A space for countering colorblind discourse: constructions of police-perpetrated homicides of African-American males

This qualitative study assesses how police-perpetrated homicides of African-American males are constructed in the public sphere. Similar studies on the discourse surrounding the topic have focused on newspaper articles as the discourse unit. In this article, I argue that the opinion-editorial (op-ed) pages of newspapers are a space for challenging colorblind frames invoked the discourse about police use of force that dominates in the print media. To demonstrate this point, I conducted an ethnographic content analysis of 168 op-eds from five different U.S. newspapers: Contra Costa Times, New York Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Salt Lake Tribune, and Washington Post. The op-eds focused on the police-perpetrated homicides of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice in 2014. The findings from this study indicate that the op-ed pages provide a unique opportunity for Black voices to be heard, as well as a space for dominant frames about police-perpetrated homicides to be challenged. Paradoxically, the results also impugn the sequestering of Black voices into the openly subjective spaces of print media.