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The Democratic Necessity of Reckoning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2024

Erica Chenoweth*
Affiliation:
Harvard Kennedy School Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Extract

In the years since the onset of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement—and especially since the Ferguson uprising—scholars have tried to understand how the movement has affected public life in the United States. The scholarship overwhelmingly shows that periods of intense BLM protest have generated high levels of public awareness about systemic racism and increased support for criminal justice reform.1 Police homicides have declined in areas with BLM protests.2 And liberals exposed to BLM protests were more supportive of candidates who condemned systemic racism and supported criminal justice reform in the 2020 elections.3

Type
A Symposium on Deva Woodly's Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame

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References

1 Dunivin, Zackary Okun, Yan, Harry Yaojun, Ince, Jelani, and Rojas, Fabio, “Black Lives Matter Protests Shift Public Discourse,” PNAS 119, no. 10 (2022), e2117320119CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Reny, Tyler R. and Newman, Benjamin J., “The Opinion-Mobilizing Effect of Social Protest against Police Violence: Evidence from the 2020 George Floyd Protests,” American Political Science Review 115, no. 4 (2021): 14991507CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mathias Ebbinghaus, Nathan Bailey, and Jacob Rubel, “Defended or Defunded? Local and State Policy Outcomes of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests” (working paper, SocArXiv, https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/pbrqu/).

2 Travis Campbell, “Black Lives Matter's Effect on Police Lethal Use-of-Force” (working paper, Social Science Research Network, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3767097).

3 Bouke Klein Teeselink and Georgios Melios, “Weather to Protest: The Effect of Black Lives Matter Protests on the 2020 Presidential Election” (working paper, Social Science Research Network, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3809877).

4 Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html.

5 Mwende Katwiwa of BYP100 New Orleans, quoted in Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), 183Google Scholar.

6 Dunivin et al., “Black Lives Matter Protests Shift Public Discourse.”