Supporting the Message, Not the Messenger: The Correlates of Attitudes towards Black Lives Matter
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Supporting the Message, Not the Messenger: The Correlates of Attitudes towards Black Lives Matter Omeed S. Ilchi 1 & James Frank 2 Received: 11 February 2020 / Accepted: 6 August 2020/ # Southern Criminal Justice Association 2020
Abstract Since the Black Lives Matter movement’s rise to prominence, there has been significant opposition from both media and political figures who believe that the movement is promoting a “war on cops.” Because there is no evidence to support this claim, the current study examines the basis for negative attitudes towards Black Lives Matter using a sample of over 500 undergraduate students from a large Midwestern university. The findings indicate that the strongest predictors of negative attitudes towards Black Lives Matter are being white and holding symbolically racist attitudes. Perceiving the police to be equivalent to soldiers in a war on crime, perceiving police misconduct to be less common, and holding a conservative crime ideology are also significant in the model. Keywords Symbolic racism . Black Lives Matter . Police accountability . Public attitudes
Introduction Black Lives Matter (BLM) began as a phrase in a Facebook post in the summer of 2013, shortly after George Zimmerman was acquitted for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American teenager. It was a statement made in response to a perception that the criminal justice system, and the United States as a whole, did not value the lives of African Americans as much as it valued the lives of others. It was not a statement of supremacy; it was a statement of and demand for equality (Chaney and Robertson 2015; Cobbina 2019; Drakulich et al. 2020; Hartigan 2020; Lowery 2016); that Black lives “should have the same value as those of non-Blacks” (Sawyer and Gampa 2018, p. 1039). A year after Zimmerman’s acquittal, Darren Wilson, a police officer with the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department, shot and killed Michael Brown,
* Omeed S. Ilchi [email protected]
1
Department of Criminal Justice, Westfield State University, Westfield, MA, USA
2
School of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA
American Journal of Criminal Justice
an unarmed African American teenager, and a statement of equality turned into a movement (Cobb 2016). Citizens protested in Ferguson in response to the shooting, which led the Ferguson Police Department to use military-style weapons and equipment in response. It was a response that some saw as the deployment of a small army to deal with a peaceful demonstration (Chokshi 2014). A year later, the Department of Justice issued a report criticizing the Ferguson Police Department for escalating tensions between citizens and the police through their use of military equipment and weapons and violating citizens’ freedom of assembly (Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing 2015). Ultimately, a grand jury failed to indict Wilson for Brown’s death and the Department of Justice investigation could not conclude definitively that Brown, as eyewitne
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