the Black vote in activating responsiveness. After a brief discussion of theories of presidential power and responsiveness to Black interests, the article examines the factors that shaped the Biden administration's responsiveness, especially the role of the Black Lives Matter protests; the substantive content of the Biden policies; and their likely effectiveness in an era of partisan polarization and in the historical context of the presidency and race reform.

Computational timeline reconstruction of the stories surrounding Trump: Story turbulence, narrative control, and collective chronopathy

Measuring the specific kind, temporal ordering, diversity, and turnover rate of stories surrounding any given subject is essential to developing a complete reckoning of that subject’s historical impact. Here, we use Twitter as a distributed news and opinion aggregation source to identify and track the dynamics of the dominant day-scale stories around Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States. Working with a data set comprising around 20 billion 1-grams, we first compare each day’s 1-gram and 2-gram usage frequencies to those of a year before, to create day- and week-scale timelines for Trump stories for 2016–2021. We measure Trump’s narrative control, the extent to which stories have been about Trump or put forward by Trump. We then quantify story turbulence and collective chronopathy—the rate at which a population’s stories for a subject seem to change over time. We show that 2017 was the most turbulent overall year for Trump. In 2020, story generation slowed dramatically during the first two major waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, with rapid turnover returning first with the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s murder and then later by events leading up to and following the 2020 US presidential election, including the storming of the US Capitol six days into 2021. Trump story turnover for 2 months during the COVID-19 pandemic was on par with that of 3 days in September 2017. Our methods may be applied to any well-discussed phenomenon, and have potential to enable the computational aspects of journalism, history, and biography.

The Church Is Essential: COVID-19 and the Hyperlocal Politics of Mutual Aid in Black and Latina/o Churches

This article explores the work of Latina/o and African American churches in New York City, Los Angeles, and Houston as they serve their communities and, in the midst of a pandemic, are fundamentally reimaging the relationship between religion and society in hyperlocal sites. A focus on neighborhood churches provides a particularly clear view of how mutual aid is practiced and informed by a relational and horizontal orientation as much as it is rooted in a social ethic with strict expectations around charity. Churches are often criticized for their vertical and heavenly focus, but for many churches, the pandemic radically changed that orientation, prompting them to redirect their efforts toward supporting the spiritual and physical wellbeing of their Black and Brown parishioners and other community members. As churches became sites for food distribution, transformed their sanctuaries into classrooms, and joined Black Lives Matter protests, they renewed their commitment to a radical religious tradition grounded in concerns around economic, racial, and immigrant justice.

“WE LEARNED VIOLENCE FROM YOU”: DISCURSIVE PACIFICATION AND FRAMING CONTESTS DURING THE MINNEAPOLIS UPRISING

Following the murder of George Floyd, Minneapolis became the epicenter of the largest movement in US history. Local Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, dubbed the Minneapolis Uprising, were met by the largest civil police deployment in state history. In the week following George Floyd’s murder, state and local officials convened ten press conferences totaling over 400 minutes of discourse. We use these press conferences, in conjunction with an ethnography of protests, to analyze how state officials counterframed Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd. Building on critical race theory, we consider how the state maneuvered to pacify Black Lives Matter protesters and maintain racial oppression and repression. Minneapolis state officials constructed their counterframe through the (re)ordering of disorder, boundary activation, co-optation, and erasure.

Why we need to explore race with Black children

This article will depict the necessity of exploring race with Black children in dramatherapy utilising a black1 empathic approach through which the effects of race can be recognised and safely explored. The concept was inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests during May 2020, triggered by the murder of George Floyd in police custody. During the video of the distressing incident, Floyd said he could not breathe on several occasions, yet the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin continued to kneel on his neck for nearly 9 minutes. Chauvin’s actions are a vivid reflection of institutional racism affecting Black people. This article will present several issues concerning racial disparities in Britain, with succinct examples of my personal feelings and experiences. Through addressing systemic problems, the article will explore the negative impact of racism and prejudice for Black children, as immediate exposure to an oppressive system means that they are at greater risk of developing mental health issues and a challenged Black identity. Therefore, it is imperative that dramatherapists provide a space for Black children to explore race in order to improve resilience and develop a healthy racial identity.

FROM POLICE REFORM TO POLICE ABOLITION? HOW MINNEAPOLIS ACTIVISTS FOUGHT TO MAKE BLACK LIVES MATTER

The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officers in 2020 was a watershed moment, triggering protests across the country and unprecedented promises by city leaders to “end” the MPD. We use interviews and archival materials to understand the roots of this decision, tracing the emergent split between activists fighting for police reform and police abolition in the wake of the initial Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in Minneapolis. We compare the frames used by these two sets of movement actors, arguing that abolitionists deployed more radical frames to disrupt hegemonic understandings of policing, while other activists fought to resonate with the existing discursive structure. After years of police reform, Floyd’s death and the rebellion that followed gave abolitionist discourses more resonance. In the discussion, we consider the future of public safety in Minneapolis and its implications for understanding frame resonance in Black movements.

