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Disciplining Black activism: post-racial rhetoric, public memory and decorum in news media framing of the Black Lives Matter movement

ABSTRACT The Black Lives Matter movement was created from a hashtag used on Twitter in 2013 in the United States when George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida, United States. Advocacy and non-violent protests by Black Lives Matter groups have been framed in news media reporting as riots and the group has been called ‘racist’ and ‘anti-law enforcement’. This paper will unpack three rhetorical strategies that the news media uses to discuss BLM. I argue that the effect of these rhetorical strategies is the delegitimization of the very real problems concerning racial profiling and racial killings that the Black Lives Matter group protests. I will examine Black Lives Matter’s own goals and how these are ignored or questioned by the news media in that the group is framed in a delegitimizing manner. This paper uses Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s concept of racial grammar in conjunction with a Foucauldian emphasis on governmentality to examine these instances of racist rhetoric in re-presentations of Black Lives Matter movement in US news media.