Body of Lies: Collective Memory, Traumatic Events, and Collective Action during the Black Lives Matter Movement
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This article revisits the findings of Harris (2006) regarding collective memory and its impact on collective action, given the emergence of a new social movement in the United States: Black Lives Matter. Harris (2006) presents a theory of how shared memories of significant historical events influenced Black activism during the modern Civil Rights Movement. Events can catalyze collective action through social appropriation, a causal mechanism that allows challengers to employ information to interpret whether environmental conditions pose an opportunity or a threat to collective action. Harris (2006) calls the individuals with appropriation power “political entrepreneurs.” This article explores how political entrepreneurs appropriate events and collective memories for collective action in the Black Lives Matter Movement. I examine four case studies of police killings in the United States. I employ interviews with Black Lives Matter local chapter leaders nationwide and archival analyses of historical accounts to establish whether or not a collective memory of police killings for Black Americans in the 21st century exists. Like Harris (2006), I examine how geographical proximity to killings impacts the memory of each event. The four case studies include the killing of Oscar Grant in 2009 in Oakland, California; Trayvon Martin in 2012 in Sanford, Florida; Rekia Boyd in 2012 in Chicago, Illinois; and Mike Brown in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. I hypothesize that the nature of the political entrepreneur has changed immensely since the 1960s. Social media and video have emerged as two key ways movement actors frame traumatic events, such as police killings, to spur collective action.
No Safety: An Exploration of the Meaning of Trauma for Black Americans
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This paper examines how Black residents in the broader Chicago area define trauma and traumatic experiences. Recently, the language of “trauma” has emerged as a popular idiom. Political scientists define trauma as the experience of a reasonably perceived threat of or actual death or serious violence and proceed to define a traumatic event as events in which there is a reasonably perceived threat of death or serious violence or experience of death or serious violence during the event or in its immediate aftermath (Marsh 2022). This definition is derived from the diagnostic criteria provided by clinical psychology for post-traumatic stress disorder. I argue this clinical definition of a traumatic event provides little practical use to scholars interested in examining the political ramifications of trauma, especially racial trauma that involves the United States government. To examine this phenomenon, I conduct a qualitative analysis of the meaning of trauma for Black residents in the broader Chicago area. Through interviews, I explore how Black Americans define trauma and traumatic experiences that involve the United States government and present a typology of traumatic events. The findings of this paper provide critical insight into how political scientists may apply the language of trauma to describe state violence in the United States.
The Politics of Expedience: Evanston, Illinois and the Fight for Reparations (with Matthew D. Nelsen)
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In March 2021, the city council in Evanston, Illinois began distributing reparations funds to Black residents in the form of $25,000 housing grants. In doing so, Evanston became the first city in the United States to provide publicly funded reparations to Black people for generations of racist policies, including redlining. Why did the reparations program first emerge in Evanston? This paper provides an in-depth look at the politics of the policy design process and describes the unique political circumstances that allowed this historic policy to pass with near-unanimous support. As communities throughout the United States consider how to deliver reparations to Black Americans, the debate over Evanston’s ordinance serves as a cautionary tale for how ambitious historic policies may become watered down when political expedience trumps the political insights of Black residents.
Forty Acres and a Mule: Symbolic Politics and the Pursuit for Black Reparations in the United States (with Matthew D. Nelsen and Amanda d'Urso)
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Initiatives to secure reparations for slavery date back to founding of the United States but remain controversial. Recently, municipalities across the U.S. have proposed policies to address the multigenerational harm inflicted upon Black residents. However, these policies vary substantially as some believe reparations can mitigate historical injustices while others view them as merely symbolic. This paper employs a mixedmethods research design to move beyond hypotheticals and latent opinions to address real policies and the public response. Thus, we lay the foundation for future scholarship aimed at understanding and studying reparations policies. Drawing from 41 in-depth interviews with residents of Evanston, Illinois—the first U.S. municipality to pass a publicly-funded reparations program—we highlight policy attributes that shape whether individuals support or oppose reparations. We use these interviews to construct a conjoint experiment fielded in the 2022 Cooperative Election Study. White Republicans remain strongly opposed to reparations. Meanwhile, White Democrats support reparations policies that mirror Evanston’s housing program while Black Americans support more ambitious proposals, including cash payments.
