Creating a space to #SayHerName: Rhetorical stratification in the networked sphere

ABSTRACT

This essay examines #SayHerName as a case study to analyze how circulation of the hashtag both challenged women’s erasure from #BlackLivesMatter discourse and motivated activists to center the stories of Black women killed in police interactions. We introduce the term rhetorical stratification to discern why the #SayHerName hashtag came to matter, and how it remained relevant in the national discourse about police brutality. To do so, we analyze how the #SayHerName movement evolved from the discursive to the material through policy briefs, social media circulation, and citizen journalism, which influenced news framing and initiated greater deliberation about this issue in both the networked public sphere and in local communities. We conclude that this hashtag invitation to digital activists engaged more nuanced perspectives about police brutality and policy reform, influenced the way Black women victims of police violence are covered in the news, and motivated community-based policy proposals addressing necessary changes in local policing.

KEYWORDS:

• Rhetorical circulation
• rhetorical stratification
• hashtag activism
• civic rhetoric
• deliberation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Risa Applegarth, Shevaun Watson, Michelle Gibbons, Renee Heath, and Heather Norton for their time and energy giving feedback on this project during its evolution, Karrin Vasby Anderson for her generous editorial support, and the anonymous reviewers for their insights, all of which helped clarify this project’s goals and made our writing and contributions stronger.

ORCID

Jennifer L. Borda http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6125-5395

Notes on contributors

Jennifer L. Borda is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire, and lead author in the translation of this project into a scholarly article.

Bailey Marshall, who initiated this project as an undergraduate student, received her B.A. from the UNH Department of Communication in 2018. The focus of this essay on Sandra Bland and #SayHerName was seeded in a capstone research paper in Social Protest: Rhetoric and Resistance, expanded through a research independent study, and explored in a university Honors Thesis by Bailey Marshall, each of which were advised by Jennifer Borda. Correspondence may be directed to: [email protected]

Notes

1 Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Andrea J. Ritchie, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women (African American Policy Forum, 2015), http://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f20d90e4b0b80451158d8c/t/560c068ee4b0af26f72741df/1443628686535/AAPF_SMN_Brief_Full_singles-min.pdf. See also: Andrea J. Ritchie, “#SayHerName: Racial Profiling and Police Violence Against Black Women”, The Harbinger 41, no. 187 (2016): 187–200.

2 Founded by Black feminist activists Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Khan-Cullors in July 2013 following George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin, The Movement for Black Lives argued that

universal freedom is an ideal best represented not by those who are already at the pinnacle of racial, gender, and class hierarchies, but rather by those whose lives are most defined by conditions of unfreedom and by ongoing struggles to extricate themselves from those conditions. Angela Davis, foreword to When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s, 2018), xiv

3 Sarah Jackson’s commentary about networked counterpublics of Black feminist activism contests this claim by arguing that Black Lives Matters founders had insisted on discourses of intersectionality that value and center all Black lives from the beginning. We contend that #SayHerName most productively addressed the issue of a lack of intersectionality in the way the movement had been covered in the media. See Sarah J. Jackson, “(Re)imagining Intersectional Democracy from Black Feminism to Hashtag Activism,” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 4 (2016): 375–9, doi:10.1080/07491409.2016.1226654.

4 Crenshaw and Ritchie, Say Her Name, 2.

5 Crenshaw and Ritchie, Say Her Name, 2, 4.

6 Ritchie, “#SayHerName,” 187; see also Crenshaw and Ritchie, Say Her Name.

7 Dustin Edwards and Heather Lang, “Entanglements that Matter: A New Materialist Trace of #YesAllWomen,” in Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric, ed. Laurie Gries and Collin Gifford Brooke (Louisville: Utah State University Press, 2018), 118, 134.

8 Edwards and Lang, “Entanglements,” 119.

9 Jonathan L. Bradshaw, “Slow Circulation: The Ethics of Speed and Rhetorical Persistence,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 5 (2018): 479–98, 481, doi:10.1080/02773945.2018.1455987.

