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2016 Wis. L. Rev. 541 (2016)
Black Lives Matter and Respectability Politics in Local News Accounts of Officer-Involved Civilian Deaths: An Early Empirical Assessment

handle is hein.journals/wlr2016 and id is 553 raw text is: BLACK LIVES MATTER AND RESPECTABILITY POLITICS IN LOCAL NEWS ACCOUNTS OF OFFICER-INVOLVED CIVILIAN DEATHS: AN EARLY EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT OSAGIE K. OBASOGIE* ZACHARY NEWMAN** The Black Lives Matter movement launched in July 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted by a Florida jury in the shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black male. The incident giving rise to this emerging social movement-where the hoodie became a key part of widespread public debates on whether certain attributes or cues reasonably signal danger-reflects the most recent iteration of a longstanding respectability politics that has fundamentally shaped the perception and treatment of Black people for many years. This political debate has centered around the idea that Blacks can minimize or evade the injustices associated with discriminatory attitudes by behaving in a so-called respectable manner, i.e., dressing, acting, speaking, and even protesting in certain acceptable ways. As a social movement, Black Lives Matter can be understood as growing out of a specific opposition to respectability politics by insisting that regardless of any ostensibly non-respectable behavior- from Martin's hoodie to Eric Garner selling loose cigarettes-their lives matter and should not be treated with deadly force. To the extent that the Black Lives Matter movement has attempted to change public discourse regarding police brutality, this article assesses the public's responsiveness to these claims through a singular yet important measure: the reporting of officer-involved deaths in local news media. Specifically, we ask, has the increased attention to officer-involved deaths spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement changed the way such incidents are reported in local news media? To investigate this question, we examine local newspaper reports of officer-involved deaths during five specific time periods: the month before George Zimmerman's acquittal and four month-long periods following his acquittal at roughly six-month intervals. Although sustained media attention to Black Lives Matter may lead some to conclude that journalists have become more sensitive to how respectability politics can lead to inaccurate reporting and encourage more balanced descriptions of these events, our qualitative assessment of the selected data suggests that journalists' reporting of these incidents continues to reflect a troubling respectability politics that minimizes the lives lost and * Professor of Law, University of California, Hastings College of the Law with joint appointment at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. B.A., Yale University; J.D., Columbia Law School; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley. ** B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz; J.D. Candidate, University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Many thanks to Catherine Albiston, Khiara Bridges, and Gwendolyn Leachman for comments on previous drafts.

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