Black Lives Research Articles

Summer (Somewhere) in the City

This (found) poem in three acts creates a conversation between Stuart Hall and Danez Smith, situated in the larger context of the long struggle for Black livingness. First comes the warning, descriptions of the violent now; HERE. Act II is a re-reading or re-writing of the secret codes of slavery and anti-Black violence, a play and exchange between realities and imaginaries, the tensions in Black social life; WHERE. The closing act insists that we dream of something different, a nod to a life Stuart Hall tried to write into existence, a life that his work is still writing; SOMEWHERE. By putting Stuart Hall in posthumous conversation with Danez Smith, I perform the kind of imaginary geographic maneuvering that characterizes Hall’s study, expanding the transatlantic and cross-generational capacity of cultural studies. Such a study, in a world where the African diaspora has been made commodity, is critical to the making of a world where Black(s) live(s) (matter).

The politics of allyship: Multiethnic coalitions and mass attitudes toward protest

Recent work finds that nonviolent resistance by ethnic minorities is perceived as more violent and requiring more policing than identical resistance by ethnic majorities, reducing its impact and effectiveness. We ask whether allies-advantaged group participants in disadvantaged group movements-can mitigate these barriers. On the one hand, allies can counter negative stereotypes and defuse threat perceptions among advantaged group members, while raising expectations of success and lowering expected risks among disadvantaged group members. On the other hand, allies can entail significant costs, carrying risks of cooptation, replication of power hierarchies, and marginalization of core constituencies. To shed light on this question we draw on the case of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which, in 2020, attracted unprecedented White participation. Employing a national survey experiment, we find that sizeable White presence at racial justice protests increases protest approval, reduces perceptions of violence, and raises the likelihood of participation among White audiences, while not causing significant backlash among Black audiences. Black respondents mostly see White presence as useful for advancing the movement's goals, and predominant White presence reduces expectations that protests will be forcefully repressed. We complement these results with analysis of tens of thousands of images shared on social media during the 2020 BLM protests, finding a significant association between the presence of Whites in the images and user engagement and amplification. The findings suggest that allyship can be a powerful tool for promoting sociopolitical change amid deep structural inequality.

Exploring intersectionality and its deadly impact on black queer lives in Brazil

Exploring intersectionality and its deadly impact on black queer lives in Brazil

‘Black self-serve’: the depreciation of blackness and racialized vision among Taiwanese netizens

ABSTRACT While the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was proliferating in the United States, the movement did not gain similar degrees of support in Taiwan. Instead, on social media there is even a term, ‘Black Self-serve,’ meaning that Black people always use race as an ‘excuse’ to demand whatever they want. Analyzing computer-mediated communication about blackness from the largest bulletin board system in Taiwan – PTT, this article highlights how and why Taiwanese netizens used the term ‘Black self-serve’ to accuse Black people of fighting for rights. Centering cultural processes of racialized vision and division, this article shows that the depreciation of blackness is deeply connected to Taiwanese navigation of its tenuous status along the racial hierarchy, sense of inferiority, colonization experience, cultural alienation, and the image of Black people as accomplices of anti-Asian racism – all are deeply embedded in systemic racism.

Racialized organizations, strategies, and structures: a case study

PurposeThis paper explores organization-level racialized work strategies for maintaining racialized organizations (Ray, 2019). It focuses on intentional actions to maintain dominant racial norms, demonstrating how work strategies are informed by dominant racial structures that maintain racial inequities.Design/methodology/approachWe compiled a chronological case study (Yin, 2012) based on 168 news media articles and various organizational documents to examine responses to athlete protests at the University of Texas at Austin following the death of George Floyd. Gioia et al.’s (2013) method uncovered how dominant racial norms inform organizational behaviors.FindingsThe paper challenges institutional theory neutrality and identifies several racialized work strategies that organizations employ to maintain racialized norms and practices. The findings provide a framework for organizations to interrogate their strategies and their role in reproducing dominant racial norms and inequities.Originality/valueIn 2020, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was reinvigorated within sporting and corporate domains. However, many organizations engaged in performativity, sparking criticism about meaningful change in organizational contexts. Our case study examines how one organization responded to athlete activists’ BLM-fueled demands, revealing specific racialized work strategies that maintain structures of racism. As organizations worldwide disrupt and discuss oppressive structures such as racism, we demonstrate how organizational leadership, while aware of policies and practices of racism, may choose not to act and actively maintain such structures.

