UC Santa Barbara

Feminist and anti-racist organizing in the United States has often concentrated on single axes of oppression: gender and race, respectively (Crenshaw 1991). Yet intersectionality — which poses that such systems of oppression interact, and therefore cannot be understood alone (Crenshaw1989) — is increasingly invoked not only in academic work but in a broad range of activist spaces. On the Black Lives Matter website and in interviews, for instance, movement leaders have framed the movement as intersectional. More specifically, they have tied it to reproductive justice, a movement whose advocates argue that racial and gender oppression are linked and shape women’s reproductive needs.

This study explores how four longstanding and prominent national feminist and reproductive rights organizations understand and portray Black Lives Matter and racialized police violence. Using social movement frame analysis, it asks if and how publications posted between 2012 and 2016 on the websites of Feminist Majority Foundation, NARAL Pro-Choice America, National Organization for Women, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America frame Black Lives Matter, and the racialized police violence to which it responds, as relevant or irrelevant to the organizations’ missions and goals (the “relevance frame”). The analysis concludes that three of the organizations under study — Feminist Majority Foundation, National Organization for Women, and NARAL — describe racialized police violence as relevant to their work. (Planned Parenthood, did not publish any documents that fit the study parameters.) They base this relevance on a framing of Black Lives Matter as a reproductive justice movement, and racialized police violence as a reproductive justice concern.

The organizations indicate three specific ways they understand racialized police violence to be a matter of reproductive justice: state violence violates Black parents’ right to raise their children to adulthood safely, police officers disproportionately perpetrate sexual violence on Black women, and non-sexual police brutality is directed not only at Black men but also at Black women. The organizations build these arguments using three discursive maneuvers I argue are best understood as types of frame articulation (Benford and Snow 2000): frame signaling (using language that implies the relevance frame, without contextualizing or directly stating it), frame situating (explaining the historical and structural context that renders the frame legible, without directly stating it), and frame naming (directly stating the frame).