10 Bradshaw, “Slow Circulation,” 481.

11 Bradshaw, “Slow Circulation,” 481.

12 Crenshaw and Ritchie, Say Her Name, 6.

13 Henry Jenkins defines convergence culture as altering “the logic by which media industries operate and by which media consumers process news and entertainment.” Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 15–6. For a study of how traditional news media and journalism responded to such threats, see Robert W. McChesney and Victor Pickard, eds., Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done to Fix It (New York: The New Press, 2011), 10–1. McChesney and Pickard note in the introduction that 2010 represented a “critical juncture” for journalism and the contemporary media system of which several questions emerged, including “Can the market and the internet eventually evolve together to create a new commercially viable news media, and if so, what would this new system look like?” We assert that part of what that transition has made possible is the ability for activists to occupy a space in the convergence of the internet and the news media.

14 Zizi A. Papacharissi, A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age (Malden: Polity Press, 2010), 156.

15 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 293–4.

16 Anne Demo coined the term “afterimage” as “a conceptual figure for news stories that justify reporting on important secondary stories with a hook to the primary newspeg of a media spectacle.” See Anne Demo, “The Afterimage: Immigration Policy after Elián,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 10, no. 1 (2007): 27–49, doi:10.1353/rap.2007.0016.

17 André Brock, “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 56, no. 4 (2012): 529–49, doi:10.1080/08838151.2012.732147; Guobin Yang, “Narrative Agency in Hashtag Activism: The Case of #BlackLivesMatter.” Media and Communication 4, no. 4 (2016): 13–7, doi:10.17645/mac.v4i4.692.

18 Sara Florini, “Tweets, Tweeps, and Signifyin’: Communication and Cultural Performance on ‘Black Twitter,’” Television & New Media 15, no. 3 (2013): 223–7, doi:10.1177/1527476413480247; Ritchie, “#SayHerName”; Marc Lamont Hill, “‘Thank You, Black Twitter’: State Violence, Digital Counterpublics, and Pedagogies of Resistance,” Urban Education 53, no. 2 (2018): 286–302, doi:10.1177/0042085917747124.

19 Florini, “Tweets,” 225. See: Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

20 Roderick Graham and ‘Shawn Smith, “The Content of Our #Characters: Black Twitter as Counterpublic,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 2, no. 4 (2016): 433–49, doi:10.1177/2332649216639067; Catherine R. Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres,” Communication Theory 12, no. 4 (2002): 446–68, doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2002.tb00278.x.

21 Squires, “Rethinking,” 465.

22 Keith Gilyard and Adam J. Banks, On African-American Rhetoric (New York: Routledge, 2018), 84–103. See also Graham and Smith, “The Content.”

23 Sherri Williams, “#SayHerName: Using Digital Activism to Document Violence against Black Women,” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 5 (2016): 922–5, doi:10.1080.14680777.2016.1213574; Melissa Brown, Rashawn Ray, Ed Summers and Neil Fraistat, “#SayHerName: A Case Study of Intersectional Social Media,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, no. 11 (2017):1831–46, doi:10.1080/01419870.2017.1334934; Armond R. Towns, “Geographies of Pain: #SayHerName and the Fear of Black Women’s Mobility,” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 2 (2016): 122–6, doi:10.1080/07491409.2016.1176807.

24 Brown et al., “#SayHerName.”

25 Brown et al., “#SayHerName,” 1839.

26 Catherine L. Langford and Montené Speight, “#BlackLivesMatter: Epistemic Positioning, Challenges, and Possibilities,” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 5, no. 3/4 (2015): 78–89.

27 Christopher P. Campbell, “#IFTHEYGUNNEDMEDOWN: Postmodern Media Criticism in a Post-Racial World,” in Race and Gender in Electronic Media: Content, Context, Culture, ed. Rebecca Ann Lind (New York: Routledge, 2016): 195–212.

28 Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Why Intersectionality Can’t Wait,” The Washington Post, September 24, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2015/09/24/why-intersectionality-cant-wait/.

