VYTAUTAS MAGNUS UNIVERSITY THE FACULTY OF HUMANITIES DEPARTMENT OF LITHUANIAN STUDIES Brenna Adams “I CAN’T BREATHE”: A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE 2020 BLACK LIVES MATTER PROTESTS IN AMERICAN MEDIA Master of Arts Thesis Joint study programme “Sociolinguistics and Multilingualism”, state code in Lithuania 6281NX001 Study area of Linguistics Supervisor Prof. Dr. Jūratė Ruzaitė ________ _________ (signature) (date) Approved by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Rūta Eidukevičienė ________ _________ (signature) (date) Kaunas, 2021 Table of Contents 1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………….1 1.1. Aim and Scope………………………………………………………………….3 1.2. Materials and Methods………………………………………………………….6 1.2.1. Corpus Compilation……………………………………………………..7 1.2.2. Data Processing: A Combined Approach to Corpus-Assisted CDA……8 2. Literature Review………………………………………….……………………….13 2.1. Anti-Black Racism in the United States………………………………………..14 2.2. The Black Lives Matter Movement……………………………………………16 2.3. Raciolinguistics and the Language of Protest…………………………………17 3. A Discussion of Racist Discursive Practices in Mainstream Media……………….20 3.1. Discursive Practices Concerning the Protesters and Protests………………….21 3.1.1. Discursive Practices Concerning the Protesters………………………..21 3.1.2. Discursive Practices Concerning the Protests………………………….26 3.2. Discursive Practices Concerning the Police…………………………………...29 3.2.1. Metonymy of Police Vehicles………………………………………….30 3.2.2. Passive Voice Construction…………………………………………….31 3.2.3. Police Brutality as a Collocation……………………………………….34 3.3. Discursive Practices Concerning George Floyd……………………………….39 3.3.1. Topical Focus on Floyd………………………………………………...39 3.3.2. Narrative Construction of Floyd’s Murder as the Spark……………….43 3.3.3. Deployment of Public Memory through Other Black Victims………...45 4. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………48 5. References………………………………………………………………………….51 6. Appendix A. Additional Examples of Excerpts from the Corpus……………………i i List of Tables Table 1. List of sources in corpus and sub-corpora by political bias……………………7 Table 2. Terms used to label protesters ……………………………………...………...22 Table 3. Usage of the phrase “black lives matter”………………………………………27 Table 4. Raw frequencies and percentages of “Black Lives Matter” in context……….28 Table 5. Usage of the phrase “police brutality”………………………………………...35 Table 6. Raw frequencies and percentages of “police brutality” in context……………35 ii List of Abbreviations AP: Associated Press BLM: Black Lives Matter CNN: Cable News Network CDA: Critical discourse analysis DHA: Discourse Historical Approach FN: Fox News G: The Guardian HP: HuffPost NPR: National Public Radio NYP: New York Post NYT: The New York Times POC: People/person of color R: Reuters WSJ: The Wall Street Journal WT: The Washington Times iii 1. Introduction May 25, 2020 began as an average Monday (as average any day could be during the COVID-19 pandemic), but it will be remembered by many as the day that George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by police. A video taken by bystanders quickly went viral, and the world watched George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, struggle to breathe under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer for several minutes until he became unresponsive and died. This video reveals Floyd’s now-famous last words as he begs the officer to get off his neck: “I can’t breathe.” Floyd was officially pronounced dead later that evening at the Hennepin County Medical Center, but paramedics specified that he was unresponsive since they arrived on scene raising questions about the time of his death (Sawyer, 2020). His dying words rang out in the ears of many Americans as a plea for an end to systemic anti-Black racism that plagues police forces across the United States. George Floyd was neither the first nor the last Black American to be murdered by a police officer in 2020. Prior to Floyd’s killing, Breonna Taylor was shot dead by police in her home in March in the middle of the night, as the officers were serving a “no-knock warrant” that allowed them to go without identifying themselves before forcing entry to her home (Browne et al., 2020). Ahmaud Arbery was also shot and killed while out on a jog in February, though this time by a retired police officer and his son, who claimed that Arbery appeared suspicious (Fausset, 2021). Mapping Police Violence, a research collaborative that compiles information about police violence and killings in the US, found that at least 233 Black people were killed by police in 2020 (Sinyangwe et al., 2021). Their data consistently illustrates that Black people (especially Black men) are disproportionately killed by police: in 2020, Black victims made up 28% of police killings despite comprising only 13% of the overall population (Sinyangwe et al., 2021). 