ABSTRACT The Black Lives Matter movement was created from a hashtag used on Twitter in 2013 in the United States when George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering unarmed Black teenager… Click to show full abstract
ABSTRACT The Black Lives Matter movement was created from a hashtag used on Twitter in 2013 in the United States when George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida, United States. Advocacy and non-violent protests by Black Lives Matter groups have been framed in news media reporting as riots and the group has been called ‘racist’ and ‘anti-law enforcement’. This paper will unpack three rhetorical strategies that the news media uses to discuss BLM. I argue that the effect of these rhetorical strategies is the delegitimization of the very real problems concerning racial profiling and racial killings that the Black Lives Matter group protests. I will examine Black Lives Matter’s own goals and how these are ignored or questioned by the news media in that the group is framed in a delegitimizing manner. This paper uses Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s concept of racial grammar in conjunction with a Foucauldian emphasis on governmentality to examine these instances of racist rhetoric in re-presentations of Black Lives Matter movement in US news media.
               
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