Agenda setting and selective resonance – Black Lives Matter and media debates on racism in Germany

On 25th May 2020, the violent death of George Floyd during a police arrest in Minneapolis sparked mass mobilisations in the US and a subsequent diffusion of ‘Black Lives Matter’ (BLM) protests around the world including Europe (see Introduction to this special issue). In Germany, this protest wave was adapted to German debates and movement contexts (see della Porta et al., forthcoming) and attracted widespread and predominantly positive public attention (Milman et al., 2021). At first glance, this resonance seems surprising, as debates on racism in general and racism against Black people, in particular, have not been in the spotlight of academic or public attention in Germany despite a long history of anti-racist mobilisation in Germany (Aikins et al., 2021; Henrichsen et al., 2022). When it comes to media debates on racism in Germany, BLM seems to be a game changer. It is argued that the public and policy debate on racism in Germany has undergone important shifts following the BLM mobilisations in 2020, including an increasing awareness and focus on racism, discrimination and underrepresentation of Black people, but also the emergence of key policy initiatives such as the ‘cabinet committee on racism and far-right extremism’ (DeZIM, 2022). Such an impact of antiracist mobilisation is puzzling for two reasons:

Firstly, research on racialised groups documents that marginalised communities are rarely able to significantly impact the media debate. On the contrary – particularly with reference to migrants, it has been argued that their claims in the public sphere are considered to be disturbing ‘noise’ rather than a legitimate ‘voice’ since ‘[t]he nation state may proclaim equality for all, but equality of rights is only reserved for its core members’ (Nicholls, 2013). Furthermore, qualitative and quantitative media studies have shown that mainstream media often reproduce stereotypes rather than dismantling them (Bail, 2008; Bonilla-Silva, 2017; Dal Cortivo & Oursler, 2021; El-Tayeb, 2016).

Secondly, the discursive context for anti-racist mobilisation in Germany has been considered particularly closed. The German public debate has traditionally been characterised by a notable reluctance to scandalise and label racism as racism, thus limiting the debate either to the historical variant of National Socialism or tending toward an analytically flawed equation of racism with xenophobia (El-Tayeb, 2016; Geulen, 2015). This has also contributed to a systematic ‘ignoring’ of antiracist claims by migrants in Germany in the post-World War Two era (Alexopoulou, 2021).

We take this puzzle as a starting point to systematically explore how the recent wave of BLM mobilisations in Germany has impacted the mainstream national mass media debate on racism. We focus on the BLM-protest wave in Germany, understood as a series of different protest events, organised by different types of Black activists and anti-racist actors and unfolding in numerous German cities in the summer of 2020 under the common banner of ‘Black Lives Matter’. We ask two related questions:

Did the BLM mobilizations influence the visibility of racism (salience) in the German media debate? Which movement frames resonated in the media, and which ones remained invisible (framing)?

With this research focus, we both fill an empirical gap and contribute to theory building on dynamics of socio-cultural change driven by racialised communities, bridging insights from social movement, media, and race and ethnicity studies. Specifically, we draw on research in social movement studies that has pointed out that media resonance for protest movements is a key mechanism for movement actors to produce social change. Collective mobilisations can increase the salience of the protest issue in public debates and, thereby, contribute to agenda setting. Moreover, movement actors can influence the framing of social problems in public debates (Amenta & Polletta, 2019; Earl et al., 2004; Oliver & Meyer, 1999). Following these assumptions, we share Amenta and Polletta’s (2019) position that social movements are important producers of meaning. One of the central arenas through which movements influence meaning making within broader society is the mass media (Vliegenthart et al., 2016).

In our study, we assess whether – against all odds – BLM changed the public debate about racism in Germany. To capture this change, we developed a novel mixed-method design based on two types of original data. The salience of racism in the German media debate is measured based on an automatised, quantitative content analysis of the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ). To analyse frame resonance, we qualitatively reconstructed movement frames based on qualitative material, including semi-structured interviews with key informants from protest actors involved in the Black Lives Matter protest wave in Germany. In a further step, we quantify the resonance for those frames in the SZ-media corpus.

