The Era of Black Lives Matter

Queen Sugar premiered in 2016, toward the end of Barack Obama’s second term, and right in the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign. While colorblind ideology continues to permeate discourses of race and racial politics, the introduction of the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2013 formed by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi dismantle and undermine colorblind ideology. Unlike colorblind ideology which insists that “racism is no longer embedded in the U.S. social structure,” (Doane, 2014, p. 15) the Black Lives Matter Movement directly calls attention to the systemic nature of racism which continues to have detrimental effects on the lives of Black Americans. Existing as both a movement and a chapter-based activist organization, Black Lives Matter has largely focused on protesting state sanctioned violence inflicted on Black communities.

The Age of Information

The movement itself did not arise in a vacuum, rather a combination of contextual factors culminated in the gradual formation and extension of a movement to capture the sentiments of an oppressed community that felt silenced. Social media and smartphone technology have offered technological affordances that have come to be defining aspects of the Black Lives Matter Movement. News, images and videos capturing incidents of police brutality against Black Americans circulate social media sites allowing users to stay informed and actively participate in conversations of systemic injustice. This has allowed the movement to garner more attention and support across a large digital landscape which has translated into an equally extensive offline presence.

While colorblind ideology aims to individualize instances of racism in order to dismiss notions of widespread racism, the countless stories and incidents circulated in social media and subsequently in news media are painting a very different picture. The progression of the Black Lives Matter movement along with the growing mainstream attention to racial injustices has made it increasingly difficult to justify the suggestion that “American society is fundamentally meritocratic” (Doane, 2014, p. 17). Instead, BLM highlights racial inequalities which have nothing to do with hard work or respectability and everything to do with the historically rooted racist values and structures of governing systems.

Discourses of Race and Gender in the Era of BLM

Though deriving many of its strategies from characteristics of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Lives Matter Movement has been distinct and intentional about ensuring the inclusivity of all Black lives. The Civil Rights movement overwhelmingly centered the voices of straight Black men, only occasionally making room for Black women who embraced respectability politics. While this allowed for the recognition and celebration of activists like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., this did little to empower the voices and affirm the experiences of those who didn’t fit so neatly into the heteronormative structure of the conversation.

“As a network, we have always recognized the need to center the leadership of women and queer and trans people. To maximize our movement muscle, and to be intentional about not replicating harmful practices that excluded so many in past movements for liberation, we made a commitment to placing those at the margins closer to the center” (Black Lives Matter Website, 2013).

The explicit mission of the Black Lives Matter Movement has played a fundamental role in encouraging the acknowledgment of intersectionality within discourses of race and gender. Though intersectionality was first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 in effort to explore the experiences of marginalized groups who are “multiply burdened” by intersecting identities of race and gender (p. 140), discourses of colorblind ideology have worked to dismiss racial inequality and don’t even begin to touch intersectional oppression. With the rise of Black Lives Matter, more mainstream attention has been brought to the importance of an intersectional approach to social justice. While intersectionality has always been of relevance, social media and digital connectedness have created spaces in which users can access, grapple with and understand the ways in which intersectional oppression manifests itself today. This is demonstrated by the formation of #SayHerName which developed in response to the lack of representation of Black women within discussions of police brutality. The increased attention to the importance of intersectionality has kindled a noticeable shift in the ways in which people are conceptualizing the interaction between race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, etc. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that intersectionality has been fully adopted into discourses of race, gender, and sexuality, there is a heightened awareness that has the potential to be further explored and used to tackle oppression.

Implications for Media and Entertainment

Though efforts have been made to reflect this renewed awareness of systemic racism and intersectional oppression on screen, the media and entertainment industry continues to be dominated by white men. While there are exceptions — show runners such as Shonda Rhimes, Ava DuVernay, Issa Rae and Mara Brock Akil have been celebrated for their contributions to the industry — many barriers remain for the representation of women of color and even more so queer women of color both on and off screen. In a study about diversity within Hollywood, Isabel Molina-Guzmán explores the lack of diversity in film and TV production despite the increase in onscreen representational diversity.

“Contemporary Hollywood is caught between the force of historically established white patriarchal structures of cultural production, and the rising currents of changing demo- graphics, economics, and technology” (Isabel Molina-Guzmán, 2016, p. 443).

In her analysis, Molina-Guzmán (2016) finds that while Hollywood is often praised for its “on screen representational progress” this does little to address the absence of “longterm structural change”(p. 445). Thus, the image of diverse representation becomes more centralized than the need for “structural transformation” (Molina-Guzmán, 2016 p. 444). The lack of structural change came into the forefront in 2016 when #OscarsSoWhite hashtag was created by activist April Reign in response to the extreme lack of diversity within the 2016 Oscar nominations. For the second year in a row, all 20 nominees for categories of leading and supporting actor or actress were White.

Visibility of Black Women

In terms of the visibility of Black women on and off screen, current representations often complicate historically rooted controlling images and stereotypes. Though these controlling images are most recognizable in representations of Black womanhood within reality television, fictional television depicts characters that don’t fit as neatly within the historically rooted negative stereotypes. It isn’t uncommon for representations of Black womanhood to subvert controlling images and notions of respectability in effort to depict a much more complex and multi dimensional character. While progress has been made toward increased representation, as argued by Molina-Guzmán, the lack of structural change continues to hinder the visibility of Black women both in front of and behind the cameras.