2020 was not unusual in terms of the number of Black people killed by police, as the numbers have remained consistent for at least a decade (Sinyangwe et al., 2021). What was remarkable was the response to the murder of George Floyd: massive protests against police brutality, headed by the Black Lives Matter (BLM, see List of Abbreviations) movement, raged across the US for months. The topic of police brutality and its disproportionate effect on People of Color (POC) remains relevant as racial tensions continue to mount in the US. Assessing media portrayal of the protests spurred by George Floyd’s murder can reveal the influence that 1 event-framing has over public opinion as it relates to the political bias of a news source (Hart, 2018; Hoewe and Peacock, 2020; Lane et al., 2020; Leopold and Bell, 2017). Understanding the media’s engagement in or combatting of (anti-Black) racism can illuminate some of the reasons why protests like these, and thus the issues being contested repeatedly by protesters, prevail and to what extent they are validated by the media. Because the media can be considered a “fourth power” (in addition to the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government), its influence on perception of events is essential in understanding the power dynamics between those in power and marginalized groups. The media both shapes and is shaped by our collective ideologies, so evaluating the ideologies constructed and reproduced in the media helps illuminate the ways in which this affects public opinion, while also revealing the ideologies held by those in power (Hoewe and Peacock, 2020; van Dijk, 2006b). Such knowledge grants the ability to question why ideologies that are oppressive to minority groups, continue to be upheld. The two problems addressed in this thesis are: (1) media plays a large role in influencing public understanding of events they portray, and (2) media portrayal of pro- Black movements often engages in anti-Black racism, or fails to engage in anti-racist strategies. These problems perpetuate systemic racism in the US because the media fails to question racist ideologies, instead presenting them as fact and disguising exclusionary tactics employed to maintain racial marginalization (van Dijk, 2006b). Undermining the protest calls for racial equity perpetuates these systems of oppression (Alim and Smitherman, 2020; Flores and Rosa, 2015). The research gap I propose to fill is that the protests of the summer of 2020 are too new to have been fully researched yet. Further, the emerging subfield of raciolinguistics (the intersections of race and language) provides interesting opportunities for re-conceptualizing how racist strategies are used in the media. This gap provides the opportunity to examine entrenched methods of oppression and understand the power dynamics of mainstream media and marginalized peoples. With these foundations in mind, the following research questions are investigated in this thesis: 1. Are conservative news sources (Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, The Washington Times) more likely to use anti-Black and/or pro-White racist discursive practices that undermine the validity of the protests or the BLM movement than neutral (NPR, Reuters, Associated Press) or liberal (The New York Times, CNN, 2 The Guardian, HuffPost) news sources? If so, what ideologies are reproduced in conservative media that are not in neutral or liberal media? 2. How does the ascription of agency in violent actions reveal underlying assumptions and presuppositions made about the group portrayed as the agent of the action vs. the object of the action? 3. Which qualities are associated with the BLM movement and Black community in the US, and how are such qualities evaluated by mainstream media against the backdrop of Whiteness a priori? These questions focus on unearthing some of the ways in which anti-Black racism is upheld in mainstream media. They consider the context of the BLM protests in combination with generalized racism in media representations of pro-Black movements. The following sections introduce the aim and scope of this thesis, followed by the materials compiled and analytical methods employed. Section 2 provides a literature review that introduces the theoretical concepts employed in analysis as well. This section is divided into three discussions: (1) a brief discussion of anti-Black racism in the US, (2) an outlining of the BLM movement’s structure and goals, and (3) the raciolinguistic outlook and how it relates to the language of protest. The third section provides in-depth analysis of the discursive practices of the media and is broken down into three sub- categories: (1) the protesters and protests, (2) the police, and (3) George Floyd. Each sub- category focuses on one primary group involved in the protest and the trends exhibited in conjunction with each group are identified and discussed at length. Finally, this thesis concludes in section 4, followed by a listing of references and an appendix containing additional examples from other sources not listed with the main findings. 1.1. Aim and Scope The aim of this thesis is to uncover elements of anti-Black racism in the discursive practices of the media, particularly as correlated to political biases in reporting on the first wave of BLM protests (roughly defined as those protests which occurred May 26 – June 7, 2020) that took place across the United States in response to George Floyd’s murder.