Steps 1-2: Claimsmaking and Media Coverage
Claimsmaking: In this step, people and groups identify an issue, and they try to convince others to take it seriously. The problem in this step is called a claim “an argument that a particular troubling condition needs to be addressed” (Best 2020:15). In this stage, people who may not agree that a problem exists agree on what to do about it or who should take action.
Media Coverage: In the second step, claimsmakers use media to build a base of people and groups who agree with them on the causes, impacts, and desired outcomes of the particular issue at hand.
On Monday May 25, 2020, Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd. One of four Minneapolis police officers who arrested Floyd for allegedly trying to pass a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, Chauvin forced Floyd to the ground and knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes. Floyd struggled to breathe, cried out in fear and pain to his mother and to his God, and foretold his own death, but Chauvin did not let up until Floyd lost consciousness. Floyd was pronounced dead at the hospital later that afternoon. Like Ahmaud Arbery, killed by white vigilantes in February 2020, and Breonna Taylor, killed by police in March 2020, Floyd is one on a very long list of Black people killed recently by police and vigilantes in the U.S.
George Floyd is one of a long list of Black people killed by police and vigilantes in the US. Did you see video footage of Mr. Floyd’s Murder? How did it impact you? (Please take caution if you have not yet seen the video and want to watch it; it is deeply disturbing.)
“George Floyd Memorial” by Fibonacci Blue is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Horrified bystanders captured a video of Floyd’s murder and shared it on social media. In the first week after Floyd’s murder, 3.4 million original posts and 69 billion engagements accounted for around 15% of all posts on Twitter (now X) during that week. By June 8th, #BlackLivesMatter was mentioned in 1.2 million original posts (Wirtschafter 2021).
However, this hashtag didn’t start in 2020. #BlackLivesMatter is a hashtag that first went viral in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer (discussed below). In the decade following its introduction, #BlackLivesMatter became a popular organizing tool on social media. This hashtag draws attention to racist violence in the US It is a code for a set of claims about racism, policing, lynching, and underserved communities. Underserved communities are groups with limited access to resources or are otherwise disenfranchised (FEMA 2023).
Below we examine how the claim of the BLM movement reflects prior claims of racist policing and violence, and underserved or under-resourced communities.
Lynchings, as discussed in a prior chapter, are extrajudicial killings in which an individual or a mob kidnaps, tortures, and kills persons suspected of crime or social transgressions. Extrajudicial killings are murders by a person with authority, without any legal process (OMCT World Organization Against Torture 2023). In the US, the victims are most often Black individuals. The perpetrators are almost never punished. More than 4,400 lynchings have been documented in the US between 1877 and 1950 (Taylor and Vinson 2020). Racially-motivated lynchings are a means of social control that reinforces the dominance of white people and oppression of Black people within a racial hierarchy.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, the journalist Ida. B. Wells wrote about lynchings as part of her work to document discrimination against Black people (see the figure below). She found that the prevalent claim that Black men were lynched because they raped white women, was a lie, a myth. Instead, she argued that lynching was a method of social control to suppress Black freedom and the right to vote by violence and murder.
Sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois led the N.A.A.C.P. in an anti-lynching campaign that reduced lynchings. This campaign inspired the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-20th century. Despite the progressive gains that these movements achieved, the murder of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager on his way home, and the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who killed him, was a painful reminder that the extrajudicial killing of Black people has never stopped.
Explicit racial (and gender) bias has been demonstrated in some police departments. In a 2022 investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department, researchers found "patterns of discrimination in arrests and use of force," and that:
"based on interviews and a review of 700 hours of body camera footage, identified an exhaustive list of slurs that officers and supervisors consistently use against women and Black people, including suspects, witnesses, bystanders and their own colleagues" (Dewan 2022).
Portland police also have a well-documented record of individual police officers expressing racist ideas about Black people. A 2012 report documents a long and troubled history of racist policing, including an incident of harassment in which several Portland officers left dead animals at a popular restaurant owned by a Black person. You have the option to read the full 2012 report, Black and Blue: Police-Community Relations in Portland’s Albina District, 1964-1985.