The article has a fourfold structure: first, we locate our empirical contribution in the literatures on antiracist mobilisations and media resonance of social movements (2), followed by an elaboration on our data and the methods we used (3). Our analysis of BLM impact on media debates begins with a brief description of the 2020 protest wave in Germany, pinpointing the timing and scope of mobilisation as well as a description of the main frames the movement sought to convey to the public (4). Lastly, we analyse how the media debate has shifted in the timeframe of the BLM mobilisation in Germany. We discuss the role of these protests in shaping public debates on racism in Germany and the implications of our findings for the public visibility of claims made by marginalised groups (5).

Social movements need mass media to reach out to their adherents, to policymakers, and to other political actors. Media outlets are central gatekeepers to the public sphere and therefore crucial to translate social movement demands into changes in public opinion (Scheffer, 1997; Ziemann, 2012). Thus, a considerable amount of research inquires how social movements create media attention, but also if and how they create resonance for specific demands and movement frames (Cristancho, 2021; Oliver & Meyer, 1999; Rucht, 2004b; Snow et al., 2014; Van Dyke & Taylor, 2019).

There are different approaches to grasp the media impact of social movements. One common way to analyse the protest-media relationship is to measure the scope that media reporting devotes to protest events (Oliver & Meyer, 1999). Others have looked into the prominence of the protest reporting (e.g. placement on the front page) or the breadth of the reporting, operationalised by the space devoted to the claims of protest actors (Koopmans & Olzak, 2004). Protest event analysis (Hutter, 2014) and political claims analysis (Koopmans & Statham, 1999) based on mass media has become an established tool for measuring both social movement activities and frame resonance within the mediatised public sphere. Content analytical codebooks in this tradition usually present pre-existing categories to detect social movement frames. Such an approach is powerful for quantitative comparative analysis across movements and countries (Hutter, 2014). Yet, this kind of standardised frame analyses has also been criticised from movement scholars working with intersectional perspectives. Montoya (2021) for example argued that this method does not allow grasping the multidimensionality and interconnectedness of problems, identities and their framings. Blackwell (Blackwell, 2011, p. 26) suggests that this constitutes a particular problem for women of colour, lesbians, or working-class women, who remain invisibilised in mass media discourse. Accordingly, research designs and methodological approaches risk reproducing existing patterns of invisibilisation and hence can even counter the efforts of challengers fighting for visibility and representation.

The focus on the representation of protest events in the media is also prominent in media attention studies, some of them discussing the interdependencies of movement mobilisation and attention cycles (Andrews & Caren, 2010; Schäfer et al., 2014). While these studies make significant contributions to our understanding of the resonance of movement frames in mainstream media, we suggest that this focus on events (Citroni, 2020) is not sufficient to grasp the extent to which social movements in general and anti-racist mobilisation in particular influence public debates on the topics they are mobilising for. Two central arguments support this claim:

First, limiting the analysis of articles to those explicitly covering the protest event leads to the systematic omission of other articles that might discuss movement-related topics and frames. But movements can have a broader agenda setting capacity beyond the coverage of the immediate protest event.

Second, studies have shown that media attention is often related to broader issue attention cycles, mainly driven by other actors or events independent from peaks of social movement mobilisations (Hall, 2002). It is therefore difficult to assess if movements are agenda surfers or agenda setters when only looking at the media coverage of protest events. One way to overcome this movement-event bias is extending the time span of analysis beyond peaks of mobilisation. This also resonates with Snow et al. who have urged to explicitly investigate the failures of framing success by social movements and selective resonance of their claims (Snow et al., 2014). They argued that a combination of qualitative and quantitative data in a longitudinal perspective could discern which patterns are driven by the protest events in the debate and those that reflect broader attention cycles or even societal change.