“History is Illuminating”: Public memory crises and collectives in Richmond, Virginia

Amid the Black Lives Matter protests and calls to remove Confederate statuary in Richmond, Virginia, during the summer of 2020, the History Is Illuminating project constructed public signs that replicated the traditional historical markers used throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia. The signs were placed along Richmond’s historic Monument Avenue in conversation with the still-standing Confederate monuments. They challenged the monuments’ representation of public memory by re-introducing narratives about prominent Black Richmonders and informing readers of the Jim Crow legislation that enabled the monuments to be constructed and venerated. This edited and condensed interview with organizers from the project describes the multiple crises of collective memory that public historians confront in the American South, as well as the strategies the History Is Illuminating project used to counter dominant narratives about public memory. Finally, the interview highlights the importance of community action and a multiplicity of public memory projects in order to ensure a democratic approach to collective memory.

From special powers to legislating the lockdown: the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2020

The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2020 were made through temporarily inserted provisions by Westminster’s vast and rushed Coronavirus Act 2020. This itself limits duties to notify deaths to the coroner, despite Article 2 European Convention on Human Rights duties being particularly relevant to deaths in care homes and of frontline workers. The regularly amended March 2020 Northern Ireland regulations have themselves raised ‘legal certainty’ issues. Until June, official websites carried no accessible information as to their scope. Initial concerns on lack of clarity over matters such as driving for exercise gave way to greater controversy regarding the application of the regulations to the Black Lives Matter protests on 6 June 2020 through Police Service of Northern Ireland powers that had only been extended through an eleventh hour amendment the night before. The enforcement powers themselves are so widely drafted that they are reminiscent of the Special Powers Acts of the past. These issues are explored in this article.

“We’re Still Dying Quicker Than We Can Effect Change”: #BlackLivesMatter and the Limits of 21st-Century Policing Reform

Black Lives Matter protests in the mid-2010s thrust police violence into the public spotlight, highlighting the stark racial divide in experiences with law enforcement and prompting a wave of police reform. We examine how residents in low-income neighborhoods on the Northside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, made sense of this focus on police violence and reform across racial lines. Drawing on interviews with a diverse sample of 112 adults, we show that there was broad consensus on the social problem of racialized police violence, but Black residents perceived the problem as more severe, more persistent, and in need of more dramatic forms of racial redressment than their white neighbors.

Kung Flu and Roof Koreans: Asian/Americans as the Hated Other and Proxies of Hating in the White Imaginary

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about not only political, social, and economic disaster globally, but also rising hate and the exacerbation of social inequity. As the pandemic spread beyond China, hate crimes against Asians skyrocketed in the United States and internationally. Amidst growing xenophobia and a global health crisis, 2020 also marked worldwide Black Lives Matter protests. Memes that featured “Roof Koreans” started being shared during the protests, along with the already racist memes about COVID-19 that targeted Asians. In this essay, we critically analyze memes from the spring and summer of 2020 to examine how Asian/Americans are not only positioned and reproduced as the Hated Other (“Kung Flu”), but also how they function as Proxies of Hating (“Roof Koreans”) in service to white hegemony. Using critical discourse analysis, while also responding to Palumbo-Liu’s 1994 essay examining images of Korean Americans from the 1992 LA Uprising as proxies of white hegemony, we explore the symbolic connections between these memes and the pervasive narrative of Asian/Americans as both yellow peril and model minority.

A Durkheimian Analysis of Racialised Crime and Punishment Police Practices and the Demand for Change

The analysis of racialised police attitudes has been frequently addressed in academic articles, but the application of a Neo-Durkheimian approach has been largely overlooked. This article will apply Durkheimian theory to illuminate the need for a shift in crime and punishment policy and practices to avoid the present societal moral stagnation. In order to do so it will address both, the recent Black Lives Matter protests in America and the 2011 Riots in London. The use of the two case studies signifies the continuity of problematic police behaviour and political address. It is evident that such an article is embedded in an extremely sensitive topic, therefore it does not presume to provide a solution to the overwhelming circumstances. Rather, in illuminating the relevance of Durkheimian theory it signifies that current global circumstances demand a moral shift in societal understandings of solidarity and “the cult of the individual”, providing pivotal foundations for police practices. However, this requires participation of criminologists alongside practitioners and activists.

Toppled Monuments and Black Lives Matter: Race, Gender, and Decolonization in the Public Space. An Interview with Charmaine A. Nelson

This paper discusses the recent backlash against public monuments spurred by Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in North America and elsewhere following the killing by police of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man in the United States. Since this event, protestors have taken to the streets to bring attention to police brutality, systemic racism, and racial injustice faced by Black and Indigenous people and people of colour in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and some European countries. In many of these protests, outraged citizens have torn down, toppled, or defaced monuments of well-known historic figures associated with colonialism, slavery, racism, and imperialism. Protestors have been demanding the removal of statues and monuments that symbolize slavery, colonial power, and systemic and historical racism. What makes these monuments problematic and what drives these deliberate and spectacular acts of defiance against these omnipresent monuments? Featuring an interview with art historian Charmaine A. Nelson, this article explores the meanings of these forceful, decolonial articulations at this moment. The interview addresses some complex questions related to monumentalization and the public sphere, symbolism and racial in/justice. In so doing, it suggests that monuments of the future need to be reimagined and redefined contemporaneously with shifting social knowledge and generational change.