Violence arises from prejudice. As you might remember, prejudice is an unfavorable preconceived feeling or opinion formed without knowledge or reason that prevents objective consideration of an individual or group. Many advocates for police and policing resist claims of racism by asserting that such attitudes are the result of individual prejudice held by a few “bad apples” rather than a culture of racism. Robin DiAngelo (pictured below), an educator who studies racism, has written extensively about the lengths people will go to to avoid being labeled 'racist,' even when expressing racist ideas (DiAngelo 2018). Most people, including police officers, resist being thought of as racist, but individual racial bias is only one dimension of racism.
Robin DiAngelo is a white working-class educator and author. She has written extensively about the lengths people will go to to avoid being labeled racist, even when expressing racist ideas.
“Robin DiAngelo, PhD, 2021” by Jason P Toews is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Claims of racism and racist policing also rest on racial disparities and historical patterns of policing. As discussed, racial disparity is the unequal outcomes of one racial or ethnic group compared with outcomes for another racial/ethnic group (Children’s Bureau 2021:2). Racial disparities are sometimes called racial inequities. For example, BLM organizers and their allies point to higher percentages of Black people being stopped, arrested, imprisoned, and killed by police than white people. In Portland, Black people make up only 5.3% of the city population, yet they accounted for 22.6% of traffic stops and 16% of pedestrian stops in 2019. They are also arrested at a rate 4.3 times higher than white people. Furthermore, Black people are killed by Portland police 3.9 times more than white people (Levinson 2021).
This pattern of racial inequity repeats in cities across the US. A 2020 study found “that while Black people were much more likely to be pulled over than Whites, the disparity lessens at night, when police are less able to distinguish the race of the driver.” This is evidence of racial discrimination. The study also found that Black people were more likely to be searched after a stop, though white people were more likely to be found with illicit drugs (Pierson et al. 2020). In the US, Black men are about 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men, and Black women are about 1.4 times more likely to be killed by police than white women (Edwards, Lee, & Esposito 2019).
Claims of racist policing also rest on scholarship about the history of policing in America. For example, Irish police officers in 1830’s Boston were specifically hired to police communities of formerly enslaved Black people (NPR 2020). Slave patrols and Jim Crow-era policing of Black communities are well documented (NAACP N.d). Please watch the brief video below to learn more about this history.
This historic construction of racist policing recalls Racial Formation Theory by Omi and Winant (1986), which we introduced in the Sociology chapter. The theory describes how racial classifications are created, changed, and recreated through racial projects, like policing, which attach meaning and power to racial categories. Policing becomes a racist practice when Black people get profiled as more likely to be considered a threat to public safety than white people.
Critical Race Theory, also previously introduced, helps us understand how legal statutes like The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 (H.R.5484) actually create and sustain racial inequity. These laws include the Crime Bill (H.R.3355), which significantly expanded prisons and funded 100,000 new police officers. They also include the 1998 Amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA), which limits access to financial aid for students who have been convicted of a drug felony (Whitman & Exarhos 2020).
Thus, the institution of the state contributes to racial inequities is the US, and within in it the criminal justice system, which relies on legal codes, criminalization, policing, and punishment to mediate conflict, protect property, and maintain social order. Critical race scholarship further places this legislation within the historical context of legal statutes that regulated Black lives. A timeline of these laws and policies is shown in the figure below. These laws began with the Slave Codes, then after the Civil War, they became Black Codes. They restricted Black people’s right to own property, conduct business, and move freely through public spaces. They fed a convict leasing system that replaced slavery as a source of cheap labor for enslavers. Black Codes then became Jim Crow Laws in many states, legally segregating Black people and white people. In each case, the laws reinforced the racist and false ideas that Black people are dangerous and needed controlling.
State-sanctioned violence was needed to maintain slavery and subsequent racial inequality, using Slave Codes, Black Codes, and Jim Crow laws. Although these three sets of laws are now illegal, where do you see racial inequality supported in other laws, policies, or practices?
“Infographic: State Regulated Violence Was Needed to Maintain Slavery” by Kimberly Puttman and Michelle Culley, Open Oregon Educational Resources, is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Claim: Under-resourced Communities
This claim centers the social devastation of historic racism in communities of color, and people whose communities have been historically under-resourced, over-policed, disproportionately impacted by social problems, and underrepresented in terms of institutional power because of their assigned race category.