An absolute shield: Qualified immunity, police misconduct and black lives matter

Before the global spotlight ascended upon nationwide efforts to codify into law that Black Lives Matter, specifically, police accountability against the use of excessive force against unarmed civilians, qualified immunity has silently flourished throughout America. Created to shield police officers and other government officials for the actions they engage on the job, this long-standing judicial doctrine continues to proliferate a culture of near-zero accountability when police officers engage in misconduct, which for communities of color, oftentimes results in deadly outcomes against unarmed civilians. This article will first revisit the development and legacy of qualified immunity, followed by analyzing its universal defense from police unions, then shifting to a data-rich illustration of disciplinary data highlighting the systemically designed outcomes of qualified immunity via the New York Police Department, before providing concluding thoughts. Ultimately, this article asserts that the retrogressive outcomes of police disciplinary inquiries, especially with respect to communities of color, is operating as designed, whereas efforts to review and revisit its structure and practices threaten a longstanding culture of disregard and near-zero accountability.

Public emotion and response immediately following the death of George Floyd: A sentiment analysis of social media comments

Social media use has become a critical form of social interaction connecting people of all ages, and across geographic regions, political, and philosophical persuasions. The results of these interactions are massive amounts of data which, through exploratory methods like sentiment analysis, can provide insight into overall public emotion and response to public and key sociopolitical events. The present study explores the sentiment surrounding the Black Lives Matter Facebook page by analyzing the comments under the video of the killing of George Floyd, posted on May 25, 2020. This examination of sentiment uses assumptions of selective exposure theory. We employed a three-pronged sentiment analysis approach and topic modeling and found an overall negative polarity in public sentiment among 7,137 Facebook comments on the video of George Floyd's death. The findings reveal a divisive response to the video which captured the death of George Floyd, which more generally suggests negative emotion in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. A sentiment test also returned a noticeably high happiness score, which might imply the widely unavoidable effects of trolls in internet discourse in the current racial context.

The Politics of Doulas: Black Feminist Collective Action in Response to “Birthing While Black”

Abstract A central function of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the United States has been to center and express the lived experiences of Black people within the social and political framework of white supremacy. Regarding reproductive justice, BLM, as well as organizations like the Black Mamas Matter Alliance and Sistersong, have drawn political attention to the oppressive parameters existing for pregnant people “birthing while Black.” Attention to disparities in health and birth outcomes for Black persons has necessary positive effects, such as the ability to produce data on the deleterious effects of anti-Blackness. However, discourses surrounding Black birthing persons can function to obfuscate the collective action undertaken by Black women and non-Black women of color. In this paper, I argue the hyper-focus on the problems Black pregnant/birthing persons face has at least four issues: (1) it encourages an ontological collapse wherein Black birthers are positioned as problems, rather than human beings facing problems; (2) obscures the collective action and care Black women undertake to support one another; (3) results in state solutions that rely on underpaid and volunteer labor of Black and non-Black women of color; and (4) focuses myopically on the time period of pregnancy and birthing for Black persons.

Humanizing Black lives in protest: emotion, embodiment, and interracial witnessing

ABSTRACT The video of Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd sparked a wave of protests and civil unrest, leading white support of Black Lives Matter to reach an all-time high in 2020. During this time, the heightened visibility of Black death by police and public conversations about anti-racism prompted conversations about institutionalized whiteness, interracial solidarity, and meaningful social justice action. This participatory rhetorical study, based on our analysis of twenty-six interviews with protest participants, investigated how racially diverse participants narrated their experiences of attending and/or organizing protests. We argue that the protests produced rhetorically impactful instances of witnessing through embodied experiences of relationality and collective feeling. Considering the protests’ impacts along with critiques of white witnessing and performative allyship, we explore the rhetorical potentialities of protest for humanizing Black lives by increasing anti-racist emotions and contributing to coalitional interracial subjectivities. Our theorization of interracial witnessing extends rhetorical witnessing to specifically address how spatial reconfigurations of racialized materialities and emotions during protest create new forms of recognition. In addition, the use of participatory approaches also extends media witnessing through the use of interviewing as an inventive space for deepening the witnessing process.

