Red States and Black Lives: Applying the Racial Threat Hypothesis to the Black Lives Matter Movement

Abstract

Despite increased media attention, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has received little scholarly attention. News coverage of BLM is often divisive, which suggests important differences may exist in how the public views BLM. Within the context of the racial threat perspective, the present study uses a nationally representative sample of 2,114 individuals from 33 states and the District of Columbia to identify state- and individual-level predictors of BLM opposition. Results reveal that older, Republican, and conservative men are more likely to oppose BLM, while Blacks and individuals who perceive their local police to exhibit racial biases against Blacks are less likely to oppose BLM. State-level racial threat variables are largely nonsignificant, but states with more fatal police shootings are less likely to oppose BLM, while states where the Republican candidate won a greater percentage of the vote in the 2012 presidential election are more likely to oppose BLM.

Keywords:

• Racial threat
• black lives matter
• law enforcement
• deadly force

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Alexander H. Updegrove is a Doctoral Research Assistant in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Sam Houston State University. His research interests include race and crime, immigration, criminology and public policy, and victimology. His recent works have appeared in Crime & Delinquency, the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, and the Journal of Criminal Justice Education.

Maisha N. Cooper, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research interests include juvenile justice and race and crime. Her recent work has appeared in the Journal of Criminal Justice Education and the Institute of Justice & International Studies.

Erin A. Orrick, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Sam Houston State University. Her research focuses on contemporary issues in corrections, among them correctional policy, prisoner reentry, recidivism, and criminal careers. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in leading journals such as Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Crime & Delinquency, and Journal of Criminal Justice.

Alex R. Piquero is Ashbel Smith Professor of Criminology and Associate Dean for Graduate Programs in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas and an Adjunct Professor in the Key Centre for Ethics, Law and Governance at Griffith University. His research interests include criminal careers, criminological theory, and quantitative research methods. He currently serves as editor of Justice Evaluation Journal. He has received several research, teaching, and service awards and is fellow of both the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. In 2014, he received The University of Texas System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award and in 2018 he was named to The University of Texas System Academy of Distinguished Teachers.

Notes

1 Blue Lives Matter is a misnomer because Black Americans do not control the level of melanin in their skin and cannot moderate their skin's appearance to escape the harmful effects of racism. In contrast, law enforcement officers freely choose their occupation and can take their uniform off when not on duty to avoid recognition as a police officer. Thus, the statement Black Lives Matter criticizes society's mistreatment of individuals based on immutable traits like skin color, while the statement Blue Lives Matter alleges that police officers are not being viewed positively in their community (something never guaranteed in their job). The former statement is about being denied fundamental human rights, while the latter is about members of a privileged occupation feeling threatened by a segment of society that has dared to question and criticize their practices in keeping with the first amendment right to free speech (Russell, 2016). It is also worth noting that Blue Lives Matter is not a social movement itself, but rather a response to the Black Lives Matter social movement.

2 These dramatic racial differences with respect to justice-related perceptions have also been reported in other social science areas including, for example, citizen perceptions of former NFL player Michael Vick’s criminal justice punishment and subsequent reinstatement by the NFL (Piquero et al., 2011), as well as young adult views of the 2017 NFL national anthem protests (Intravia et al., 2018), and criminal gangs (Piquero, 2018).

3 An examination of missing cases reveals that those who were eliminated from the sample due to missing covariates were significantly more likely to oppose the BLM movement. Those eliminated were also significantly more likely to be White, older, and male. Based on the nature of the analysis and our hypotheses regarding how these factors might relate to the outcome, our position is that the remaining cases would pose as a conservative test to the opposition of BLM.

4 States included in the analysis were AL, AZ, AR, CA, CO, CT, DE, DC, FL, GA, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MD, MA, MI, MN, MS, MO, NV, NJ, NY, NC, OH, OK, PA, SC, TN, TX, VA, WA, WI.

5 Ordinal logistic analyses were run retaining the original scale responses of the dependent variable; however, postestimation tests indicated that multiple variables in each of the models violated the proportional odds assumption, meaning the effects of the variables were not consistent across all response categories. Results of these models were substantively similar to those produced and presented here using the dichotomous indicator of the dependent variable.

6 Analyses were also conducted using two alternate treatments of the dependent variable. In the first alternate treatment, participants who neither supported nor opposed the BLM movement were added to the BLM opposition group. In contrast to the analysis results presented in this manuscript, this treatment resulted in married individuals being 39% more likely to oppose the BLM movement at p < .10, individuals who did not graduate high school being 60% more likely to oppose the BLM compared to high school graduates without a college degree at p < .10, and Other race and perceived discrimination no longer being marginally significant at p < .10. Fatal police shootings were also significant at p < .01 rather than p < .10, and the Black/White voter ratio was significantly and positively associated with opposition to the BLM movement. In the second alternate treatment, participants who neither supported nor opposed the BLM movement were removed from the sample. In contrast to the analysis results presented in this manuscript, this treatment resulted in individuals who did not graduate high school being 71% more likely to oppose the BLM movement compared to individuals who graduated high school but not college at p < .10. Additionally, Other race and perceived discrimination were no longer significant at p < .10, fatal police shootings were significant at p < .05 rather than p < .10, and the Black/White voter ratio was significantly and positively associated with opposition to the BLM movement. We have chosen the treatment of the dependent variable as presented in this manuscript over these two alternate treatments because it produces models with pseudo R² values slightly larger than the alternate two treatments, and because it serves as the most conservative test of BLM opposition from a theoretical perspective.

