“You don’t know nothing about being me”: Ideology and Characterisation in When They See Us

In this paper, a range of linguistic and multimodal approaches are used to show how the Us versus Them polarisation between the White and the Black population is construed in the American TV show When They See Us (2019). Starting from the contribution of linguistic and visual choices at the level of paratext, the study analyses how the representation of the black characters heavily relies on trite stereotypes about food, sport and music. A key role in this polarisation is played by language variation, which also explains why the white characters struggle to make sense of some colloquial expressions used by the black group, ultimately misunderstanding their meaning.