Following the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, at the hands of a white Ferguson police officer in 2014, a social media hashtag emerged drawing attention to the power (and potential bias) of the media in representing Black youth. #IfTheyGunnedMeDown asked the semi-rhetorical question, “Which picture would the media choose to represent me if I were killed by police?” and offered a choice between two contrasting images—one a presumably positive representation and the other stereotypically negative. Through a content analysis of 100 pairs of juxtaposed images from the first 24 hours of the hashtag, I examine the ways Black youth negotiate oppressive media representations and produce their own self-images. Through their strategic political response, the users of the hashtag demonstrate their “double consciousness” in a Du Boisian sense as well as their acute understanding of the specific symbols that mark a Black body as threatening and those that mediate the supposed threat. In doing so, however, they expose the limited number of templates available to them for performing an identity interpreted positively by the mainstream media and broader social world, as well as the continuing role of respectability politics in shaping public perceptions of Black youth.

中文翻译：

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#IfTheyGunnedMeDown：黑人青年对压迫性媒体的双重意识

2014 年，手无寸铁的黑人少年迈克尔·布朗 (Michael Brown) 死于弗格森白人警察之手后，出现了一个社交媒体标签，引起人们对媒体代表黑人青年的力量（和潜在偏见）的关注。#IfTheyGunnedMeDown 提出了一个半反问的问题，“如果我被警察杀死，媒体会选择哪张照片来代表我？” 并提供了两个对比图像之间的选择——一个可能是正面的表现，另一个是刻板的负面形象。通过对主题标签前 24 小时的 100 对并列图像的内容分析，我研究了黑人青年协商压迫性媒体表现并产生自己的自我形象的方式。通过他们的战略政治反应，标签的用户展示了他们在杜波依斯意义上的“双重意识”，以及他们对将黑人身体标记为威胁的特定符号和调解所谓威胁的特定符号的敏锐理解。然而，在这样做的过程中，他们暴露了有限数量的模板，用于执行主流媒体和更广泛的社会世界积极解释的身份，以及体面政治在塑造公众对黑人青年的看法方面的持续作用。