The Struggle over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter
By (author) Amanda Nell Edgar, Andre E. Johnson
Publication date:
15 October 2018Length of book:
164 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498572057
In The Struggle over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter, Amanda Nell Edgar and Andre E. Johnson examine the surprisingly complex relationship between Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter as it unfolds on social media and in offline interpersonal relationships. Exploring cultural influences like family history, fear, religion, postracialism, and workplace pressure, Edgar and Johnson trace the meanings of these movements from the perspectives of ordinary participants. The Struggle over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter highlights the motivations for investing in social movements and countermovements to show how history, both remembered and misremembered, bubbles beneath the surface of online social justice campaigns. Through participation in these contemporary movements, online social media users enact continuations of American history through a lens of their own past experiences. This book ties together online and offline, national and local, and personal and political to understand one of the defining social justice struggles of our time.
The book is a good case study for social movement scholars who wish to discern nuance between social movements that seem consistently at odds. Such nuance is crucial for understanding and resolving current cultural conflict. The book’s practical engagement with individuals representing a localized context of dueling national protest movements reveals particularities missed in other approaches. For that reason, it is refreshing.