"To honor and remember": An ethical awakening to African American remains in museums.

In 2021, amid surging activism in the Movement for Black Lives, the Smithsonian Institution's possession of the remains of thousands of African Americans drew widespread attention. In response, the Smithsonian and its National Museum of Natural History undertook a series of steps to assess these remains and to develop a policy for returning as many as possible to descendants and descendant communities, under changes that would apply to all non-Native American remains in Smithsonian collections. This paper reviews the actions taken to date and the work that is still in progress or planned. I contextualize these steps more broadly within an "ethical awakening" to African American remains that have long been present, studied, and displayed in collections across the museum community in the United States, where other institutions have faced similar challenges and changes.

Employment Barriers for Racialized Immigrants: A Review of Economic and Social Integration Support and Gaps in Edmonton, Alberta

This article explores the strategies used by government-sponsored institutions dedicated to addressing systemic barriers to employment for racialized immigrants in Edmonton. The research involved conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews with service providers, employment program coordinators from different settlement and employment agencies, and a research and training centre operating in Edmonton, Alberta. The first objective is to understand the barriers racialized immigrants face through the hiring and promotion process. The second objective is to understand the support provided by those institutions and the impact of their equity policies on how they assist racialized Canadians in finding gainful employment. Lastly, this study explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement on the employment of racialized immigrants in Edmonton. The results show that around 50% of employment service providers acknowledged that visible minority immigrants face barriers while integrating into the labour market, including racial microaggressions in their jobs. In addition, the findings indicate a lack of programs tailored to the needs of racialized job seekers. Participants in this study recognized that the Black Lives Matter movement raised awareness among employers regarding racial issues in the workplace. Hence, there is a demonstrated need for employers to undergo training to recognize and address racism in hiring, promoting, and retaining racialized employees at Canadian workplaces. Interviewees recognized that the COVID-19 pandemic negatively impacted racialized employees and newcomers. They recommended that Canadian companies establish educational programs that emphasize the importance and benefits of racial diversity, equity, and inclusion in the hiring process.

Does Greater Visibility Benefit Minority Businesses? Evidence from an Online Review Platform

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, numerous companies took action to advance racial equality. Several online platforms added a feature that identified “minority-owned” businesses to help users locate and, thus, support them. In this study, we investigate how reviews and ratings of restaurants in New York City change after being identified as Black-owned on an online platform. We find that the number of reviews increases, but the average rating decreases after restaurants are identified as Black-owned. We investigate how various contextual factors, such as the number of hate crimes where the restaurant is located and restaurant popularity, as well as reviewer characteristics, such as reviewer race and gender, impact this relationship. We also examine mechanisms that could be contributing to our findings. Collectively, and in contrast to the positive findings in other studies, our results reveal a possible unintended consequence of identity disclosure for minority-owned businesses. Findings from our study offer important implications for society, business owners, and online platforms.

‘Being part of a space made up of people of colour, led by people of colour’: Young people navigating institutional whiteness in the cultural sector

AbstractIn 2020, after George Floyd's murder and with the mobilisation of Black Lives Matter activism, many UK institutions announced social media pledges to tackle racism. The cultural sector promised honest conversations about race, racism and whiteness and offered hope for social justice. However, not long after claims of imminent change on the part of cultural organisations, it went quiet. Conversations about race, racism and whiteness, once again, were not a priority. Rightly, young activists question the performative nature of cultural institutions expressing anti‐racist commitment and social justice values. Drawing upon the experiences of museum education, engagement and activism, the key question addressed in this paper by the author and members of the Our Shared Cultural Heritage Young Collective is: How do young people understand and experience the processes of engaging in education and activism in what they perceive to be overwhelmingly white middle‐class cultural institutions? The authors argue that museums can be useful, relevant and interesting to young people if museum staff actively seek to learn from them through participatory action research. The authors share some highlights, challenges and complexities of our ‘youth‐led’ work in the heritage sector, in the hope that museums and galleries, as well as other arts and cultural organisations, might learn and benefit from our experiences and knowledge of young people's activism in the heritage sector.

