Cultural Contention in the 2020 Black Lives Matter Summer

• In Event: 41014 - Cop Cities and Abolition: Law and Order Backlash Politics and Urban Resistance

Abstract

The 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movements, catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd, reshaped American public culture by extensively embedding anti-racist symbols, narratives, and practices into mainstream discourse. Yet, despite its cultural resonance and significance, the movement’s transformative potential was constrained by backlash and the limitations of its meaning as part of a cultural “toolkit” (Swidler 1986). Drawing on cultural sociology and social movement studies, this article argues that while BLM’s symbolic resources successfully established a new public lexicon, and held the killer of George Floyd accountable, they failed to achieve the movement’s long-term goals due to two key factors: (1) the rise of a counter-cultural “law and order” narrative within an increasingly polarized public sphere, (2) the strong constraints on its cultural meaning, particularly the high discursive barriers to legitimizing its claims beyond police brutality, which not only relied on a narrowly defined notion of the “perfect victim”, but constrained its symbolic spillover to wider issues. We test our arguments using millions of real-time Twitter posts to study #BLM as an element in a cultural toolkit. This study highlights the paradox of cultural success in polarized and complex societies, where increased visibility amplifies the scale of impact but also constrains consensus in ongoing contention.

Authors

• Andrew J. Perrin, Johns Hopkins University

• Yuanhao (Colin) Liu, Johns Hopkins University