Third, movement frames and public discourses oftentimes interact. In their seminal work, Benford and Snow (Benford & Snow, 2000) argue that social movements need to align their frames with their target audiences to create resonance. Frames resonate because the public finds them convincing, or as Gamson put it, ‘natural and familiar’ (1992). Accordingly, movements are more likely to be successful in gaining attention and in reshaping public debates when their arguments resonate with pre-existing cultural and discursive scripts (Rucht, 2004a).¹ The degree to which frames articulated by movements are taken up by mass media, hence, is related to discursive contexts or ‘opportunities’.

However, these opportunities are not the same for all groups, but instead mirror hegemonic discourses, which structurally exclude groups considered as ‘outsiders’. For these reasons, marginalised groups rarely gain large media attention for their actions (Chabanet & Royall, 2014). In like manner, scholars with an intersectional perspective on discrimination have criticised the structural determinism of the opportunity approach which fails to acknowledge that marginalised groups are confronted with structural disadvantages when attempting to gain media attention and therefore face more obstacles in seizing opportunities in the first place (Kacar et al., 2021). Scholarship in the field of race and ethnicity studies even demonstrates how racial stereotypes and the implicit legitimation of racist discourses often dominates the media coverage of minority groups (Bonilla-Silva, 2003). Mainstream media largely reproduces scripts of devaluation for certain groups (Lamont, 2014), which again have their roots in historically grown narratives and dominant cultural and discursive scripts (Vertovec, 2021; Wimmer, 2008). This has been repeatedly confirmed for Black citizens, particularly in the US (Hirschfield & Simon, 2010; Umamaheswar, 2020).

In view of complex processes of public resonance, the exclusion of messages by social movements in general and groups marginalised through racialisation in particular, we differentiate between the development of the general debate on racism (salience) and the presence of movement specific frames in mass media (framing). Inspired by the notion of ‘two-level’ approaches (Goertz & Mahoney, 2005), we combine a longitudinal perspective of discursive shifts with more fine-grained analysis of the resonance for frames articulated in specific waves of contention. In our analysis of BLM's media impact in Germany, we rely on a mixed-methods approach, drawing from different data sources to (1) identify key movement frames, and to (2) assess issue salience and frame resonance.

1. To identify key frames of the BLM-mobilisations in Germany, we used textual information produced by the BLM movement (e.g. websites and flyers), and conducted six semi-structured interviews with key protest organisers.² We included interviews to provide movement actors with the space to articulate their core frames in their own words. The selection of interview partners aimed to include new and established movement actors and to represent activists from different regions in Germany. This open approach to define movement frames was explicitly chosen to address the above-mentioned challenge of making marginalised frames visible. Due to the COVID-19 anti-contagion measures in place, all interviews were conducted online in November and December 2020. The interviews covered a broad range of topics. For this analysis, we focused on those issues and frames largely shared by the movement. We could not include very specific frames of intersectional discrimination, as they indeed remain too invisibilised to be quantified in media discourse over a longer time period.

2. We conducted a quantitative newspaper content analysis based on the text corpora ‘MigPress’ (Blätte et al., 2020), which allows computer-based analyses of German daily newspaper coverage. We are aware that media attention can come through a variety of channels, including television, the internet, or radio. Concerning BLM, most media-related research so far has focused on analysing the social media debate, as social media has been key for protest mobilisation (Mundt et al., 2018; van Haperen et al., 2023). Yet, while social media analysis has many distinct advantages, in this contribution we focus on newspaper reports to assess the impact on long-term debates in the German public. In the following, we focus on Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ). As one of the leading traditional quality newspapers in Germany, SZ is a standard choice for content analytical research endeavours interested in the media representations of public debates in Germany. We focused on a quality newspaper instead of a tabloid paper, since we suspect a broader and more detailed coverage on debates about racism in the former,³ as tabloids tend to reproduce underlying stereotypes and are particularly closed to mobilisations by anti-racist groups.