African Americans’ Willingness to Extend Legitimacy to the Police: Connections to Identities and Experiences in the Post-George Floyd Era

Abstract Numerous benefits materialize when people extend legitimacy to institutions; consequently, many investigations of the legitimacy of the police have been reported. However, several critical issues remain unanswered. My paper’s purpose is to revisit the question of willingness to grant police legitimacy, focusing on a nationally representative sample of African Americans. I test hypotheses connecting police legitimacy with experiences with unfair treatment by legal authorities, ingroup attachments, attitudes toward systemic racism, and engagement with Black Lives Matter. My findings reveal significant connections between experience with discrimination, ingroup attachments, and beliefs about systemic racism but little relationship between BLM attitudes and police legitimacy.

"Black Women Should Not Die Giving Life": The lived experiences of Black women diagnosed with severe maternal morbidity in the United States.

We sought to understand the lived experiences of Black women diagnosed with severe maternal morbidity (SMM) in communities with high maternal mortality to inform practices that reduce obstetric racism and improve patient outcomes. From August 2022 through December 2022, we conducted a phenomenological, qualitative study among Black women who experienced SMM. Participants were recruited via social media and met inclusion criteria if they self-identified as Black cisgender women, were 18-40 years old, had SMM diagnosed, and lived within zip codes in the United States that have the top-five highest maternal mortality rates. Family members participated on behalf of women who were deceased but otherwise met all other criteria. We conducted in-depth interviews (IDIs), and transcripts were analyzed using inductive and deductive methods to explore birth story experiences. Overall, 12 participants completed IDIs; 10 were women who experienced SMM and 2 were mothers of women who died due to SMM. The mean age for women who experienced SMM was 31 years (range 26-36 years) at the time of the IDI or death. Most participants had graduate-level education, and the average annual household income was 123,750 USD. Women were especially interested in study participation because of their high-income status as they did not fit the stereotypical profile of Black women who experience racial discrimination. The average time since SMM diagnosis was 2 years. Participants highlighted concrete examples of communication failures, stereotyping by providers, differential treatment, and medical errors which patients experienced as manifestations of racism. Medical personnel dismissing and ignoring concerns during emergent situations, even when raised through strong self-advocacy, was a key factor in racism experienced during childbirth. Future interventions to reduce racism and improve maternal health outcomes should center on the experiences of Black women and focus on improving patient-provider communication, as well as the quality and effectiveness of responses during emergent situations. Précis statement: This study underscores the need to center Black women's experiences, enhance patient-provider communication, and address emergent concerns to mitigate obstetric racism and enhance maternal health outcomes.

Becoming response-able with a protest placard: white under(-)standing in encounters with the Black German Other

Abstract This paper emerged from an encounter with the Black Lives Matter placard I understand that I will never understand but I stand with you in Leipzig, Germany, and it centers white understanding as a constitutive practice of whiteness. This is mainly a theoretical contribution (learning towards the philosophical), although it includes some interview data and observations from protest participation. I contribute to raciolinguistics by reading the concept of the white listening subject through Barad’s new materialist notion of apparatuses, asking what exactly constitutes white understanding. This allows me to bring out the potentials and pitfalls (i.e. the counter/productivity) of white understanding as a reflective practice, which I put into conversation with my embodied practice of under-standing (i.e. standing under) the placard at a BLM protest in Berlin. I show how the white body is measured by a Black norm in the protest space, producing a productive discomfort filled with opportunities for becoming response-able towards the Black Other, but also towards whiteness. Considering the ethico-esthetic framing of this collection, I pursue an aesthethics of wor(l)ding that inter-rupts, dis/entangles, and walks around with and in words. It gestures towards what we usually leave out when pursuing one analytical avenue over another.