The history of exclusion, segregation, and discriminatory lending practices described in the Neighborhoods and Housing chapter created the social and economic conditions in the under-resourced communities we are looking at in this chapter. Under-resourced communities are areas with relatively high poverty rates that lack robust economic infrastructure. While the term often refers to cities and suburbs with populations of over 250,000 people, many rural communities are also under-resourced (adapted from Eberhardt, Wial, and Yee 2020:5). In the South, Midwest, and Northeast, these neighborhoods are disproportionately Black. In the West, these neighborhoods are disproportionately Latinx.
The legacy of economic exclusion and discrimination is well demonstrated in a 2014 report from Portland State University. The report found that Black family income is less than half that of white family income. The poverty rate among Black children is nearly 50% compared to 13% for white children. Local unemployment levels in 2009 for Black people were nearly double the unemployment rate for white people.
Researchers also found that “fewer than one-third of Black households own their homes, compared to about 60% of white households, and that Black people have experienced housing displacement and the loss of community as the historic Albina District has gentrified” (Coalition of Communities of Color 2014:3). The same study also documented substantial disparities for health outcomes like diabetes, stroke, and low birth weight, and in access to health insurance, prenatal care, and mental health care. If you would like to read the full report, consider how The African American Community in Multnomah County: An Unsettling Profile clearly documents racial inequity.
Demands for police reform and prison abolition argue that policing and the prison system are inadequate responses to the social problems that impact historically disadvantaged communities. The call for “defunding the police” is a call for redirecting resources to programs that directly support the well-being of communities disproportionately impacted by poverty, so that police may focus on their actual job, public safety.
Social geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore (pictured below) applies a Marxist analysis to the economic conditions that accompanied the massive expansion of prisons in California. She demonstrates that the US prison system grew to contain and control surplus labor as low-wage workers in historically disadvantaged communities lost access to jobs during the 1980s and 1990s. She also argues that mass incarceration prevents displaced workers from building robust labor movements that might challenge these exclusionary economic conditions (Wilson Gilmore 2007).
Social geographer and Black activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore traces the physical locations of prisons to better understand how economic systems create privilege and oppression. Along with Angela Davis, she champions prison abolition. What do you think a world without prisons would be like?
“Ruth Wilson Gilmore” by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
In 1996, Gilmore partnered with Angela Davis to organize Critical Resistance, a social movement organization that challenges the idea that imprisonment and policing are acceptable solutions for social, political, and economic social problems. The contemporary prison abolition movement, with which many BLM organizers are aligned, can trace its roots to these organizing efforts. Visit Critical Resistance if you'd like to learn more.
As our discussion of these claims makes clear, the US has a long history of systemic, institutionalized racist practices. The claim of the BLM movement is that racist practices continue today and that more must be done to address this problem. Once this claim is publicized in the media, the public reacts.
Step 3: Public Reaction
Public Reaction: According to Best (2021), in this step, individuals, groups, and organizations begin to align to a particular explanation of the problem and request a change in policy or law. Most of the time, at this step, it is the power of social movements that create the changes in policy or law.
A protest is a public expression of objection, disapproval, or dissent towards an idea or action (Merriam Webster 2023). Social movements have used sustained protests to disrupt civic life, draw attention to how the system is not working, and demand change. However, protesting is not the only collective action that social movements take. They may engage in sit-ins, where groups of people occupy a space, demonstrations, where they may take a more performative action to draw attention to a cause, civil disobediance, which halts the normal operations of an organization or public space such as blocking a highway or prohibiting workers from entering their work space, or other social movement tactics. We will focus on protests in this section, though an example of successful antiracist sit-ins is described in the People Making a Difference box below.
People Making a Difference
College Students and the Southern Civil Rights Movement
Anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
The beginnings of the Southern civil rights movement provide an inspirational example of Mead’s wisdom and remind us that young people can make a difference.
