Maternal Figures or Aggressors: Controlling Images in Newspaper Constructions of Police Violence Against Black Women and Men

Authors

Ashley Hollingshead, Rutgers University

Abstract

"In the last decade, media coverage of state-sanctioned police violence against Black women and men re-emerged. Despite campaigns that expose how Black women and men become victims of police violence, Black men’s fatalities gain more traction, garnering national outrage and calls for police reform, policy reform, and criminal justice reform (Crenshaw & Ritchie, 2015). I conduct a content analysis of 76 newspaper articles covering 24 cases of Black women and men from 2016 to determine how newspapers construct narratives of Black women and state-sanctioned violence in comparison to Black men. Newspaper articles reflect and construct differing narratives on Black women’s and men’s experiences with aggressive policing, relying on a combination of racialized and gendered stereotypes, witness accounts, police reports, and city responses to create those perspectives. This project leans on Hill-Collins’ concept of controlling images to argue controlling images on motherhood and aggression obscures the institutional failures that lead to fatal force. Controlling images are presented in what I refer to as “secondary narratives,” newspaper narratives of police violence that include police statements, community reactions, and family responses disseminated after an initial reporting of their deaths. On the other hand, the narratives on Black men illustrate their roles as fathers and caretakers alongside issues of racial injustice, institutional failures, and state-sanctioned victimization. Ultimately, centering controlling images prevents a collective resonance with Black women’s state-sanctioned victimization."

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Hollingshead, Ashley (2022) "Maternal Figures or Aggressors: Controlling Images in Newspaper Constructions of Police Violence Against Black Women and Men," Qualitative Criminology (QC): Vol. 11: No. 3, Article 4.
Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/qc/vol11/iss3/4