29 Sherri Williams, “Digital Defense: Black Feminists Resist Violence with Hashtag Activism,” Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 2 (2015): 343, doi:10.1080/14680777.2015.1008744

30 See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/policeshootings/.

31 The AAPF report also notes that “there is currently no accurate data collection on police killings nationwide, no readily available database compiling a complete list of Black women’s lives lost at the hands of police.” Crenshaw and Ritchie, Say Her Name, 1, 4.

32 Crenshaw and Ritchie, Say Her Name.

33 African American Policy Forum, “#SayHerName: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women: A Social Media Guide,” https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f20d90e4b0b80451158d8c/t/555e2412e4b0bd5f4da5d3a4/1432232978932/SAYHERNAME±Social±Media±Guide.compressed.pdf.

34 See Papacharissi, A Private Sphere, 15.

35 Nikki Usher, “Professional Journalists, Hands Off! Citizen Journalism and Civic Responsibility,” in Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done to Fix It, eds. Robert W. McChesney and Victor Pickard (New York: The New Press, 2011), 275.

36 Marcia Chatelain, and Kaavya Asoka, “Women and Black Lives Matter,” Dissent 63, no. 3 (2015): 54, doi:10.1353/dss.2015.0059.

37 Crenshaw and Ritchie, Say Her Name.

38 Ben Bradley, “Woman Shot by Off-duty Officer Dies,” ABC7 Chicago, March 22, 2012, https://abc7chicago.com/archive/8591349/; Editorial Board, “Rekia Boyd Shooting Was ‘Beyond Reckless,’ So Cop Got a Pass,” April 22, 2015, https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/editorials/ct-cop-verdict-servin-edit-0423-20150422-story.html.

39 Aamer Madhani, “Chicago Chief: Cop Should Be Fired for Rekia Boyd Death,” USA Today, November 25, 2015, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/11/24/chicago-police-superintendent-calls-for-firing-dante-servin-rekia-boyd-case/76295730/.

40 Steven Hsieh, “Police Can’t Get Their Story Straight After a Deputy Fatally Shoots a Texas Woman,” The Nation, February 20, 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/police-cant-get-their-story-straight-after-deputy-fatally-shoots-texas-woman/.

41 Julie Chang, “Bastrop Woman’s Family, Friends Say She Was Unarmed When She Was Killed by Deputy,” Austin-American Statesman, February 18, 2014, https://www.statesman.com/article/20140218/NEWS/302189639.

42 Chang, “Bastrop Woman’s Family.”

43 Chang, “Bastrop Woman’s Family.”

44 KVUE Staff, “Dash-cam Video Played in Murder Trial of Former Deputy,” KVUE, September 18, 2015, https://www.kvue.com/article/news/crime/dash-cam-video-played-in-murder-trial-of-former-deputy/269-152164906.

45 The Associated Press, “Notable Mistrials in Cases of Police Deaths,” CBS Baltimore, December 17, 2015, https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2015/12/17/notable-mistrials-in-cases-of-police-deaths/; See also: Philip Jankowski, “Lead Juror Gives Peek into Mistrial of Ex-Deputy Accused of Murder,” Austin-American Statesman, September 4, 2016, https://www.statesman.com/NEWS/20160904/Lead-juror-gives-peek-into-mistrial-of-ex-deputy-accused-of-murder.

46 African American Policy Forum, “#SayHerName: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women. A Social Media Guide,” https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f20d90e4b0b80451158d8c/t/555e2412e4b0bd5f4da5d3a4/1432232978932/SAYHERNAME+Social+Media+Guide.compressed.pdf.

47 Crenshaw and Ritchie, Say Her Name, 20.

48 David M. Perry and Lawrence Carter-Long, The Rudderman White Paper on Media Coverage of Law Enforcement Use of Force and Disability: A Media Study (2013–2015) and Overview (Ruderman Family Foundation: March 2016), https://rudermanfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/MediaStudy-PoliceDisability_final-final.pdf.

49 Crenshaw and Ritchie, Say Her Name, 16.

50 Sean Gardener, “Family Sues Police in Death of Daughter,” The Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2012, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303816504577320233003422506.