To grasp long-term changes in the media debates about racism in Germany, we covered an extensive timespan of over 20 years from 2000 to 2020. To be sure, the lasting impact of the BLM-mobilisations in 2020 can only be judged in the years to come but our timespan helps locating the protests and the following discursive shifts in the broader societal and discursive context.

With regards to capturing variation in the overall salience of racism and the key frames articulated by BLM over time, we have constructed two lists of search terms, so-called dictionaries. For measuring the salience of racism, we rely on word frequencies of a truncated form of racism (‘rassis*’ in German) and compare it to the salience of the often synonymously used terms ‘Fremdenfeindlichkeit’ or ‘Ausländerfeindlichkeit’ (different words for xenophobia). As racism in Germany is often discussed as a phenomenon of the far-right, and rooted in the history of National Socialism, we also included references to Right-wing extremism. This approach is particularly significant since public debates in Germany are reluctant to label racism as such (Geulen, 2015). The second dictionary of search terms was built on the basis of movement frames, which were identified in the qualitative interviews and textual data produced by the movement. Finally, we qualitatively assessed a sub sample of 48 articles in which at least two relevant movement frame keywords were used to specify how movement frames were discussed.

The protest wave following the violent death of George Floyd rapidly traveled to various European countries (Milman et al., 2021). In Germany, waves of anti-racist protest unfolded in the summer of 2020. In a protest event analysis, for Germany, we identified 111 protest events with explicit reference to ‘Black Lives Matter’, mobilising more than 220,000 protesters on the streets of many German cities (see della Porta et al., forthcoming). With protests taking place in all sixteen Länder (states), the protest landscape was strongly decentralised. Large protests with 10,000 participants or more were organised in urban centers and university towns with a history of collective mobilisation, including Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Leipzig, and Freiburg, but we also identified several protest events in smaller towns, such as Parchim in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern or Landau in Rhineland-Palatinate. The analysis documents a peak of protest activity in the week immediately following Floyd's death on 25 May – more than 75% of all demonstrations were recorded in this period.

While the mobilisations entailed strong transnational references to BLM in the US, the mobilisations also sought to bring forward demands for antiracist social change in Germany, as illustrated by the following quote from one of the leading Black women’s organisations in Germany:

This emphasis on the multi-dimensionality of racism correspond to mainframes we identified in the interviews. Overall, we detected six central frames that the BLM-protesters sought to advance.⁴

• Labeling racism as racism: First and foremost, the BLM-protests in Germany denounced racism by explicitly labelling it as such (see quote above). This is noteworthy given the long-time reluctance to use the term in public debates in Germany. The BLM-protests explicitly aimed at breaking this bizarre German uneasiness and the use of inadequate terms such as xenophobia. The movement also made clear distinctions between the US and Germany, aware that the historical and socio-cultural context of Black Lives Matter and the debate on racism in Germany significantly differs from the US and requires a separate discussion.

• Racial profiling/racism in police institutions: A particular variant of institutionalised racism, which has become a key issue for the movement, was related to the police. The death of George Floyd was translated into claims against (racist) police violence in Germany, including references to the case of Oury Jalloh. In particular, the protests bridged Floyd's death to practices of racial profiling in Germany and the scandalous connections between the police and far-right groups (NSU 2.0) – hinting at institutionalised routines as fertile grounds for racist violence. As one activist put it: ‘The people on the street are young people who have had so many bad experiences with the police, and that pain of broken promises is expressed in these demonstrations.’ (Interview G3)

• Institutional racism: BLM protests specifically highlighted institutional and structural forms of racism, and thereby countered the dominant individualistic framing according to which racism is mostly perpetrated by extreme right-wing individuals on the fringes of society: ‘Mobilization gives us the opportunity not only to spread information, but also to discuss issues like structural racism’ (Interview G1). Accordingly, organisers and protesters regularly referred to the sectors of education and health as settings in which racism ocurrs on a daily and systemic basis. Thus, their accounts of everyday racism – which were often distinguished from institutional racism – were tied to institutional settings.

