This article presents evidence that exposure to officer-involved deaths of low-threat Black victims increases political interest and voter turnout among Black respondents under age 40 to the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey. Victim race, threat level, and visibility affect the likelihood that an officer-involved death will mobilize political interest. Political interest and voter turnout are higher among the treatment group, which was exposed to high-visibility/low-threat Black victims only before participating in the CMPS, than in the control group, which was exposed to such victims only after taking the survey. Exposing young Black respondents to all victims without accounting for threat, visibility, or race does not affect political interest or voter turnout, suggesting the importance of these factors for mobilization. The findings clarify the role that Black Lives Matter activists, journalists, and watchdog groups can play in countering the police actions that shape the visibility and framing of Black victims of police violence.

In the spring and summer of 2020, a remarkable number of Americans participated in a remarkable number of protests in support of Black Lives Matter. How did the general public understand these protests, and where does support for the movement stand overall? We answer this question by drawing on several national surveys from 2020 and then examining the results of a framing experiment we conducted in June 2020. We structure the story we find in two parts—the partisans and the persuadables—both of whom are important to understanding public views of Black Lives Matter. Democrats and Republicans differ strongly in their views of the movement but are similar in the firmness of those views, which did not change in response to our framing experiment. Nonpartisans, in contrast, were more persuadable, though their reactions to some of our frames were conditioned by racial resentment. We conclude by setting the movement in historical context and assessing its impact, which we describe as complicated and contradictory but consequential.

A growing literature demonstrates the importance of both race and skin color in one’s lived experiences, including interactions with police. Media discourse and anti-police brutality movements consistently emphasize race while little, if any, attention is given to skin color. This paper seeks to examine how Black Americans navigate the multidimensionality of race with respect to organizing efforts against institutionalized racism. Do Black Americans perceive skin color as informing police interactions or support incorporating skin color into anti-brutality movement messaging? Is self-identified skin color associated with these views? A combination of sixty-seven in-depth interviews and two national surveys of Black Americans reveals widespread recognition that darker-skinned Black people are more likely to be brutalized by police and feelings that Black Lives Matter organizing is implicitly associated with skin color. Yet there is general hesitancy for movement messaging to explicitly engage with subgroup disparities based on characteristics like skin color or gender. Among self-identified darker-skinned individuals, skin color is perceived as even more tightly interwoven with policing and there is more openness to discussing skin color alongside race. Overall, this mixed-methods project highlights how Black Americans perceive the multidimensionality of racialized interactions and, in search of justice, strategize responses through social movement organizing.

How do local citizens publicly converse online about the protests that follow when police kill Black residents? And do participants reflect local publics? Here we examine racial justice protests in Baton Rouge after police killed Alton Sterling in 2016. Local news streamed the protests on Facebook Live. In comments appearing below the video, locals supported and attacked each other in real-time while watching protests unfold. We assess a representative sample of these comments. First, we find surprising demographic and political representativeness in comments compared to census data and a local survey. We also document extensive hostile rhetoric corresponding with commenter traits and expressed views. Finally, we find more “likes” for comments by women, college-educated people, and locals. Violent and racially derogatory comments by Blacks received fewer likes, but similar comments by whites went unpenalized. The results illuminate social media functions in local politics, racial disparities in contentious digital dialogues, and political communication’s dual roles in strengthening and undermining multiracial democracy.

The relationship between Black Lives Matter (BLM) and anti-police brutality movements abroad reveals the variety of ways in which Black feminist theories of justice have taken root in public discourse. The EndSARS movement in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and the world’s largest Black nation, illustrates the influence of BLM transnationally and some of the continuities and discontinuities between anti-police brutality movements across contexts. I examine these two movements in tandem and develop a theory of political behaviour that builds on transnational Black and African feminist insights. More specifically, I consider how Black feminist articulations of intersectionality, personal politics, and Black liberation have informed the language and organizational praxis of two of the largest anti-police brutality movements to have taken place in the midst of a global pandemic. Here, I argue that organizers, many of whom were women, leveraged social power, in the form of embeddedness in politically active communities, to effectively organize protests and demand for justice. Through this comparative analysis, I contribute substantively to our understanding of how social power engenders political empowerment for individuals and communities in spite of patriarchal systems of exclusion.