Although there had been several efforts during the 1950s by African Americans to end legal segregation in the South, the start of the civil rights movement is commonly thought to have begun on February 1, 1960. On that historic day, four brave African American students from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, dressed in coats and ties, sat down quietly at a segregated lunch counter in a Woolworth’s store in the city of Greensboro and asked to be served. When they were refused service, they stayed until the store closed at the end of the day, and then went home. They returned the next day and were joined by some two dozen other students. They were again refused service and sat quietly the rest of the day. The next day some sixty students and other people joined them, followed by some three hundred on the fourth day. Within a week, sit-ins were occurring at lunch counters in several other towns and cities inside and outside of North Carolina. In late July, 1960, the Greensboro Woolworth’s finally served African Americans, and the entire Woolworth’s chain desegregated its lunch counters a day later. Although no one realized it at the time, the civil rights movement had 'officially' begun thanks to the efforts of a small group of college students.
During the remaining years of the heyday of the civil rights movement, college students from the South and North joined thousands of other people in sit-ins, marches, and other activities to end legal segregation. Thousands were arrested, and at least forty-one were murdered. By risking their freedom and even their lives, they made a difference for millions of African Americans. And it all began when a small group of college students sat down at a lunch counter in Greensboro and politely refused to leave until they were served.
Sources: Branch 1988; Southern Poverty Law Center 2011
Protests began on May 26, 2020, in Minneapolis and around the US, growing to more than 7700 BLM-inspired protests by mid-August. Juneteenth weekend alone saw as many as 25 million people in the US, including many celebrities and public figures, publicly demand justice and change.
On Thursday, May 28, 2020, the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front (PNYLF) (pictured below) organized a protest at The Multnomah County Detention Center demanding an end to state-sanctioned violence against Black people. The young, mostly white protesters chanted, “Black Lives Matter,” “I Can’t Breathe,” and “Defund the Police.” PNYLF followers describe themselves as a "decentralized network of autonomous youth collectives dedicated to direct action towards total liberation" (Graves 2020). For PNYLF, total liberation includes ending mass incarceration. If you would like to learn more about the history of mass incarceration, check out this fact sheet from The Brennan Center for Justice.
The Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front protested during Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon. Why do you think young people emerge as leaders in movements for social justice?
“Photo of The Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front” by PNWYLF is included under fair use
The charged protests in downtown Portland were not the only protests for Black Lives in the state. Thirty-three Oregon towns saw overwhelmingly peaceful protests like the 25-50 people enthusiastically singing “Black Lives Matter” as they paraded up and down the main street in Manzanita every weekend throughout that grim COVID summer. More than 2,000 cities in 60 countries around the world saw similar protests (Wikipedia 2022).
It was and remains a contested, often heated conversation. Smaller groups of pro-police counter-protesters soon declared that “Blue Lives Matter,” positioning the lives of police over the lives of the Black people whom they disproportionately kill. White supremacists joined in, declaring that “White Lives Matter.” This highlights the significance of framing, how a social movement frames their claim. The claim “Black Lives Matter” means that Black lives matter, too. Not that they only matter, or that they matter most, but that they also matter even thought they are treated as if they do not matter. However, this framing quickly met the counterframes described above, slowing the momentum of the movement.
Public reaction to a social movement's claim and aims is central to the movement's success. In the BLM movement, the nation- and world-wide protests that occurred, particularly in the summer of 2020, helped fuel the movement.
Steps 4-6: Policy Making, Social Problems Work, and Policy Outcomes
Policy Making: In this step, governments create new laws and organizations create new policies to implement as a response to the social problem.
Social Problems Work: Once a new policy is put into place or the law is signed, organizations and institutions must act to implement the change.
Policy Outcomes: In this final step, claimsmakers examine the outcomes of the policies and actions taken to respond to the social problem. Often, the outcome of this step is the refinement of a claim and a request for more action.
BLM took center stage in Oregon and across the nation as we seemed to enter into an urgent public conversation about racism, alternatives to policing, and what it might look like if Black lives really mattered. Here we provide some examples of proposed and implemented policies in Oregon that resulted from BLM-related organizing.
The small town of Vernonia, Oregon, was one of several that issued resolutions supporting racial equality and inclusion. Book clubs and racial equity work groups were convened. If you’d like to learn more about this work, please review the blog Victory in Vernonia.
