Spectacular Trials

This chapter expands on the concept of embodied gatekeeping as it studies the way visual journalists negotiate access to the most newsworthy trials. In the United States, rules for camera access to trials vary state to state. Some states, such as Florida, have opened courtrooms to visual media, while others, such as Pennsylvania, forbid camera-in-the-court coverage. At either end of the spectrum, visual journalists face a maze of rules designed by court officials to protect the dignity of the process. Based on interviews and observational research, this chapter details the way visual journalists have negotiated these rules as they covered several spectacular trials, including Jerry Sandusky’s child sexual assault trial in 2012, George Zimmerman’s trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013, and Bill Cosby’s sexual assault case in 2017. Each case drew national attention, and each presented journalists with different sets of grounded challenges for visual coverage.

Pre-Arrest Perceptions of George Zimmerman’s Guilt in the Fatal Trayvon Martin Shooting: Examining Racial Differences in the Presumption of Guilt

The racial gradient hypothesis of comparative conflict theory predicts Black people perceive the greatest social injustices, followed by Latinx and white people, respectively. This study used nationally representative data collected prior to George Zimmerman’s arrest to examine whether racial groups (Black, Latinx, white) differed in their perceptions that Zimmerman was guilty of a crime against Trayvon Martin. Logistic regression results revealed Black participants were 98% more likely than white participants to perceive Zimmerman as guilty. Latinx perceptions of Zimmerman’s guilt did not significantly differ from those of Black or white participants. Findings suggest some Latinx individuals may not fully appreciate how the same U.S. racial hierarchy that harms Latinx communities also works to produce anti-Black violence.

Black and Blue

This mystory explores alienation in a law enforcement family and anti-racist allyship after the 2012 murder of Florida teen Trayvon Martin. Situated within key circuit of culture moments of identity and representation, I use the popular song “What It Means” by Drive-By Truckers (2016) and my personal experience to address whiteness. Colorblindness and fragility are twin components of whiteness in post-racial America that animate alienation and allyship. Both embodied analyses of pop culture and personal experience describe white identity and white privilege at the interpersonal and intercultural level.

The Room Where It Happens: Reflections on Being a Black Woman in the Academy

The Black Lives Matter movement emerged in 2013 as a result of George Zimmerman being acquitted for the death of Trayvon Martin. Until recently, the movement was mostly limited to violence inflicted on Black and Brown bodies at the hands of the police. More recently scholars, have extended the movement to include the experiences of minorities in academia with the purpose of addressing the institutional biases along with the racial and ethnic micro-aggressions that result from them. The purpose of this essay is to explore micro-aggressions and how they have impacted my life as a Black female scholar in the academy. In my discussion, I provide direct accounts of racialized and gendered experiences that have shaped me. The experiences highlighted in this essay reflect the broader challenges that minority faculty experience when they attempt to be gain visibility and respect in their disciplines.

The Framing of Race: Trayvon Martin and the Black Lives Matter Movement

This study analyzed two national newspapers to investigate how each framed race in coverage of Trayvon Martin and the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing from Feagin’s white racial frame as the framework for analysis, results show that the news coverage reflected an encompassing pro-white/anti-black master-frame that presented Black Americans as inadequate, lawless, criminal, threatening and at times biologically different. Some news stories contributed to the media’s conceptualization of race within a liberty-and-justice American myth paradigm. Conversely, whites were presented favorably as “protectors” and “virtuous.” Episodic news frames were discovered with highly-focused coverage on events that shifted attention away from the broader trend of racial profiling. These findings contributed to the understanding of the role of corporate media in reinforcing the framing of race. Emerging sub-frames are discussed.

Strange Intimacies

This paper sits with the understudied subgenre of the contemporary black maternal memoir in the Black Lives Matter era. We read Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin’s Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin and Lezley McSpadden’s Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil: The Life, Legacy, and Love of My Son Michael Brown not only as performances of grief and of the birth of political subjectivity—even as they emphatically stage how respectable black maternal political subjectivity is born through loss. These black maternal memoirs also offer what we call strange intimacies, which strain the predictable scripts of the maternal memoir. We read the embeddedness of strange intimacies in these memoirs as a way of refusing the gendered logics of the reception of the black maternal, and as performances of intimacy that refuse and undo normative conceptions of familial intimacy and black maternal loss.