Advancing racial and ethnic equity in science, medicine, and health: a call for papers

Advancing racial and ethnic equity in science, medicine, and health: a call for papers

TECHNOLIBERAL PARTICIPATION: BLACK LIVES MATTER AND INSTAGRAM SLIDESHOWS

After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, Black Lives Matter protests surged around the globe. Amid COVID-19, activism on social media flourished. On Instagram, use of the ten-image carousel as an informative slideshow akin to a PowerPoint presentation gained significant attention: The New York Times highlighted their “effort to democratize access to information." In this paper, I rhetorically analyze case studies to illustrate how Instagram slideshows facilitated deliberation about participation. I argue that these posts reveal a tension in platformed digital activism: as digital templates broaden access to participation, technoliberal ideology constrains activist judgment.

Teaching the History and Organization of Libraries: The Coronavirus Pandemic as an Opportunity to Study Public Library Reopenings

Teaching the History and Organization of Libraries: The Coronavirus Pandemic as an Opportunity to Study Public Library Reopenings

The Future of Visual Anthropology in the Wake of Black Lives Matter

AbstractAs a discipline, anthropology has long been subject to the scrutiny of critical race theorists and to questions of ethical practice with regard to ethnicity and representation. This dialogue features critical Black visual anthropologists discussing their approach to the discipline, and crucially asks, “What are the key lessons from 2020 in the wake of the global Black Lives Matter protests?” Each participant responds to photographs and film clips, offering provocations that challenge how we think about the discipline today. The dialogue is edited from a discussion that took place for the Royal Anthropology Institute Film Festival in 2021.

The Unlikely Pressure for Accountability: The Insurance Industry’s Role in Social Change

The summer of 2020 witnessed a national reckoning: the murder of George Floyd and the resulting unprecedented Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. As the BLM movement gained unsurpassed traction, corporate America jumped to show support: nearly 70% of the five hundred largest companies made statements in support of racial justice and more than a third provided financial donations to racial justice organizations/causes. Countless companies made public promises regarding their commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) within their organizations. However, companies have largely failed to live up to those promises. The result—a frenzy of diversity driven derivative suits against boards and officers for that failure. Although Director and Officer (DO as premiums increase, limits are lowered, and coverage is dropped, the possibility of a new catalyst for accountability arises—the D&O insurance industry.

A Tale of Two Cities: COVID-19 and the Emotional Well-Being of Student-Athletes Using Natural Language Processing.

Student-athletes at the Division I institutions face a slew of challenges and stressors that can have negative impacts in eliciting different emotional responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. We employed machine-learning-based natural language processing techniques to analyze the user-generated content posted on Twitter of Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) student-athletes to study changes in their sentiment as it relates to the COVID-19 crisis, major societal events, and policy decisions. Our analysis found that positive sentiment slightly outweighed negative sentiment overall, but that there was a noticeable uptick in negative sentiment in May and June 2020 in conjunction with the Black Lives Matter protests. The most commonly expressed emotions by these athletes were joy, trust, anticipation, and fear, suggesting that they used social media as an outlet to share primarily optimistic sentiments, while still publicly expressing strong negative sentiments like fear and trepidation about the pandemic and other important contemporary events. Athletic administrators, ACC coaches, support staff, and other professionals can use findings like these to guide sound, evidence-based decision-making and to better track and promote the emotional wellness of student-athletes.

How the ‘Law and Order’ Trope Individualizes Racism and Inverts Racial Vulnerability

During the 1968 US presidential campaign, Richard Nixon infamously ran as the “law and order” candidate, invoking in his Republican nomination acceptance speech the domestic protests against racial injustice and the Vietnam war. In the 2020 presidential campaign, Donald Trump revived Richard Nixon’s “law and order” slogan as part of his response to the Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis on May 25th. In this paper, we examine how Trump and his supporters use the “law and order” trope to move public discourse about racism away from critical understandings that view racism as embedded in institutionalized practices and policies, and toward the racial ideology encapsulated in what Jane Hill (2008) calls the “folk theory of race and racism.” Whereas the racial justice movement attempts to center public discourse on systemic racism in policing, the “law and order” trope works to decenter that discourse by individualizing racism and thereby minimizing concerns about the system-wide pattern of racism. As it reinforces the dominant understanding of racism that underpins much US public discourse, the “law and order” trope inverts the racial vulnerability so that Black bodies and racial justice protesters are seen as threats rather than victims of state-sanctioned violence. We illustrate these ideas by drawing from examples of public discourse in response to the summer 2020 racial justice protests, including excerpts from Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham’s shows on Fox News in the days immediately following Floyd’s killing through Ingraham’s interview of Trump at the end of the summer. Our analysis explains how the discourse spawned by the “law and order” trope reinscribes key assumptions about racism, dismisses calls for racial justice, and perpetuates the racial status quo — thereby posing a substantial barrier to changing the policies and practices that lead to racial inequities in policing.