TITLE:
Black Lives Matter: The Emotional and Racial Dynamics of the George Floyd Protest Graffiti
AUTHORS:
Mary Louisa Cappelli
KEYWORDS:
Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, Racism, Protest Graffiti, I Can’t Breathe, Breonna Taylor, Structural Racism, Racial Capitalism, Police Brutality, Defund the Police
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Applied Sociology,
Vol.10 No.9,
September
14,
2020
ABSTRACT: Political Protest Graffiti is an increasingly visible form of rhetoric that provides a democratizing space to enable its disenfranchised peoples to articulate their own narratives. As a form of visual activism, the George Floyd Protest Graffiti acts to historically document the tragic sentiment of the collective protest demonstration and testify to political and racial struggles in America. In this essay, I examine the George Floyd Protest Graffiti as a discursive site to analyze how emotions come into play in its production. With a rhetorical power to communicate ideas and influence public debate, I contend that the Floyd cultural graffiti production functions as a system of socio-cultural negotiations and a political call to arms to collapse structural racism in America.