Supporting the Message, Not the Messenger: The Correlates of Attitudes towards Black Lives Matter

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.