• Anti-Black racism: Moreover, the protests underlined the existence of anti-Black racism as a specific form of racism in Germany: ‘Generally, racism against Black people is something different and must be treated separately’ (Interview G5). On the one hand, the struggle against anti-Black racism was located within broader anti-racist activism; on the other hand, activists conceived anti-Black racism distinctly from other forms of racism, which should be fought against with specific means: ‘I’m specifically concerned with anti-Black racism. In the past, people only talked about ‘racism-racism’ and sometimes everything was meant and sometimes only specific forms. And now we differentiate anti-Muslim racism, anti-black racism, etc.’ (Interview G3).

• Black empowerment: The protest emphasised the situation of Black people with a clear focus on the voices, experiences and demands of Black individuals and groups in Germany. This resonates with the key role played by Black actors in organising the protests and the self-empowerment by many young Black individuals. In this vein, some activists underlined that their protest was a message to a wider public ‘for us by us’ – in other words, an occasion for Black community building and empowerment⁵: ‘through being visible on the streets, you empower other black people, and you show here are more people, they feel the same way you do’ (Interview G1). Moreover, the acknowledgment of Black life in Germany was important to the movement. Black people have been members of German society for generations, yet Black perspectives are underrepresented in academia, politics, and civil society in Germany (Aikins et al., 2021). As one activist put it: ‘[A]t times, this has been a frustrating experience, since we’ve been trying over and over again to point this out: Folks, Black activism in Germany doesn't start in 2020, but has existed since … at least the late 80s’ (Interview G1).

• Colonialism: Finally, the protests were embedded in a critique of German colonial history and legacies. Interviewees pointed out the need to raise awareness of colonial atrocities committed in the former German colonies, including the genocide against the Nama and Herero in German Southwest Africa (now Namibia), and called for the renaming of public spaces that commemorate the colonial perpetrators: ‘Racism or racisms have histories. Especially when we look at Black people, it is a very particular history because we’re talking about hundreds of years of colonialism and enslavement’ (Interview G4).⁶

We translate these six frames in six specific sets of search terms (dictionaries) for the quantitative analysis of media resonance. The dictionaries can be found in the  Appendix.

In this section, we first trace the development of the German media debate on racism since 2000. This helps both identifying the impact of BLM on the media debate and situating BLM in Germany in its broader discursive context. Subsequently, we identify the specific frames BLM put forward and assess how they resonated in the media debate.

These three aspects are worth discussing further: First, the German debate on racism has a longer history, even though it has been characterised as particularly reluctant to explicitly label racism as such (Geulen, 2015). Particularly in the 1990s, Germany witnessed a hitherto unprecedented scale of racist violence and the rise of a new nationalism following the reunification of Eastern and Western Germany in 1989. These racist mobilisations were met with counter mobilisations against racism and in support of migrants (Stjepandić et al., 2021). However, both academic and public debates interpreted anti-racist protest primarily as a response to the re-emergence of the far-right in reunified Germany (Jaschke, 1994). Racism as such (e.g. as a structural or institutional phenomenon) independently from far-right mobilisations was hardly discussed (Espahangizi et al., 2016). This began to change during the 2000s – with BLM seemingly being an important catalyst (see below).