51 Nick Pinto, “Family Sues to Learn Why Shereese Francis was Suffocated in Her Home by Police,” The Village Voice, June 26, 2012, https://www.villagevoice.com/2012/06/26/family-sues-to-learn-why-shereese-francis-was-suffocated-in-her-home-by-police/.

52 Pinto, “Family Sues.”

53 Editorial Board, “Did Michelle Cusseaux Have to Die?” The Republic (AZCentral), August 18, 2014, https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/editorial/2014/08/18/michelle-cusseaux-mental-illness/14266383/.

54 D.S. Woodfill, “Phoenix Police Shoot, Kill Woman During Mental-Health Call,” AZCentral.com, August 14, 2014, https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2014/08/14/phoenix-officer-involved-shooting-mental-health-abrk/14085607/.

55 Woodfill, “Phoenix Police.”

56 Megan Cassidy, “Phoenix Police: 2014 Fatal Shooting of Michelle Cusseaux Was ‘Outside’ Policy,” The Republic (AZCentral.com), September 17, 2015, https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/breaking/2015/09/17/phoenix-police-michelle-cusseaux-shooting-outside-policy/72370792/.

57 Crenshaw and Ritchie, Say Her Name, 7.

58 Transcript, “Police Killing of Michelle Cusseaux Raises Questions of Wrongful Death & Handling of Mentally Ill,” Democracy Now!, May 20, 2015, https://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/20/police_killing_of_michelle_cusseaux_raises.

59 John Counts, “House Where Ann Arbor Police Shot and Killed Woman Had Troubled Past,” Ann Arbor News, November 14, 2014, https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2014/11/house_where_ann_arbor_police_s.html.

60 Parul Sehgal, “Fighting ‘Erasure,’” First Words, New York Times, February 2, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/magazine/the-painful-consequences-of-erasure.html.

61 Sehgal, “Fighting.”

62 This article notes that social media has the positive impact of “broadening the range of sources beyond traditional information gatekeepers.” Matthew Ingram, “Do Journalists Pay Too Much Attention to Twitter?” Columbia Journalism Review, October 10, 2018, https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/journalists-on-twitter-study.php.

63 Demo, “The Afterimage,”43.

64 Demo, “The Afterimage,” 35.

65 Demo, “The Afterimage,” 31, 35.

66 Ryan Stanton, “One Year After Aura Rosser Shooting, Ann Arbor Leaders Discuss Steps Forward,” Ann Arbor News, March 20, 2018, https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2015/11/one_year_after_aura_rosser_sho.html.

67 See Twitter search results for Tanisha Anderson here: https://twitter.com/search?l=&q=Tanisha%20Anderson%20Cleveland%20OR%20police%20OR%20death%20%23SayHerName%20since%3A2015-07-01%20until%3A2020-01-07&src=typd&lang=en; and for Aura Rosser here: https://twitter.com/search?l=&q=Aura%20Rosser%20killed%20OR%20police%20%23SayHerName%20since%3A2015-05-01%20until%3A2020-01-07&src=typd&lang=en; and for Michelle Cusseaux here: https://twitter.com/hashtag/michellecusseaux.

68 Michelle Dean, “‘Black Women Unarmed’: How Tanisha Anderson’s Bad Day Turned into Her Last,” The Guardian, June 5, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/05/black-women-police-killing-tanisha-anderson.

69 Dean, “Black Women.”

70 Demo, “The Afterimage,” 40.

71 A newspeg is how journalists frame an angle on a story that makes it “newsworthy.”

72 Philip De Oliveira, “Tanisha Anderson’s Mother Reflects on Police, Mental Illness, and Her Daughter’s Death,” WKSU News, February 12, 2018, https://www.wksu.org/post/tanisha-andersons-mother-reflects-police-mental-illness-and-her-daughters-death#stream/0.

73 Marti Hause and Ari Melber, “Half of People Killed by Police Have a Disability: Report,” NBC News, March 14, 2016, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/half-people-killed-police-suffer-mental-disability-report-n538371.

