Black Lives Research Articles

Public attitudes toward athlete activism in sport: utilizing a multivariate list experiment to address social desirability bias in survey responses

ABSTRACT Research Question: This study investigates the degree of hidden racial hatred towards athlete protests within the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement by correcting for the Social Desirability Bias (SDB) in survey responses. Research Methods: Employing a multivariate list experiment on a nationally representative sample (n = 1,075), it assesses the extent of SDB and explores variations in support for on-field kneeling protests based on the race of the athlete, respondent demographics, and sport fan identification. Results and Findings: Findings reveal underreported disapproval for BLM-supportive athlete activism, particularly when the protesting athlete is identified as Black. Further analyses highlight hidden biases influenced by respondents’ race, region, political affiliation, and fan identification. Implications: Our findings offer valuable insight on applying list experiments to reduce social desirability biases in surveys, ensuring more accurate reflections of public opinion on contentious topics.

#Polarized: Gauging Potential Policy Bargaining Ranges Between Opposing Social Movements of Black Lives Matter and Police Lives Matter

(1) Background: Since the death of George Floyd, the social movement Black Lives Matter continues to dominate the American political psyche, not only advancing a public dialogue but also escalating the polarization of supported solutions for policing and systemic discrimination. (2) Methods: Using a qualitative context analysis approach, we assessed over 350 sources related to social justice literature and policy-relevant documents to identify key policy solutions supported by the American Black Lives Matter movement compared to the Blue Lives Matter movement. We applied Fearon’s bargaining range of war model to analyze the extent to which the policy recommendations of these two opposing movements may overlap. The purpose was to identify and categorize agreement alternatives across various sectors. This research presents top policy solutions, assessing their bargaining ranges. (3) Results: 32 of the 36 top policy reform alternatives at the national level have sufficient bargaining ranges. This analysis indicates the importance of supporting various sectors like mental health/psychosocial policies and programs, which can (1) serve as a focal point of agreement between contending movements, and (2) decrease racial injustice through strategic bargaining. (4) Conclusions: In a divisively political landscape, it is crucial to identify starting points for negotiation among contending actors. Identifying bargaining opportunities can help seed a dialogue that may benefit all parties involved.

The Internationalization of #BlackLivesMatter: Solidarity From Minneapolis to Gaza

This article aims to better understand the contemporary nature of Black-Palestinian solidarity by directly speaking to activists and explain why US-based Anti-Police Brutality Movements, like Black Lives Matter, share a sense of common solidarity with Palestinians. We argue that solidarity by US-based anti-police brutality movement activists with Palestinians has become more salient since the 2014 Ferguson Protests and especially since the 2020 George Floyd protests that started in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Interviews with activists in Minnesota reveal that interviewees tend to highlight a shared sense of oppression with Palestinians, which is largely perceived through symbolic images and videos shared on social media. Moreover, we find that the Covid-19 pandemic served as a catalyst for the unprecedented mass mobilization that followed the murder of George Floyd. The Covid-19 pandemic, the simultaneous struggle with similar injustice frames occurring in both Ferguson and Gaza, and the powerful images and videos of oppression and police brutality all influenced increasing solidarity and connections among these two disparate struggles.

Review: Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest, by Ian C. Hartman and David Reamer

Review: <i>Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest</i>, by Ian C. Hartman and David Reamer

Apartheid in the digital outdoors? An analysis of the Instagram content of outdoor brands in the US, UK and Scandinavia

The outdoors offers widely understood health and wellbeing benefits and provides an unparalleled resource for the realization and projection of identity, from the personal to the national. Yet access to the outdoors in the countries of the global North is manifestly unequal, with BIPOC communities typically much less likely than their white counterparts to participate in outdoor leisure activities such as hiking, trail running, cycling, climbing, etc. This study revisits the hypothesis that outdoors media plays a central role in perpetuating what Martin (2004) terms “apartheid in the Great Outdoors” by performing a content analysis of the Instagram posts of the top 10 outdoor brands in the US, Scandinavia and UK between the spring and summer seasons of 2020 – a period when the global pandemic restricted access to the outdoors at the same time as the Black Lives Matter movement raised awareness of systemic racial inequalities. The analysis reveals that whilst there is a purposeful response to calls to diversify the outdoors in the representational strategies of US outdoor brands, this is not the case in the UK and Scandinavia. In these locations the digital outdoors and its associated leisure identities remain overwhelmingly white, young, straight, and able-bodied.