Second, in the early 2000s, media attention on racism was triggered by the debate on a potential ban of the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). This initiative followed a series of racist attacks, including a bomb attack on a group of Jewish immigrants from Russia. The attempt to ban the NPD failed but sparked vivid debates on racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism in Germany (Nobrega et al., 2021). Later, important events driving the media debate on racism in Germany include the uncovering of the so-called NSU (National Socialist Underground) 2011, an extreme right terrorist group responsible for racist murder and attempted murder in dozens of cases, as well as the growing electoral support for the radical right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The so-called ‘long summer of migration’ in 2015 has also left its mark on debates of racism in Germany, yet mostly because of the skyrocketing racist attacks on refugees and their homes and not because of the pro-migrant and partly antiracist civil society mobilisations. Even a series of huge mobilising events such as the mass demonstrations for migration, diversity, social justice, and anti-racism, including ‘unteilbar’ in October 2018, which mobilised almost a quarter of a million protesters alone (Stjepandić et al., 2021), did not result in an increasing salience of racism in the media debate, even though the event itself was extensively reported.⁷ The peak in the salience of racism in 2018 documented in Figure 1 was not triggered by these mobilisations, but rather by debates on racism in the German Football Association (DFB).

Two conclusions can be drawn from this observation of the long-term trends in the German debate on racism: First, the BLM mobilisation indeed had a significant impact on the debate on racism in Germany by significantly increasing the media attention on that issue (salience). This suggests that the movement was able to reach one of its goals, labelling racism as racism – even if word counts are only a rough indication for the salience of racism. Second, the diachronic analysis also suggests that before BLM the salience of racism has already increased. Yet the debates were largely connected to right-wing extremism and violent attacks. This discursive context, which has successively opened up to debates on racism has provided a discursive opportunity for BLM to enter the public debate. The BLM-protest wave eventually served as a catalysing moment for the salience of racism in German media debates.

In a second step we examine whether BLM, in addition to increasing the salience of racism, also succeeded in creating resonance for its core movement frames⁸: racism as an institutional phenomenon (institutional racism), police violence, anti-Black racism as a particular variant of racism, Black Lives and Black empowerment as well as colonialism. We again trace the word frequencies back to the year 2000 to reconstruct the development of key frames over time.⁹

Even during the height of the protest, references to terms such as ‘Black lives’ were rare. We therefore engaged in an additional, qualitative reading of the articles, to gain a better understanding of the specific interpretation of these frames. In this closer reading, we first found that, unsurprisingly, most articles discussed topics of police violence and anti-Black racism in the US context – thereby interpreting the mobilisation in Germany as an act of solidarity with the people affected by racism in the US. Sentences such as ‘the solidaric sympathy [with George Floyd] goes far beyond the US borders, also in Germany people go to the streets’ (SZ 08.06.2020 own translation) – indicate that the externalisation of the problem (‘racism as a US problem’) continued to be prominent. Still, we also found comparative reflections on the case of Germany e.g. when a journalist stressed that there are similar claims in Minnesota as well as in Munich (SZ 10.06.2020). The protests also triggered attention to Black organisations in Germany, such as Each one Teach one (EOTO) or Initiative of Black People in Germany (ISD). In one extensive media interview, Tahir Della (ISD) discussed the peculiarities of racism in Germany and how the German white population could respond to racism (SZ 09.06.2020). The particularities of Black lives were presented through a series of interviews of Black celebrities from sports, culture, and politics, which were asked ‘what it means to be to be Black’ (SZ 08.06.2020). Jérôme Boateng, a famous professional footballer was quoted: ‘It is not only the severe acts of violence, but also the sum of many gestures, questions, doubts and hurdles in everyday life that can feel like a knee to the neck’ (SZ 08.06.2020, own translation).¹⁰

The colonialism frame most clearly resonated with media debates. Articles explicitly interpreted the critical engagement with colonialism as a result of the mobilisation: ‘Millions of people demonstrated, streets with discriminatory names were renamed, public monuments are being rediscussed’ (see also Atuire, 2020). There were articles about Germany's colonial past – also reflecting that many people in Germany neither have knowledge about the former colonies nor about the relationship between colonialism and racism. Most articles discussed the implications of the recognition of Germany's colonial past for museums, and the art and culture scene more broadly. The SZ reported several times that BLM counts as the most influential ‘person’ of the art scene as they pushed the debate on restitutions of colonial art (e.g. article from 03.12.2020). Museums were picking up the issue, fearing consequences for their exhibitions. A rather prominent issue before the BLM mobilisation was also the reconstruction of the old Berlin city castle (Humboldt Forum) – which, according to a journalist of the SZ, triggered the ‘most bitter allegations of colonialism in German museum history’ (SZ 12.12.2020, own translation). These debates paved the way for an increasing resonance with the colonialism frame during the BLM protest wave.

