In 2020, the murder of George Floyd sparked the Black Lives Matter movement resulting in thousands of protests against police brutality and racial discrimination across the country.
According to a study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the country experienced a significant and rapid drop in White Americans’ racial biases towards Black Americans following the onset of BLM protests. However, White Americans’ racial biases slowly increased through the year, nearly reaching pre-BLM levels by the end of 2020.
To measure White Americans’ levels of implicit and explicit racial biases, the authors used data collected in 2020 by Project Implicit, a nonprofit organization dedicated to studying the thoughts and feelings that often operate outside of conscious awareness. This information was combined with data from the Armed Conflict Location Event Data Project and the proportion of Google searches for the term “Black Lives Matter” per state relative to the total number of searches in that state.
Both implicit and explicit biases against Black Americans dropped rapidly in the initial weeks following the onset of the BLM movement. As attention to the movement decreased, both types of racial biases slowly increased. The authors provide two possible explanations for the initial drop in racial biases. First, the BLM protests could have caused the drop. However, it is also also possible that the BLM protests attracted different people to participate in the Project Implicit study, and this change of sample composition could have contributed to the drop in racial biases in the summer of 2020.
“The death of George Floyd and the resulting immediate reactions were followed by a rapid decrease in racial bias, but these changes were short-lived,” the authors write. “For long-term changes in the social and cultural environment — and corresponding long-term changes in attitudes and behavior — protests may be insufficient but might need to be translated into policy and legislative changes that have stronger potential to permanently alter existing social norms.”
The study was authored by scholars at Radboud University in the Netherlands.