Congregations, with their size, breadth, and legacy of shaping political activism, have the potential to be important sites of action for addressing racial injustice in America. Yet historical legacies of racism and persistently high levels of racial animus have made white evangelical communities in particular resistant to addressing racism. Most efforts to address racism in these communities begin with prejudice reduction programs that often fail. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, we examine the effectiveness of a different kind of six-week racial justice program in one of the nation’s largest evangelical megachurches that focuses on animating action among people open to tackling racial injustice in their church. We find that program participation is associated with increased feelings of efficacy, amplified perceptions of community, a greater commitment to cross-racial perspective taking, and greater likelihood of engaging in meaningful action. We argue that the program works by focusing on cross-racial relationship building to equip a people pre-disposed to action to actually take action. Developing such leaders is potentially the first step in a program other congregations can take to tackle racial injustice.

Because of its genealogy and a shared commitment to racial justice, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement might be expected to have strong cooperative links with community organizing groups. Close, localized study of the interactions between these two approaches to social change reveals, however, something quite different. Far from being harmonious, the relations between BLM and community organizing prove to be marked by distrust, sometimes competition, and, more sporadically, cooperation. This article, based on ethnographic surveys in Los Angeles and Chicago, investigates how the BLM movement deployed and took root at the local level and how it interacted with community organizing groups in both cities. Emphasizing the importance of blending a meso-sociological level of analysis with a micro-sociological approach, we argue that the relations of competition and distinction, embodied in distinct group styles, repertoires of action, and organizational forms, can be explained by taking into account the actors’ resources, social properties, socializations, and trajectories. The article’s comparative perspective also shows that forms of cooperation may exist despite competition, and that cooperation is made possible in particular by younger people playing a bridging role.

Many were taken aback by the initial spike in support for Black Lives Matter among white Americans during the summer of 2020. But will these antiracist attitudes translate into antiracist behavior? Accordingly, I ask under what conditions do white Americans engage in antiracist behavior? To answer this question, I build upon the insights of Martin Luther King, Jr., and A. Philip Randolph to theorize contemporary white antiracism. I argue that, under neoliberal capitalism, the conditions they laid out as necessary for the cultivation of productive antiracist politics have been difficult to satisfy. In lieu of that, in many instances, has been the privatization of racial responsibility, which I coin to describe a form of antiracist politics that relies upon white individuals’ sympathetic (and often symbolic) gestures rather than the implementation of more state programs to address structural racial injustices. I discuss what this development might mean for the Black Lives Matter movement—and the Black Freedom Struggle writ large—moving forward.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement arose to put a much-needed spotlight on police brutality and systemic racism. In two comprehensive studies, we sought to investigate the determinants of support for the BLM movement. First, in a systematic review 1,588 records were identified and findings from twenty-four studies (Npooled =27,691) were narratively synthesized along five categories relating to demographics, race, partisanship and ideology, discrimination and prejudice, and psychology. Second, we exhaustively examined the determinants of BLM support across thirteen probability-based nationally representative datasets (Npooled =31,779), finding thirty-seven common predictors for which individual meta-analyses were conducted to estimate the strength and robustness of their associations. Our results suggest a near perfect match between BLM opposition and positive attitudes towards political actors and institutions rooted in systemic racism in the United States. The present work contributes to a broad categorization of correlates of support for BLM across social, psychological, and political domains.

Summer 2020 saw widespread protests under the banner Black Lives Matter. Coupled with the global pandemic that kept America’s children in the predominant care of their parents, we argue that the latter half of 2020 offers a unique moment to consider whites’ race-focused parenting practices. We use Google Trends data and posts on public parenting Facebook pages to show that the remarkable levels of protest activity in summer 2020 served as a focusing event that not only directed Americans’ attention to racial concepts but connected those concepts to parenting. Using a national survey of non-Hispanic white parents with white school-age children, we show that most white parents spoke with their children about race during this period and nearly three-quarters took actions to increase racial diversity in their children’s environment or introduce them to racial politics. But the data also show parenting practices to be rife with uncertainty and deep partisan, gender, and socioeconomic divisions. Drawing upon our findings, we call for a renewed focus on political socialization that considers how parenting choices are shaped by political events—including Black Lives Matter—and the possible long-term consequences of racial parenting practices on politics.