74 Phillip Atiba Goff and Kim Shayo Buchanan, “Charleena Lyles Needed Health Care. Instead, She Was Killed,” Op Ed, New York Times, June 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/opinion/charleena-lyles-seattle-police-shooting.html.

75 Katie Mettler and Mark Berman, “Seattle Police Fatally Shoot Pregnant Woman Who They Say Confronted Officers with a Knife,” Washington Post, June 19, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/19/seattle-police-fatally-shoot-black-mother-of-four-who-confronted-officers-with-a-knife/?utm_term=.0a008dde9009.

76 Dani McClain, “#SayHerName Shows Black Women Face Police Violence, Too—and Pregnancy and Motherhood Are NO Refuge,” The Nation, May 21, 2015, https://www.thenation.com/article/sayhername-shows-black-women-face-police-violence-too-and-pregnancy-and-motherhood-are-n/.

77 Demo, “The Afterimage,” 45.

78 Stanton, “One Year After Aura Rosser Shooting;” Katherina Sourine, “Community Looks Back on Policing Reform Efforts in AAPD,” Michigan Daily, 6 November, 2019, https://www.michigandaily.com/section/ann-arbor/community-looks-back-policing-reform-efforts-aapd.

79 Hause and Melber, “Half of People Killed.”

80 Brenna Cammeron, “Sandra Bland’s Death Sparks Online Demand for Answers,” BBC News, July 16, 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-33560980; Kimberlee Morrison, “Social Media Activism: Sandra Bland, Police Brutality and #BlackLivesMatter,” Adweek, July 30, 2015, https://www.adweek.com/digital/social-media-activism-sandra-bland-police-brutality-and-blacklivesmatter/.

81 Maurice Chammah, “Sandra Bland, One Year Later,” The Marshall Report, September 15, 2016, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/07/12/sandra-bland-one-year-later.

82 Taibbi, Matt, “Sandra Bland Was Murdered,” Rolling Stone, July 24, 2015, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/sandra-bland-was-murdered-49124/.

83 See, for example: Ray Sanchez, “Who Was Sandra Bland?” CNN, July 23, 2015, https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/22/us/sandra-bland/index.html; Amy Ohlheiser and Sarah Larimer, “What We Know About Sandra Bland, Who Died this Week in a Texas Jail,” Washington Post, July 17, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/17/what-we-know-about-sandra-bland-who-died-this-week-in-a-texas-jail/?utm_term=.a52f6cf2a6c8; Katie Rogers, “The Death of Sandra Bland: Questions and Answers,” New York Times, July 23, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/23/us/23blandlisty.html; and Josh Sanburn, “Everything We Know about the Sandra Bland Case,” Time, July 23, 2015, https://time.com/3966220/sandra-bland-suicide-police/.

84 Rogers, “The Death of Sandra Bland.”

85 Hope Racine, “26 Meaningful ‘Say Her Name’ Sandra Bland Tweets Show that America Truly Wants Justice for Sandy,” Bustle, July 22, 2015, https://www.bustle.com/articles/99225-26-meaningful-sayhername-sandra-bland-tweets-show-that-america-truly-wants-justice-for-sandy.

86 Sanchez, “Who Was Sandra Bland?”

87 See Tanya Steele, “Sandra Bland in Her Own Words,” Rewire.News, August 5, 2015, https://rewire.news/article/2015/08/05/sandra-bland-words/.

88 David A. Graham, “Sandra Bland and the Long History of Racism in Waller, Texas,” The Atlantic, July 21, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/sandra-bland-waller-county-racism/398975/.

89 Debbie Nathan, “What Happened to Sandra Bland?” The Nation, August 21, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/what-happened-to-sandra-bland/.

90 Nathan, “What Happened.”

91 Chuck Lindell, “Sweeping Arrest, Jail Reforms Proposed with Sandra Bland Act,” The Statesman, September 25, 2018, https://www.statesman.com/news/20170302/sweeping-arrest-jail-reforms-proposed-with-sandra-bland-act.

92 Bradshaw, “Slow Circulation,” 484–5.

93 Jackson, “(Re)Imagining Intersectional Democracy,” 378.