“I just chill and keep quiet ya’ know”: understanding Black college students’ silence during in-class racial conversations at an AANAPISI/HSI

ABSTRACT Communication scholars have considered silence in (higher) education as indicative of a range of cultural attitudes and an exercise of power. Some communication scholars consider student silence in classrooms as problematic, wherein a lack of participation in the learning process via student voice constitutes an act of resisting educators and education. Others conceptualize it as a way to challenge oppression or as a part of students' cultural identity. This study examines 21 Black college students' impetus for communicating silence during in-class discussions at a large Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-serving institution (AANAPISI) and a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) 4-year university on the U.S. West Coast. Given the anti-Black phenomena in recent years (e.g., police violence, anti-Black education laws, Black Lives Matter protests), this study investigates the reasoning behind Black students' reasons for communicating silence within in-class discussions of race/racial phenomena. This study found Black students communicate in-class silence for three overarching reasons: (1) silence due to feeling underrepresented, (2) silence to avoid (negative) peer attention, and (3) silence due to fear of instructor retaliation. Findings inform how instructors can better approach racial discussions by mitigating Black student racial labor, foster civility, and move toward improving cross-racial learning during in-class interactions.

From Protest to Child-Rearing: How Movement Politics Shape Socialization Priorities

Abstract Classic political behavior studies assert that childhood socialization can contribute to later political orientations. But, as adults consider how to introduce children to politics, what shapes their decisions? We argue socialization is itself political with adults changing their socialization priorities in response to salient political events including social movements. Using Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and race socialization as a case, we show the summer 2020 information environment coupled movement-consistent concepts of race with child-rearing guidance. A survey of white parents after the summer activism suggests that many—but especially Democrats and those near peaceful protest epicenters—prioritized new forms of race socialization. Further, nearly 2 years after the protests’ height, priming BLM changes support for race-related curricular materials among white Americans. Our work casts political socialization in a new light, reviving an old literature, and has implications for when today’s children become tomorrow’s voters.

“If Today Never Gives Up In Me”

Abstract Featuring a conversation with the artist, this essay offers a reading of Amina Ross's aesthetic practice across a selection of their work. Alongside Fred Moten's own critique of the overrepresentation of blackness as death-driven, it highlights their ongoing contributions to what they refer to as “black work,” or aesthetic experimentations in making multiple forms of blackness appear and emerge in the present moment. For Ross, the present is not merely a death-driven end but, at once, a rigid structure and a “space of unlimited potential” wherein blackness and black life may be experienced in their multiplicity. Placing objects in unexpected positions and built structures, Ross seeks to widen spectators' sense of their own present and immediate environment. As such, the present is, for them, a space to be, not escaped from, but worked on and reenvisioned in an effort to make a black present possible, livable, and replenishable.

Urban Life at the Extensions

There has been much consideration of the ways in which urbanization exceeds the city form—particularly in its peripheries and hinterlands. Extended urbanization conventionally refers to the multifaceted processes through which urbanization articulates different logics and territories. Yet extensions reflect a going beyond that can take place anywhere, and which is manifested not only in new territorial formations but also in ways of living and inhabiting. Acts of extending urban form and life do not simply reproduce the dominant modes of valuation but unsettle, disrupting familiar categorization, as inhabitants attempt to situate themselves in the midst of increasingly unsettled terrain. Extensions and extending, then, are at the heart of an interplay between attempts to resettle and unsettle, to extract as much as possible but also to operate where nothing apparent is to be gained, nothing useful to the prolongation, either of the urban or life. Drawing from Black tactical life, extensions concern how a people spread out to cover the angles, to act as lookouts at all those interfaces where capture attempts to suture a conceit of seamlessness. It is also a stance against the everywhereness found in the proliferation of “dead exchanges”—where discourses of freedom and development become merely aspects of continuous assessment of the exercised efficacies of particular bodies and their trajectories and interactions.