http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9459-3622
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ABSTRACT
The Black Lives Matter movement gained national prominence after highly publicized protests turned the spotlight on police violence in the US. We explore how this complex, multi-vocal movement is framed in the media using an original dataset of over 500 editorial cartoons by award-winning syndicated cartoonists. We find that every cartoonist in our sample increased their frequency of cartooning about racism in the BLM period with the greatest increases from those who had previously drawn the least about racism. Cartoons of this period also focused on police brutality to a hitherto unprecedented extent. When they did so, they emphasized the systemic nature of police brutality. Cartoons about movements having an impact on racism significantly increased. Movements were usually portrayed in a sympathetic light. Despite these gains for the advocacy of BLM activists, the engagement with the movement was superficial, indicated most clearly in the exclusion of women from cartoonists’ framing of the movement. Nevertheless, the cartoons drawn in the wake of BLM demonstrate a clear break, in imagery and meaning, from the presence of post-racial tropes typical of editorial cartoons in the preceding period.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Dwaine Jengelley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9459-3622
Notes
1 Analysis of news stories about BLM and social media content employ this approach of sampling from moments of heightened significance for the movement (Elmasry and el-Nawawy Citation2017; Freelon, Mcilwain, and Clark Citation2016).
2 The polysemic nature of this cartoon also shows the potential of cartoons as an object of study and the challenge of developing a method that captures the positions taken in the debates about BLM while protecting the complexity and depth of the cartoons.
3 By imagining the victim (or police officer) cartoons allow us to evaluate the degree to which the figure of the victim is assumed to be male.