"When George Zimmerman was acquitted in the Trayvon Martin murder trial in July 2013, widespread disbelief and despair shook black communities across the nation...A day after the verdict, Alicia Garza wrote a love letter to black people on Facebook. It read, 'I continue to be surprised at how little black lives matter. . . . Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.' Her friend and fellow organizer, Patrisse Khan Cullors, reposted her words on Twitter with the hashtag behind it: #BlackLivesMatter. Although people from all walks of life gathered to protest the Zimmerman verdict that year, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag (and movement) peaked truly in Ferguson after Michael Brown was killed in 2014."
- From the Preface of Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism by Allissa V. Richardson, Oxford University Press, 2020, https://ezproxy.wpi.edu/login?url=https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190935528.001.0001.
'Black Lives Matter': Cross-Media Resonance and the Iconic Turn of Language
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This volume focuses on the ongoing protest in the US against racial discrimination and racial profiling, which often result in the loss of black lives at the hands of police agents, a phenomenon that has recently attracted unprecedented media attention. The topics dealt with here, such as the relevance of the 'Black Lives Matter' movement, are currently included in a variety of education curricula in the US, and, in like manner, this book can be used in first and second level degrees in linguistic and cultural studies, communication, media studies and political sciences. It contains well-developed methodological sections (with tables, figures, graphs and notes), where the tenets of critical discourse analysis are concisely illustrated from its Foucauldian roots up to the more recent developments of multimodal critical discourse analysis and positive discourse analysis, as well as the contribution of the Sidney School with their emphasis on mapping culture through narrative genres and the wealth of resources for discourse analysis provided by the appraisal framework
Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism
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Bearing Witness While Black tells the story of this century's most powerful Black social movement through the eyes of 15 activists who documented it. At the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, African Americans filmed and tweeted evidence of fatal police encounters in dozens of US cities - using little more than the device in their pockets. Their urgent dispatches from the frontlines spurred a global debate on excessive police force, which claimed the lives of African American men, women, and children at disproportionate rates.This groundbreaking book reveals how the perfect storm of smartphones, social media, and social justice empowered Black activists to create their own news outlets, which continued a centuries-long, African American tradition of using the news to challenge racism. Bearing Witness While Black is the first book of its kind to identify three overlapping eras of domestic terror against African American people - slavery, lynching, and police brutality - and explain how storytellers during each period documented its atrocities through journalism. What results is a stunning genealogy - of how the slave narratives of the 1700s inspired the Abolitionist movement; how the black newspapers of the 1800s galvanized the anti-lynching and Civil Rights movements; and how the smartphones of today have powered the anti-police brutality movement. This lineage of black witnessing, Allissa V. Richardson argues, is formidable and forever evolving.Richardson's own activism, as an award-winning pioneer of smartphone journalism, informs this text. Weaving in personal accounts of her teaching in the US and Africa, and of her own brushes with police brutality, Richardson shares how she has inspired black youth to use mobile devices, to speak up from the margins. It is from this vantage point, as participant-observer, that she urges us not to become numb to the tragic imagery that African Americans have documented. Instead, Bearing Witness While Black conveys a crucial need to protect our right to look into the forbidden space of violence against black bodies, and to continue to regard the smartphone as an instrument of moral suasion and social change.
Black Lives Matter
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Black Lives Matter covers the shootings that touched off passionate protests, the work of activists to bring about a more just legal system, and the tensions in US society that these events have brought to light. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.
Black Lives Matter and Music
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Music has always been integral to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, with songs such as Kendrick Lamar's "Alright," J. Cole's "Be Free," D'Angelo and the Vanguard's "The Charade," The Game's "Don't Shoot," Janelle Monae's "Hell You Talmbout," Usher's "Chains," and many others serving as unofficial anthems and soundtracks for members and allies of the movement. In this collection of critical studies, contributors draw from ethnographic research and personal encounters to illustrate how scholarly research of, approaches to, and teaching about the role of music in the Black Lives Matter movement can contribute to public awareness of the social, economic, political, scientific, and other forms of injustices in our society. Each chapter in Black Lives Matter and Music focuses on a particular case study, with the goal to inspire and facilitate productive dialogues among scholars, students, and the communities we study. From nuanced snapshots of how African American musical genres have flourished in different cities and the role of these genres in local activism, to explorations of musical pedagogy on the American college campus, readers will be challenged to think of how activism and social justice work might appear in American higher education and in academic research. Black Lives Matter and Music provokes us to examine how we teach, how we conduct research, and ultimately, how we should think about the ways that black struggle, liberation, and identity have evolved in the United States and around the world.