In sum, our data suggest that specific movement frames hardly received attention in the time before the 2020 BLM mobilisations. Accordingly, BLM did not only impact the salience of racism but also the framing of the debate. However, it only did so to a limited degree – and rather in articles centring on specific institutions, such as the police (racial profiling) or museums (colonialism).

Many observers have perceived the Black Lives Matter mobilisation as a game changer in the debate on racism. Studies in the US suggested that BLM protests disseminated antiracist ideas in mainstream media discourse (Dunivin et al., 2022). For Germany, neither longitudinal studies on the development of the debate on racism nor on the mass media impact of BLM exist. To fill this empirical gap, we developed a mixed methods strategy, combining qualitative and quantitative methods based on original data to assess the BLM-protests’ impact on the public debate on racism in Germany. We followed prominent propositions in frame analysis to use a nuanced approach to the multiple dimensions and degrees of frame resonance in a longitudinal perspective (Snow et al., 2014), while acknowledging the criticism of an overgeneralisation in the quantification of frames, which complicates the identification of specific frames from (intersectionally) marginalised groups.

Overall, we found that the BLM-protest wave in Germany had a significant impact as an agenda setter, pushing the public discussion of racism beyond the reporting about the protest events alone and decoupling the discussion on racism as a debate on the far-right. We also found that the protests created resonance for core movement frames related to specific expressions of anti-Black racism, colonialism, and Black lives in Germany in the mainstream media. In quantitative terms, however, the media resonance for those frames was limited. Furthermore, our qualitative readings of the newspaper articles suggest that BLM ideas were only partially reported. Many aspects of Black life in Germany and the particularities of anti-Black racism continued to remain largely invisible. In sum, the protest wave introduced broader discursive shifts in the debate on racism with selective resonance on specific topics.

This finding is puzzling and urges further analysis why BLM was more consequential than previous antiracist mobilisations by migrant communities or mobilisations in response to other acts of racist violence in Germany. In a tentative outlook, we want to discuss some plausible factors contributing to this unexpected outcome with a view to stimulate future research.

In the explanation of media attention to protest, movement scholars stress the intuitive importance of protest size and disruptiveness. In this regard, on the one hand, BLM indeed mobilised masses. More than 200.000 persons marched on the streets (Milman et al., 2021). Yet, the single protest events were also highly decentralised and thus relatively small with rallies taking place in urban centers and small towns in all sixteen Länder (states). This also corresponds with the organisational backbone of the mobilisations, which were predominantly organised spontaneously by young Black and/or Afro-diasporic – many of them women – often without previous experience in protest organisation or strong ties to anti-racist organisations (see also della Porta et al., forthcoming). Accordingly, BLM did not rely on a resource-rich and well-organised network of organisations from which social movement theories would expect stronger media resonance.