In this article examining Black Lives Matter in France, we consider how French politicians and others in the public sphere use a U.S./France contrast frame to deny or downplay the existence of systemic racism within France. In so doing, they delegitimize as un-French or as too Americanized those French anti-racist activists who claim that racism in France is systemic and who challenge republican difference-blindness. To demonstrate this, we specifically focus on anti-racist activism against police violence and argue that, contrary to accusations by French political leaders, anti-racist activists do not directly impose U.S. Black Lives Matter discourse onto the French context. Rather, they deploy it in conversation with existing and long-standing anti-racist mobilization in France. This comparison between the United States and France also reveals the unique challenges of addressing police violence as a manifestation of racism in France, where anti-racist activists must fight to even name race and racism.

Within the context of a social movement, a niche is a set of its supporters’ characteristics that define the movement’s location in a multidimensional space. Niches may clearly separate movements from one another or niches may overlap. This article examines the realization of an activist niche by Black Lives Matter (BLM), which has become one of the most prominent movements of the early twenty-first century. It draws on surveys of 3,860 activists conducted in Washington, DC, in 2017 and 2018, and 393 surveys of activists participating in the March for Racial Justice in five cities in 2017. The results show that BLM activists formed a niche along five dimensions. First, BLM activists have a greater-than-average commitment to intersectional activism than do comparable activists in other movements. Second, they use social media more regularly for political purposes than do their peers working on other causes, which helps the movement operate in a decentralized fashion. Third, they are less satisfied with how democracy is practiced in the United States. Fourth, they are more likely to acknowledge justifications for using violence for political purposes. Fifth, they report having experienced high levels of anger in conjunction with politics.

Informality is often studied by scholars of urban studies but has received comparatively little attention by political scientists. This is surprising given the fact that large portions of the world’s population live, work, or transfer funds informally. The conventional wisdom is that the informal economy—the portion of the economy operating outside the regulatory reach of the state—is not very political because informal sector workers are relatively atomized and find collective action to be costly. The three books reviewed here, however, demonstrate that the informal sector is not only characterized by important forms of political organization but also affects politics within government institutions—and can even contribute to regime downfall. Calla Hummel’s Why Informal Workers Organize and Shelby Grossman’s Politics of Order in Informal Markets examine organization among informal sector workers, with Hummel probing the circumstances under which organization occurs and Grossman when such organizations are effective. In Black Markets and Militants, Medani takes the opposite perspective, examining how informal financial flows and networks affect state regulatory capacity. These three books marshal significant amounts of original data, pointing to how future research on these important dynamics can be conducted.

Three recent books introduce political scientists to important debates and conceptual challenges for contemporary social science research. Rather than proposing new methods, these books propose new frameworks that their authors believe should guide current practice. The authors and editors seek to guide researchers through the research process, from asking questions and proposing theories to operationalizing concepts and executing comparative research designs. Reading the three books together will give researchers a comprehensive overview of the state of the discipline on important questions like how and what to compare, what social science concepts should refer to, and how to proceed when theory and empirics disagree.

There is no doubt that the political economy of contemporary China has received significant attention, both in academic disciplines and in the real world. The role of the state in the economy and the relations between government and business actors have always been central concerns of classic social science works about China. There are, however, several crucial challenges in studying this topic. The complicated landscape of a multilayered, fragmented Chinese state and numerous state-owned, private, foreign, or mixed-type businesses has made it difficult to tease out their interactions and establish a comprehensive theoretical model. The fast-changing nature of state–market relations and their vast subnational and sectoral variation has often prevented scholars from generalizing those lessons beyond the case or issue area. Yet, among all these, the most daunting challenge is: How can studies of a particularly interesting phenomenon in China’s political economy contribute to broader discussions of state–society relations, regime durability, and state-led development without losing respectable country expertise?