The Rhetoric of Hegemony and Racism: Living Black in America

Because of its ripeness, past studies have not had the opportunity to examine the rhetoric of the black lives matter countermovement or to compare the rhetoric to civil rights era rhetoric. This paper examines such rhetoric using an ideological criticism and draws similarities to the civil rights era.By using an ideological criticism to examine the artifact, eleven tweets, and the rhetoric of recent events this paper looks beyond the surface language to reveal the true beliefs, values, and assumptions suggested by the artifact. In addition, this paper attempts to answer criticisms that black people are inherently violent, lazy, unintelligent, or responsible for their inequities. Data was collected through twitter using several hashtags based on NodeXL analysis. The findings reveal downplaying of black issues, blame and issue shifting, as well as justification of violence toward black protesters. Additionally, many parallels and similarities can be drawn between the movements, rhetoric, and counter rhetoric. The data and research heavily implies that it is unlikely that black people are expressly to blame for their struggles and unsurprising that the black condition has not drastically improved since the civil rights era because of discrimination and prejudice that still persists while black issues are downplayed or ignored