#BlackLivesMatter and a Movement in the Media: A Closer Look at BLC 8.2

June 12, 2017

#BlackLivesMatter and a Movement in the Media: A Closer Look at BLC 8.2

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

Charles P. Linscott’s article, “#BlackLivesMatter and the Mediatic Lives of a Movement” from Black Camera’s newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, Charles elaborates on the relevance of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and how its importance affects everything from juror prospection to pop culture.

As I write this blog post, attorneys in a Hamilton County, Ohio, courtroom are fighting a Herculean battle to seat a jury in the retrial of Ray Tensing, a police officer charged with murdering an unarmed black motorist named Sam Dubose in Cincinnati during a traffic stop in July 2015. One of the more pointed questions the opposing sides of this legal battle will ask of prospective jurors concerns the potential jurors' opinions of the #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) movement. This line of questioning portends a number of pressing issues that persons outside the courtroom should consider as well. For instance, how are “opinions” of #BlackLivesMatter formed? Do said opinions reflect larger conceptions of race in America? How are such views colored by various mediatic representations? How do such attitudes circulate within and, at the same time, constitute contemporary discourses? And, perhaps most poignantly, of what relevance are the jurors' opinions on #BlackLivesMatter to the impending performance of their "civic duty" in this retrial? (Of note is the fact that Tensing’s first murder trial ended in a hung jury and apparently did not include this prevalent focus on #BLM.)

In our Close-Up on “#BlackLivesMatter and Media” in the latest issue of Black Camera (8.2, Spring 2017), Michele Prettyman Beverly, Alessandra Raengo, and I explore some of the essential questions above while also pursuing related avenues of thought. Our work traffics primarily in film, television, new/social media, and critical theory, but I hope that this journal issue will elicit further conversation on an extremely fertile and largely unexplored topic: the complex contemporary interactions between #BLM and innumerable forms of media. (For example, popular musicians such as Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, and D'Angelo have recently produced provocative work that explicitly nods along to the rhythms of #BlackLivesMatter. Media like this deserves close analysis.) Being in part dependent upon contemporary media, #BlackLivesMatter moves in ways both analog and digital; it exists in public space, private space, and cyberspace; it lives on the street and on the screen. Put differently, #BLM inhabits rich mediatic lives. How those mediatic lives unfold—and how black lives continue to matter and not matter—must remain the subject of intense scrutiny both within media studies and in human activity more broadly conceived.

Chip Linscott has a PhD in Interdisciplinary Arts and teaches at Ohio University. His work focuses on blackness and media, and he has published a number pieces on film, social media, and music/sound.

More from Black Camera 8.2