On the Erasure of race in control culture discourse: a case study of Trayvon Martin’s role in the Black Lives Matter movement

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Black Lives Matter
• journalism
• racism
• play
• framing
• Trayvon Martin

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/us/ferguson-missouri-protests.html; https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/12/01/ferguson-struggles-to-understand-move-to-violence/70120308/#. http://www.nbcnews.com/video/black-lives-matter-protest-in-las-vegas-over-tashii-farmer-s-death-955456067512

2 http://www.cbsnews.com/news/national-guard-assembles-in-ferguson-as-crowd-becomes-agitated/

3 https://apnews.com/dae6c38b396f400b93d0ccf0c4289b10/leaders-black-lives-matter-condemn-violence-dallas; http://blacklivesmatter.com/the-black-lives-matter-network-advocates-for-dignity-justice-and-respect/

4 Author Toni Morrison (2007) describes, for instance, how ‘images of blackness can be evil and protective, rebellious and forgiving, fearful and desirable–all the self-contradictory features of the self’ which ultimately ‘others’ those to whom the attribute is ascribed by marking them as, for better or worse, wholly outside of the norm.

5 http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/12/30/black-lives-matter-offshoot-embraces-anti-semitism-engages-with-terrorists.html