From Black squares to White guilt: The influence of Black Lives Matter on non-Indigenous views of the Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia

This article examines the impact of the global Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement on decolonization efforts in Australia, focusing on non-Indigenous Australians’ attitudes towards the Voice to Parliament (VtP). This study utilized surveys (122 respondents) and interviews (11) with predominantly non-Indigenous Australians, conducted before the October 2023 VtP referendum. We found that the BLM movement did not bridge the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Instead, the research highlights a highly polarized environment, particularly evident in the discourse surrounding the VtP referendum. Factors such as the lack of truth-telling regarding Australia's colonial history, media bias, community segregation and political polarization created a complex association between BLM and stances on the VtP. A promising result is that individuals who recognized the link between BLM and challenges faced by Indigenous Australians were more likely to support the VtP. The overall findings indicate that Australia has a way to go towards true reconciliation.

EUROPEAN SCEPTICISM AND ANTI-AMERICANISM IN THE EURO-ATLANTIC POLITICAL PROCESS IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

The article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the development of European scepticism and anti-Americanism in the public political process in the United States and the European Union. In the countries of the European Union, the term European scepticism refers to a negative attitude towards the process of European integration and its functional result in the form of the European Union. In the United States, mostly in ultra-conservative circles, European scepticism refers to a critical attitude towards the EU as the embodiment of the liberal democracy project. Anti-Americanism as an ideological attitude is present not only in European far-left political circles, but also in European far-right political circles. In the United States, the ideology of anti-Americanism was clearly manifested in the Black Lives Matter movement. European scepticism and anti-Americanism are actively used by Russian and Chinese propaganda as signs of an allegedly inevitable crisis of the ‘collective West’ and a ‘natural transition’ to a multipolar world in which Western democracies will not be crucial for further development. The conclusions emphasise that populist diseases of liberal democracies are actively used by autocracies to discredit the democratic experience of political life. At the same time, Russia, Iran, and China are trying to take advantage of discourses on scenarios of the US isolation from active foreign policy and the European Union's self-restrictions in pursuing its own common foreign policy and impose their own versions of ‘hybrid wars’, pushing Western influence out of key regions of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. In view of this, the transfer of ideas of anti-Americanism and European scepticism from the circle of leading trends in public political life to its deep periphery can actually ensure greater stability not only for liberal democracies, but also for modern international relations.

Rehistoricizing Black Masculinity in The Wonder Years Reboot

Popular entertainment remains one of the last places where Black history lives on despite the recent political erasure of U.S. Black struggles. The 2021 reboot of The Wonder Years, reframing Black masculinity through the young eyes of main character Dean Williams, rehistoricizes modern notions of Black families in the post-Civil Rights Movement. The purpose of this study is to explore Black masculinity media representations within reboot culture as a means to rehistoricize Black struggle and civil rights. Based on discourse analysis, the authors found the following three discourses: Reimagining Black Excellence, Recontextualizing Black Masculinity, and Revisiting Respectability Politics.

“You can't ignore us”: Multiliteracies and disruption in youth activism

AbstractThis article examines the activism of student protesters in a rural Rust Belt community's Black Lives Matter protest, challenging prevailing stereotypes about civic engagement, literacies, and youth involvement in rural settings. Utilizing critical ethnography and nexus analysis to examine disruptions of discourses in place and interview student participants about their activism, findings showcase how students strategically practiced multiliteracies to upturn power dynamics and assume leadership roles within a socio‐spatial landscape. Examining youth protest literacies can inform education partners of the ways students already engage in civic discourse and how understanding their co‐construction of space can inform practices across learning communities.