Black Networks Matter: The Role of Interracial Contact and Social Media in the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests
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Scholars have long recognized that interpersonal networks play a role in mobilizing social movements. Yet, many questions remain. This Element addresses these questions by theorizing about three dimensions of ties: emotionally strong or weak, movement insider or outsider, and ingroup or cross-cleavage. The survey data on the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests show that weak and cross-cleavage ties among outsiders enabled the movement to evolve from a small provocation into a massive national mobilization. In particular, the authors find that Black people mobilized one another through social media and spurred their non-Black friends to protest by sharing their personal encounters with racism. These results depart from the established literature regarding the civil rights movement that emphasizes strong, movement-internal, and racially homogenous ties. The networks that mobilize appear to have changed in the social media era. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century
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The breadth and impact of Black Lives Matter in the United States has been extraordinary. Between 2012 and 2016, thousands of people marched, rallied, held vigils, and engaged in direct actions to protest and draw attention to state and vigilante violence against Black people. What began as outrage over the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin and the exoneration of his killer, and accelerated during the Ferguson uprising of 2014, has evolved into a resurgent Black Freedom Movement, which includes a network of more than fifty organizations working together under the rubric of the Movement for Black Lives coalition. Employing a range of creative tactics and embracing group-centered leadership models, these visionary young organizers, many of them women, and many of them queer, are not only calling for an end to police violence, but demanding racial justice, gender justice, and systemic change. In Making All Black Lives Matter, award-winning historian and longtime activist Barbara Ransby outlines the scope and genealogy of this movement, documenting its roots in Black feminist politics and situating it squarely in a Black radical tradition, one that is anticapitalist, internationalist, and focused on some of the most marginalized members of the Black community. From the perspective of a participant-observer, Ransby maps the movement, profiles many of its lesser-known leaders, measures its impact, outlines its challenges, and looks toward its future.
The Politics of Protest: Readings on the Black Lives Matter Movement
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This collection provides a deep engagement with the political implication of Black Lives Matter. This book covers a broad range of topics using a variety of methods and epistemological approaches. In the twenty-first century, the killings of Black Americans have sparked a movement to end the brutality against Black bodies. In 2013, #BlackLivesMatter would become a movement-building project led by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. This movement began after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who murdered 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The movement has continued to fight for racial justice and has experienced a resurgence following the 2020 slayings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sean Reed, Tony McDade, and David McAtee among others. The continued protests raise questions about how we can end this vicious cycle and lead Blacks to a state of normalcy in the United States. In other words, how can we make any advances made by Black Lives Matter stick? The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities.
Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter
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Black Lives Matter, like its predecessor movements, embodies flesh and blood through local organizing, national and global protests, hunger strikes, and numerous acts of civil disobedience. Chants like "All night! All day! We're gonna fight for Freddie Gray!" and "No justice, no fear! Sandra Bland is marching here!" give voice simultaneously to the rage, truth, hope, and insurgency that sustain BLM. While BLM has generously welcomed a broad group of individuals whom religious institutions have historically resisted or rejected, contrary to general perceptions, religion neither has been absent nor excluded from the movement's activities. This volume has a simple, but far-reaching argument: religion is an important thread in BLM. To advance this claim, Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter examines religion's place in the movement through the lenses of history, politics, and culture. While this collection is not exhaustive or comprehensive in its coverage of religion and BLM, it selectively anthologizes unique aspects of Black religious history, thought, and culture in relation to political struggle in the contemporary era. The chapters aim to document historical change in light of current trends and current events. The contributors analyze religion and BLM in a current historical moment fraught with aggressive, fascist, authoritarian tendencies and one shaped by profound ingenuity, creativity, and insightful perspectives on Black history and culture.
The Struggle over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter
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In The Struggle over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter, Amanda Nell Edgar and Andre E. Johnson examine the surprisingly complex relationship between Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter as it unfolds on social media and in offline interpersonal relationships. Exploring cultural influences like family history, fear, religion, postracialism, and workplace pressure, Edgar and Johnson trace the meanings of these movements from the perspectives of ordinary participants. The Struggle over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter highlights the motivations for investing in social movements and countermovements to show how history, both remembered and misremembered, bubbles beneath the surface of online social justice campaigns. Through participation in these contemporary movements, online social media users enact continuations of American history through a lens of their own past experiences. This book ties together online and offline, national and local, and personal and political to understand one of the defining social justice struggles of our time.
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
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A poetic and powerful memoir about what it means to be a Black woman in America--and the co-founding of a movement that demands justice for all in the land of the free. Raised by a single mother in an impoverished neighborhood in Los Angeles, Patrisse Khan-Cullors experienced firsthand the prejudice and persecution Black Americans endure at the hands of law enforcement. For Patrisse, the most vulnerable people in the country are Black people. Deliberately and ruthlessly targeted by a criminal justice system serving a white privilege agenda, Black people are subjected to unjustifiable racial profiling and police brutality. In 2013, when Trayvon Martin's killer went free, Patrisse's outrage led her to co-found Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. Condemned as terrorists and as a threat to America, these loving women founded a hashtag that birthed the movement to demand accountability from the authorities who continually turn a blind eye to the injustices inflicted upon people of Black and Brown skin. Championing human rights in the face of violent racism, Patrisse is a survivor. She transformed her personal pain into political power, giving voice to a people suffering inequality and a movement fueled by her strength and love to tell the country--and the world--that Black Lives Matter. When They Call You a Terrorist is Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele's reflection on humanity. It is an empowering account of survival, strength and resilience and a call to action to change the culture that declares innocent Black life expendable.
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An interview with the founders of Black Lives Matter | Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi