Black Lives Matter: Social Media and a Social Movement, Pt. 3

Diction: Why “Black” Lives Matter

               There is one aspect of the Black Lives Matter movement that has not been discussed as much as other aspects: the diction of the message itself; why was “black” chosen instead of African-American? One aspect of this is the fact that Twitter, where the hashtag is often used and where its usage originally surged, only allows for brief messages to followers. You are permitted 140 characters to express your message, therefore, it makes sense to use a shorter word, but this is not the entire explanation. Black is short, to the point, and expresses emotion in a way that the term “African American” cannot. Black has a certain connotation and allows for a more charged message because it is not always what people believe to be the “politically correct” term. Also, according to a blog posting by a social scientist named Taylor Jones, the importance of the phrase “Black Lives Matter” from a linguistic standpoint correlates with a technical term called “implicature.” Implicature refers to a way of communicating something without stating it directly. Jones discusses implicature and provides examples of how it is used in every day conversations and later explains that people are using implicature to negate the movement and that “Black Lives Matter” uses implicature to focus on the movement rather than exclude other races/ethnicities. He says that when you express a message, people will have different interpretations of it. For example: if you say: I watched half of a movie, people may believe that you ONLY watched up to and including one half of the movie while you may have watched three-fourths. Similarly, when a person uses “#BlackLivesMatter,” people could infer that the person is expressing that ONLY black lives matter, when that is not the case, making the phrase significant in its ability to create that dialogue without every degrading another group of people. Another aspect of the phrase that is linguistically important is its ability to say so much in such a brief statement. The fact that “Black Lives Matter” even needs to be said generates a lot of emotion and dialogue on as a stand-alone phrase.