The overlap of anti‐Black and anti‐protest rhetoric: How far‐right political commentators preserve anti‐Black racist stereotypes in the context of Black Lives Matter debates

TL;DR

This paper examines how far-right commentators use anti-Black stereotypes to discredit Black Lives Matter protests and justify racialized police brutality.

Contribution

The study reveals how anti-protest rhetoric overlaps with anti-Black racist tropes to undermine movements against systemic racism.

Findings

Far-right commentators use 'rioter' categories to pathologize BLM activists.

Anti-protest rhetoric frames BLM as violent and uncivilized, downplaying racialized police brutality.

Right-wing speakers conflate anti-racism with violence to justify oppressive systems.

Abstract

Research has shown that speakers opposing political demonstrations can pathologize protesters campaigning against racial prejudice in order to justify racialized police profiling and brutality. This paper builds on these insights by exploring how right‐wing political commentators reinforce the racist stereotype of violent Black people when discussing protests and police brutality in Black Lives Matter (BLM) debates. The dataset includes two debates drawn from Conservative Talk Radio and The Candace Owen Show, where issues concerning anti‐Black racism in the United States were discussed—including racialized police brutality and BLM demonstrations. Using discursive and rhetorical psychology, we show how far‐right commentators managed their (arguably racist) identities by employing ‘rioter’ categories against the BLM movement. We demonstrate that far‐right commentators used anti‐protest rhetoric and anti‐Black racist tropes to portray BLM activists as uncivilized and violent rioters. Doing so portrayed the BLM movement as using anti‐racism as an ulterior motive to enact violence which also downplayed racialized police brutality. This study shows how anti‐protest rhetoric and anti‐Black stereotypes overlap when right‐wing speakers undermine attempts to challenge systemic racism. Black people and protesters are discriminated against in similar ways; both are characterized as violent and uncivilized when they mobilize against structural oppression and inequality.

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