Additionally, more than 800 people, organized by Unite Oregon and Imagine Black, testified in June 2020 at city budget hearings and urged city officials to redirect $50 million dollars from policing to community support and to sever connections between Portland Public Schools and the Portland Police Bureau. The city budget cut $15,000,000 in funding for School Resource Officers and two other controversial policing programs. The Mayor also responded with a list of 19 proposed police reforms, 13 of which he achieved within the year. Check out their websites if you would like to learn more about Unite Oregon and Imagine Black.
In July 2020, The Electoral Justice Project of the Movement for Black Lives introduced the Breathe Act, which “offers a radical reimagining of public safety, community care, and how we spend money as a society.” Two Members of Congress, Rashida Talib and Ayanna Pressley stepped up to champion the measure’s “four simple ideas”:
- Divest federal resources from incarceration and policing
- Invest in new, non-punitive, non-carceral approaches to community safety that lead states to shrink their criminal-legal systems and center the protection of Black lives – including Black mothers, Black trans people, and Black women
- Allocate new money to build healthy, sustainable, and equitable communities
- Hold political leaders to their promises and enhance the self-determination of all Black communities (Movement For Black Lives 2020).
In April 2021, the Portland City Counsel’s Racial Equity Steering Committee issued a 65-page report with recommendations for police reform that included improved racial equity training and assessment, along with proposed changes in the way law enforcement responds to houselessness and mental health crises (Abdurraqib 2021).
Also in 2021, the Oregon legislature passed HB 2930 to hold police more accountable for sexual assault and racial bias. By August 2022, the commission formed to draft the new rules and released a draft proposal for public comment. The proposal has been widely criticized for being too lenient and allowing officers who commit serious crimes to keep their jobs (Levinson 2022).
Portland police followed through on several of the requests, including more robust anti-bias training (Byrne 2021). Police agencies across the state have prioritized increasing racial and gender diversity in their recruitment and have begun to screen new hires for racial bias.
However, these efforts have not been broadly supported by police officers. The majority of police personnel surveyed in 2021 thought that additional anti-bias training was unnecessary, and 15% of respondents said they had plans to leave within the year. A respondent quoted in the report described a general feeling within the rank and file that had been “betrayed” by “city leaders, elected officials, and community” (Gennaco et. al. 2022: 47). Those who advance an abolitionist vision, in which there are no under-resourced communities, assert that we can’t train our way out of racism.
A growing coalition of organizers emerging from the 2020 protests continues to work towards decarceration (undoing mass incarceration), transformative justice, and community care. For example, Don’t Shoot PDX, which was organized in 2016, continues to offer programming for young people impacted by racial injustice and police violence, as well as “mutual aid [including] food, household supplies, and clothing distributions to marginalized families, houseless communities, indigenous reservations and rural populations in the region” and legal outreach community members who experience racism and discrimination (Don’t Shoot PDX 2022). If you’d like to learn more about Don’t Shoot PDX, you can check out their website at Don’t Shoot PDX.
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In this chapter, we have taken up the national BLM movement and local Portland protests as a case study of social movements. We used the social problems process framework to contextualize the protests. We considered how theories about the social, historical, and political construction of race and racism help us understand how racist policies and racist ideas produce and substance racial inequities. We also identified harmful racist ideas about under-served communities and racist policies that strive to contain rather than enrich under-served communities.
We also looked at the uses of social media for social movements, and we located Garza, Cullors, and Tometi within interdependent organizing traditions that touch back to Black Feminist Theory, the 20th century Civil Rights movement, and the emancipatory sociology of Du Bois. We considered how #BlackLivesMatter makes powerful claims that engage critical consciousness, calling attention to all the places where Black lives don’t seem to matter.
We did the work that BLM invites us to do as we analyze how policing in under-resourced communities creates and sustains racism. Finally, we considered how an antiracist framework, which centers on the well-being of people most impacted by police violence and mass incarceration, can advance social justice, and create a world where no one goes hungry.
Though the chapter centered the learning of sociological perspectives on social movements, we hope that this chapter also inspired you to get involved in local, state, national, or global social movements to fight against the social injustices we covered throughout this textbook and to secure a more just world for everyone.