THE TYBEE ISLAND, GEORGIA BLACK HISTORY TRAIL: A COMMUNITY APPROACH to BLACK GEOGRAPHIES

ABSTRACT Tybee Island, Georgia, was a colonial borderland between Spanish and British America before evolving into a middle-class, seaside resort in the 1800s. It continued as a popular vacation spot in the twentieth century. However, research has highlighted the island’s troubling history of racial segregation, particularly surrounding events like the Orange Crush Beach Party. Previous studies also underscored the Historical Society ignoring the island’s Black history in its exhibits. Building on this, a collaborative project emerged in 2021 involving a Georgia Southern University faculty member and undergraduate student, Tybee MLK Human Rights Organization, and Tybee Island Historical Society. The goal was to create a Black History Trail highlighting a rich yet ignored Black history and culture on the island and addressing the exclusion of Tybee’s Black population from museums and markers. This project integrates community geography, focusing on resolving problems like social exclusion, and exploring spatialities of Black life, social oppressions, and resistance. Utilizing archival research, oral history interviews, and ArcGIS, the project developed a 13-stop virtual tour using ESRI Story Maps. We conclude our paper by highlighting the lessons learned during the trail’s development, the multitude of ways the trail embodies the theory of Black geographies in practice, and the broader challenges in honoring Tybee’s Black geographies. Keywords: community geography, Black geographies, Tybee Island, tourism, memory

“I can’t tell you what freedom is ’cause I’ve never seen it”: Addressing the Omission of Liberation Narratives in Sociology

ABSTRACT While liberation, or the process of freeing marginalized individuals and groups from societal oppression and domination, is referenced across many sub-disciplines of sociology, it surprisingly remains under-conceptualized in sociological literature. To address this omission, the present study responds to the following query: how, if at all, do Black individuals conceive of a Black liberated future? I draw on data from 65 in-depth interviews with Black Millennials during Black Lives Matter to capture their imaginings of a Black liberated future. Findings reveal that participants construct four types of liberation narratives when detailing their perceptions of Black freedom: 1) Liberation via Reformation, 2) Liberation via Reconstruction, 3) Liberation via Afrocentrism, and 4) Liberation as Inconceivable. I ultimately argue that liberation narratives function as resistant knowledge projects and, as such, are significant socio-political artifacts and resources for future generations of change agents, community organizers, and social movements actors. Altogether, this study demonstrates how rectifying the omission of liberation narratives magnifies our sociological knowledge about marginalized groups and deepens our analytic capacity to make sense of their ontological approaches toward politics of liberation and imaginings of their collective futures.

This Is an Eventful Era: Exploring Event-Oriented Approaches to Organizational Research

This special issue explores the transformative role of discrete events in fostering changes at different organizational levels, challenging traditional feature-oriented approaches that focus on stable attributes of individuals, groups, and organizations. Joining the growing body of event-oriented research in diverse settings, the nine published articles evoke a novel theoretical lens (i.e., Event System Theory) to examine a number of discrete events (e.g., everyday change events, organizational downsizing, merger, corporate scandal, technology implementation, the U.S.–China trade war, the Black Lives Matter movement). Their findings demonstrate the interesting ways discrete events disrupt routines, prompt adaptation, and impact individual and collective behaviors across various levels within organizations. Our further analysis underscores the importance of adopting an event-oriented perspective for a better understanding of management issues, offering new insights and directions for future research. We hope this special issue provides a robust foundation for integrating event-centric research approaches into organizational theory, emphasizing the need for continued empirical investigation and theoretical refinement in a variety of management research domains, such as strategic management, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, and human resource management.

Ain’t I a Migrant?: Global Blackness and the Future of Migration Studies

In the wake of recent interventions to better connect the subfields of international migration and race and ethnicity through a sociology of racialized immigration, we push this further by arguing for the necessity of a global Blackness perspective on global migration. Such a focus does not just reflect the role of race in the dynamics of migration, and vice versa, but more importantly shifts assumptions about this relationship. So, it is not enough to say that race matters in migration but rather that blackness and Black lives matter in how migration unfolds. Using global blackness as a starting point in our analyses of migration reveals a clearer and closer entanglement of race, racism, colonialism, and migration. We argue that global Blackness structures notions of who migrates and under what conditions, as well as our ideas regarding migrants and their descendants and use the examples of New York City, Paris, and France as paradigmatic sites for understanding this relationship.

A Tale of Two Divestments: South Africa, Sudan, and Howard University

Abstract The anti-apartheid movement and Save Darfur campaign were important moments of African American activism towards Africa. Howard University played a central role by divesting from both South Africa and Sudan. This article examines each divestment within Howard University’s history of engagement with Africa. While each divestment was linked by a concern to support oppressed African peoples, the roles of race and racism operated differently in each action. Such an analytic provides space to reconsider the role of US higher education in African-facing human rights activism during the age of Black Lives Matter.

