Stranger Fruit: The Cultural Coding of Black Males in America (original) (raw)
Related papers
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
Harvard Law Review, 2018
Since Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in 2014,1 the problem of police violence against African Americans has been a relatively salient feature of nationwide discussions about race. Across the ideological spectrum, people have had to engage the question of whether, especially in the context of policing, it’s fair to say that black lives are undervalued. While there is both a racial and a political divide with respect to how Americans have thus far answered that question, the emergence of Black Lives Matter movements2 has made it virtually impossible to be a bystander in the debate. Separate from whether racialized policing against African Americans is, in fact, a social phenomenon, is the contestable question about solutions: Assuming that African Americans are indeed the victims of overpolicing, meaning that by some metric they end up having more interactions with the police and more violent encounters than is normatively warranted, what can we do about it? And here, the...
The Framing of Race: Trayvon Martin and the Black Lives Matter Movement
Journal of Black Studies, 2020
This study analyzed two national newspapers to investigate how each framed race in coverage of Trayvon Martin and the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing from Feagin’s white racial frame as the framework for analysis, results show that the news coverage reflected an encompassing pro-white/anti-black master-frame that presented Black Americans as inadequate, lawless, criminal, threatening and at times biologically different. Some news stories contributed to the media’s conceptualization of race within a liberty-and-justice American myth paradigm. Conversely, whites were presented favorably as “protectors” and “virtuous.” Episodic news frames were discovered with highly-focused coverage on events that shifted attention away from the broader trend of racial profiling. These findings contributed to the understanding of the role of corporate media in reinforcing the framing of race. Emerging sub-frames are discussed.
Special Issue Introductory Essay: Black Lives Matter
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly , 2022
Mass media messages create, popularize, and reinforce stereotypical narratives of Black people that fuel fear and hatred of the group (Dates & Pease, 1994). Blackface representations overemphasized and ridiculed personality traits, mannerisms, and the vernacular of Black people. Narratives of Black men included images of criminals, dupes, social deviants, and brutes. In the 21st century, U.S. media continued to frame Black men negatively—as drug dealers, pimps, and thugs—to provide a rationale for the high number of them in prison. After the 13th Amendment passed, free Black men in chain gangs provided free labor, and this legacy lives on in for-profit prisons that benefit from the income generated from the sale of everyday necessities, such as toi- letries, telephone calls, and food.
Social Identities, 2019
In this paper, we analyze an emergent cultural clash between: (a) how media outlets and other control culture institutions have portrayed events related to Black Lives Matter, and (b) the complex reality of Black Lives Matter movements as they have developed through embodied, intersectional, and always socially situated forms of direct collective action. In focusing specifically on American mainstream media coverage of the killing of Trayvon Martin, we argue that, given the history of white supremacy in America, such journalistic accounts generally fail to provide an adequate socio-historical context for emergent social movements in the vein of Black Lives Matter. In framing such movements, at worst, as anti-American terrorist organizations, though more regularly as social constellations of misplaced anger, American control culture institutions have consistently reinforced a certain set of logical contradictions found across broader discussions about race throughout the history of America. Finally, drawing on the theory of play proposed by Gregory Bateson, we outline how a form of subverting mainstream journalistic framing techniques is enacted and embodied creativity through the communally oriented tactics successfully deployed by social movements like Black Lives Matter.
This essay is an brief examination of the dis-proportionality of black males incarcerated in America. It is an analysis of the motivations that have created mechanisms of injustice and oppression, namely excess force and police brutality. This is a historical approach to understanding the psyche that promotes police brutality and mass incarceration against blacks. The answer is that; blacks are still viewed as subhuman by law enforcement agencies and systems. The criminal justice system fails to see blacks as part of America and indeed benefits from their oppression.
Social Sciences
In this article, I examine how political and media discourses of multiraciality are deployed to justify guilt and innocence. I trace the deployment of multiraciality to determine who is deserving of life or death in media coverage, political rhetoric, and court records during Obama’s presidency, in George Zimmerman’s 2013 acquittal, and in the 2021 killing of Daunte Wright. I examine the weaponization of discourses of multiracial identities as tools of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Through such weaponization, the construction of the multiracial man as an index of racial progress and post-racism evident in the Barack Obama era enabled the violence and miscarriages of justice in the killings of Trayvon Martin and Daunte Wright. I consider how transnational and U.S. narratives of multiraciality, joined with anti-Blackness and white supremacy, enabled the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Furthermore, I examine how white womanhood and fears of Black masculinity facilitated the sympat...