7 Many studies that examine public attitudes on social issues control for Catholic religious affiliation. In part, this is because “Many religious groups do not have an official stance on moral issues…One group that does have official doctrine, which is easily accessible and simple to examine, is the Catholic Church” (Bias, Goldberg, & Hannum, 2011, p. 3). One Catholic doctrine that has been linked to social issues such as the death penalty and abortion is the sanctity of life. This principle can be summed up as follows: “Each life, each individual, each human being is unique, and each is equally and infinitely precious. That is the root of Catholic morality on all issues of human life” (Kreeft, 2001, p. 8). The sanctity of life doctrine states that Catholics should oppose capital punishment because “it is obviously unjust to kill one man and not another because…of any kind of racial prejudice” (Kreeft, 2001, p. 10). Thus, studies examining public attitudes toward the death penalty have controlled for Catholic religious affiliation (Sanchez, 2006; Soss, Langein, & Metelko, 2003; Updegrove & Orrick, 2017). Similarly, sanctity of life doctrine requires Catholics to oppose abortion because “All persons, not just some, have a 'natural right' to life simply because of their nature, because of what they are: human persons” (Kreeft, 2001, p. 13). As a result, scholars have used Catholic religious affiliation to predict attitudes toward abortion (Sanchez, 2006). It is not a stretch to imagine that Catholics may also draw upon the sanctity of life doctrine that is so fundamental to their faith to guide them on how they should view the BLM movement. The BLM movement is dedicated to proclaiming that Black Lives Matter and should be valued rather than tragically ended by police officers acting on racial prejudices. This message appears consistent with the Catholic sanctity of life doctrine. Additionally, Catholics are expected to “take cues from the pope” (Mulligan, 2006, p. 746). Pope Francis has frequently demonstrated interest in social justice issues in the US and praised the Civil Rights Movement, which some perceive to share similarities with the BLM movement (Morrison, 2015). For these reasons, we control for Catholic religious affiliation in the present study.

8 Individuals who attend religious services more often are assumed to more closely adhere to the values associated with their faith. Thus, religious involvement is a proxy measure for how important an individual's religious faith and its associated moral values are to them.

9 The original question for income resulted in ordinal categorical responses. The cutoff to recode the variable dichotomously was determined by the mean response group to create two groups; 1 = higher than average income, 0 = lower than average income).

10 A combined variable of both percent Black and percent Latinx was included in the model due to the moderately high correlation between the two variables (-0.51). Separate models were run, one with % Black only, one with % Latinx only, one with both measures, and one with the combined measure only. In none of the models were these measures significant, nor did the choice of model substantively change the effects of the other covariates. Model fit statistics suggested the combined variable produced the best fitting model. As such, those results are presented here.

11 Multicollinearity between all individual- and state-level variables was assessed and found not to be an issue. All correlations between included variables were under r = .70.

12 Analyses were also conducted using a multilevel framework to account for the clustering of individuals within states. Due to the small amount of variation explained between states and model fit tests suggesting the logistic regression models with clustered standard errors were a better fit, only the latter models are included. Results from both sets of analyses were substantively identical.

13 Additional state-level variables were available for inclusion in the model, such as: the number of full-time police officers per 100,000 population in 2015, the 2015 violent crime rate, the number of executions carried out in the state up through 2015, the number of historical lynchings per state, whether a state had passed Blue Lives Matter legislation, and the percent of households below the poverty line in 2010. Due to issues with multicollinearity, however, model fit tests were conducted by adding each of the state-level covariates individually. These diagnostic tests indicated the best model fit was with the inclusion of percent Republican voter. Additionally, percent Republican voter and number of fatal police shootings in 2015 were the only two variables at the state-level in this group that were statistically significant in their relationships with opposition to the BLM movement (aside from racial threat variables).

14 The states shown in white (as well as both Alaska and Hawaii) were not included in the sample, with the exception of Delaware, which is in fact a valid observation.

15 Although we are unaware of any empirical research into this issue, one potential explanation for why BLM opposition is so high in Minnesota is that the Minneapolis chapter of the BLM movement staged several highly visible calls for local law enforcement reform in 2015, including peacefully disrupting drivers' work commutes by blocking multiple highways (Tigue, 2015) – events which predate when the Pew data were collected (February 29, 2016 through May 8, 2016). Incidents such as these may have increased opposition to the BLM movement throughout the state, especially among those personally inconvenienced by the resulting traffic. Furthermore, Minneapolis community members disagreed over how to respond to the 2015 police shooting of Jamar Clark, with older community leaders urging the BLM movement to keep the peace and avoid demonstrating (The Associated Press, 2015). Thus, even when community members are sympathetic to the causes the BLM movement represents, they may still ultimately oppose the BLM movement because of the tactics individuals in the movement employ. In these cases, opposition to the BLM movement stems from disagreement over tactics rather than disagreement with BLM's core message of racial inequality. It is also worthwhile to note that the Pew data collection predated the July 6, 2016 fatal police shooting of Philando Castile by two months. It would be illuminating for future research to examine whether levels of opposition to the BLM movement increased, decreased, or remained relatively stable in Minnesota after the widely publicized police shooting of Philando Castile.

16 A separate independent samples t-test revealed that in the average state that passed Blue Lives Matter legislation, 38.2% of individuals opposed the BLM movement. In contrast, only 29.9% of individuals from the average state that did not pass Blue Lives Matter legislation opposed the BLM movement. This difference was marginally significant (t(32) = -1.62, p = .11)).