From Kent State to Black Lives Matter: Student Affairs’ Relationship With Campus Activism

Kent State University (KSU) has been associated with campus activism history since May 4, 1970. Using a case study approach, we interrogated if and how KSU student affairs administrators’ approach to activism has changed in the intervening decades and how the legacy of the shootings informed their practice during the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020. We found administrators’ bedrock values and approach were consistent across the two periods. However, their tactics for working with activists shifted in line with the growth and evolution of the field of student affairs, available technologies, and the social and news media climate.

Advancing the grand challenge to eliminate racism: a call to action for citational justice in social work

ABSTRACT The challenge to eliminate racism is not new to social work but achieving its eradication has proven difficult as systemic and structural racism are deeply embedded in systems, laws, policies, and practices that impact both society and the profession. Of great concern is that existing research has reinforced lack of diversity in content and representation in social work. Previous research asserts that Black and Latine individuals were not only less likely to be cited, but more likely to publish on less-cited topics such as racial discrimination, gender-based violence and immigrants. Importantly, The Black Lives Matter, Black in the Ivory and Cite Black Women Movements sparked efforts among numerous academic disciplines and institutions to chart both researcher diversity and recognize how structural racism in science and publishing impacts both Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) researchers and the academic disciplines in which they publish. As cited authors are considered thought leaders in their areas of expertise, it is important for the profession to address how structural racism has led to citational disparities for many scholars who are BIPOC. Citational Justice seeks to critically examine the ethics and politics of knowledge production in academia. Using the Grand Challenge to Eliminate Racism as a guiding framework, these authors present several action strategies that social work organizations can utilize across micro, mezzo and macro levels to achieve citational justice.

“They can learn it through us”: Youth seeking racial justice through a community‐based book club

AbstractIn the summer of 2020, amidst state‐mandated social distancing and protests for racial justice, youth participating in an ongoing YPAR initiative sought to design and facilitate a book club for the residents of their subsidized housing community to increase community awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement. Through interviews, youth shared their plans to design and facilitate a book club differently than they had experienced in English classroom settings. Through the lenses of critical literacy and civic praxis, the youths' imaginings reveal a desire to talk about books that were relevant to their lives, involve discussions that were participant‐led and democratic, and lead to meaningful, tangible outcomes. Implications encourage teachers to re‐examine their classroom book club practices and consider ways to center student desires.

Geographies of race and ethnicity 3: Black Geographies of creativity

This is the last of three reports on Black Geographies. Through theories then practices of Black creativity, the report highlights the need for critical engagements with creativity, as necessary to Black life but not innocent in racial capitalism.

Delegitimizing protest: Psychology's omissions and commissions

AbstractPsychological research has failed to take accountability for the ways it has aligned with State interests, at the expense of solidarity with Black people protesting the criminal legal system and pursuing liberation in the U.S. Through a case study analysis of six psychological research articles, ranging from 1968 to 2022, this paper tracks evidence of psychology's alignment with the State's interests. Evidence emerges in clinical disease(s) assigned to enslaved and incarcerated Black people (drapetomania, protest psychosis) and in empirical assumptions and (il)logics binding research methods and analyses. While theoretical and methodological frameworks, language (“patients,” “rioters,” “ghetto residents,” “minority group members”) and levels of analysis (psyche, personality, social, community, identity, movement) evolve over time and across subdisciplines, racialized carceral ideologies persist across psychological research approaches. By tracing carceral footprints across this vast psychological literature, this analysis reveals how traditional empirical research weaponized pathologizing and criminalizing accounts to delegitimize Black protests of State violence from the Civil Rights Movement to the Movement for Black Lives and beyond.

Black Informational Past: History, Data, and Archives of Chicago's ‘New Negro’ Wonder books

ABSTRACTIn 1927, an organized group of Black college and graduate students from the Washington Intercollegiate Club of Chicago compiled a rich informational reference text reflecting the mosaic of Black life in Chicago, IL, USA. This effort resulted in the publication of two editions of the Intercollegian Wonder Book in 1927 and 1929. These books are reflective of the New Negro movement and cultural renaissance of the Black urban population in the early 20th Century. Our project examines the influence of the Wonder Books through methods that express the layered informational context of a Black community. The poster reflects the iterative development of a phased descriptive, archival, data and visual analysis of an historic Black Community. such as citation tracking, genealogical research of individual members, and analysis of data usage by the club's active students.