We, therefore, suggest drawing attention to other relevant contextual factors explaining mobilisation strength, public attention, and frame resonance. First, the specific timing of the protests provided a crucial opportunity: The BLM demonstrations in Germany took place within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, yet at a particular moment. The demonstrations were one of the first mass protests in Germany after the lifting of some of the toughest COVID-19 restrictions in May 2020. Accordingly, the protests were particularly newsworthy, as debates on social distancing regulations and rights to assembly were prominent. While some feared the waning of democracy, others warned that mass protest might again increase the spread of the virus. In addition to this general effect of timing, BLM bridged its key claims to the pandemic, pointing out that marginalised communities are most strongly affected (SZ 09.06.2020).¹¹ Furthermore, the protests in Germany unfolded in a transnational discursive opportunity (Milman et al., 2021; Oliver, 2021). BLM protests sparked worldwide, thus amplifying the scope of protests and adding to the newsworthiness of events. Lastly, our data provides evidence that the media resonance for antiracist claims during BLM should not be isolated from a broader trend in German public debates, which opened before the BLM protest wave. Key events in this process were the discussions around the ban of the German far-right party NPD, the right-wing terrorist group NSU, debates about racism in football or the racist attacks during the refugee reception crisis 2015. Such events increased the salience of racism in mainstream media, yet the BLM-protest wave marks a visible peak, lifting the salience of racism to a new level. Despite limits in the resonance of specific movement frames, our findings provide tentative evidence that the BLM mobilisation has contributed to a change in media debates on racism, and by this, opened a discursive space for both the resonance of racism in general and specific expressions. In how far these changes sustain, remains to be seen.

This study constitutes a first attempt to empirically trace and quantify the media impact of antiracist activism, and thereby to measure a distinct cultural-discursive impact of marginalised mobilisation. Its novel analytical approach opens avenues for future research: in order to assess the cultural-discursive impact of anti-racist mobilisation more broadly we believe it is worthwhile (a) including additional media sources, in order to compare the impact within different publics and to assess the combined media impact of the mobilisation; (b) looking into the role and power of specific actors to push debates and (c) broadening the analysis of media content to related discourses such as those on multiculturalism or diversity, as they could have spill-over effects on the debates on racism.¹²

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

dict1 <- list(

 Racism = c(

  ’"[rR]assismus.*"’,

  ’"[rR]assistisch.*"’

 ),

 Xenophobia = c(

  ’"[xX]enophob.*"’,

  ’"[fF]remdenfeind.*"’,

  ’"[aA]usl?nderfeind.*"’

 ),

 Antisemitism = c(

  ’"[aA]ntisemit.*"’,

  ’"Judenhass"’,

  ’"Judenfeind.*"’

 ),

 Right_wing_Extremism = c(

  ’"[rR]echtsextrem.*"’,

  ’"[rR]echtsradikal."’

 )

)

A3: Dictionaries Movement Frames

dict2 <- list(

  Colonialism = c(

  ’"[kK]olonial.*"’

 ),

 Institutional_Racism = c(

  ’"[Ii]nstitutionell.*" "Rassis.*"’,

  ’"[rR]assis.*" []{0,3} "Institution.*"’,

  ’"[sS]trukturell.*" "Rassis.*"’,

  ’"[aA]lltagsrassis*"’,

  ’"system.*" "Rassis.*"’

 ),

 Racial_Profiling = c(

  ’"[Rr]acial" "[pP]rofiling"’,

  ’"[rR]assist.*" []{0,4} "Polizeigewalt"’,

  ’"Polizeigewalt" []{0,4} "[rR]assist.*"’

 ),

 Anti_Black_Racism = c(

  ’"[aA]nti-schwarz.*"’,

  ’"[aA]ntischwarz.*" "Rassismus"’,

  ’"[rR]assis.*" []{,5} "[sS]chwarz.*"’,

  ’"[rR]assis.*" []{,5} "[aA]fro.*"’,

  ’"[rR]assis.*" []{,5} "POC*"’

 ),

 Black_Empowerment = c(

  ’"[sS]chwarz." "(Leben.*|Frauen|M?nner|Jugendliche|Kinder|Menschen)"’,

  ’"[aA]fro."’,

  ’"POC"’,

  ’"[sS]chwarz.*" "Deutsch.*"’,

  ’"[aA]frodeutsch.*"’,

  ’"[aA]fro-deutsch.*"’,

  ’"ADEFRA"’,

  ’"Citizen* for Europe"’,

  ’"Each One Teach One"’,

  ’"EOTO"’,

  ’"Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland"’,

  ’"Schwarze Menschen" []{0,3} "Deutschland"’

 )

)