Hundreds of Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and state violence have taken place in American cities since 2013. Several leading scholars of social movements have advanced the view that there was a populist bent to these protests (Harris, 2015; Ransby, 2015; Rickford, 2016; Taylor, 2016). These scholars see the disruptive protests of the Black Lives Matter movement as a sign that lower class African Americans are rising up to challenge both the unequal conditions in their neighborhoods and the stagnant policy models grounded in respectability politics that have been purveyed by establishment leaders since the 1990s.
Thus far, the evidence marshalled in support of this argument has been based on qualitative and impressionistic data. This paper provides the first empirical test of the populism thesis in the domain of public opinion research.
Drawing upon data from a 2017 survey of 815 African Americans in thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia, the paper presents evidence that both income and educational attainment are negatively correlated with participation in Black Lives Matter protests. In other words, African Americans with lower incomes and at lower levels of educational attainment are more likely to participate in protests sponsored by the Black Lives Matter movement than their counterparts at higher levels of socioeconomic status. These findings lend support to the view that the Black Lives Matter movement was founded upon a populist surge within African American communities.
The findings that those respondents who reported participating in Black Lives Matter movement protests had higher levels of black group consciousness and linked-fate are also important. These findings challenge the axiom that middle class African Americans are the vanguard of antiracist activism in the United States (Dawson, 1994; Hochschild, 1995). If these findings can be replicated in subsequent studies, then they have the potential to reorient long-established theories of the drivers of mobilization in African American social movements and politics.
The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement has been read by many scholars of African American politics as a populist reaction to a leadership crisis that has ensued in the African American community since the demise of the Black Power movement in the 1970s (Harris, 2015; Ransby, 2017; Rickford, 2016; Taylor, 2016). This viewpoint is grounded in the belief that the incorporation of African American elites into the neoliberal power structure during the 1980s amplified the worst variants of respectability politics and rent-seeking behaviors that further disadvantage the majority of African Americans (Harris, 2014; Rickford, 2016; Taylor, 2016). Harris (2014) has described the relationship between elite incorporation and the amplification of respectability politics as follows:
Today’s politics of respectability…commands blacks left behind in the post-civil rights America to ‘lift up thyself.’ Moreover, the ideology of respectability, like most other strategies for black progress articulated within spaces where blacks discussed the best courses of action for black freedom, once lurked for the most part beneath the gaze of white America. But now that black elites are part of the mainstream elite in media, entertainment, politics, and the academy, respectability talk operates within the official sphere, shaping the opinions, debates, and policy perspectives on what should—and should not—be done on the behalf of the black poor (p. 33).
The fact that many leading BLM activists have disavowed respectability politics, rent-seeking behaviors, and centralized leadership structures—just as we would expect of New Social Movements—has moved some scholars to argue that the lower classes are rising up to reclaim the mantle of leadership within the African American community. Ransby (2017) describes the ‘lead organizers of the Movement for Black Lives’ as focused on the ‘most marginalized people’ within the African American community. Harris (2015) also points out that the ‘core activists of the Black Lives Matter movement’ do not see traditional African American elites ‘as the gatekeepers of the movement’s ideals or leaders who must broker the interests of black communities with the state or society’ (p. 37).
Taylor (2016) shares the appraisal of the behavior and attitudes of the core activists proffered by Harris and Ransby in their writings on the movement. Moreover, writing from a Neo-Marxian perspective, she locates the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in a broader class conflict between the lower- and middle-class segments of the African American community. Taylor argues that this class conflict began under the Clinton administration when ‘Black elected officials lined up to sign off on [a crime bill] that was literally intended to kill Black people’ (2016, p. 100). In Taylor’s view, African American political elites were largely driven by their desires to reproduce respectability narratives about the African American community and also to maximize their own power within Democratic politics (pp. 101-103).
In Taylor’s analysis, the rise of elitist politics under the Clinton administration is merely the fuse of the Black Lives Matter movement. The match that sparked hundreds of mass protests across the United States since 2014 is the disappointment that downtrodden African Americans experienced with both the further deterioration of their neighborhoods during the Great Recession and Barack Obama’s conservative rhetoric about these conditions. Taylor describes the impact of these dynamics as follows:
Over the course of his first term, Obama paid no special attention to the mounting issues involving law enforcement and imprisonment, even as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow described the horrors that mass incarceration and corruption throughout the legal system had inflicted on Black families. None of this began with Obama, but it would be naïve to think that African Americans were not considering the destructive impact of policing and incarceration when they turned out in droves to elect him. His unwillingness to address the effects of structural inequality eroded younger African Americans’ confidence in the transformative capacity of his presidency (2016, p. 143).
Taylor continues by describing the role that the Occupy Movement played as an ideological counterpoint to the Obama administration in some African American communities: ‘[N]Old Testament only did Occupy popularize economic and class inequality in the United States by demonstrating against corporate greed, fraud, and corruption throughout the finance industry, it also helped to make connections between those issues and racism .... The public discussion over economic inequality rendered incoherent both Democratic and Republican politicians’ insistence on locating Black poverty in Black culture’ (2016, p. 146). Throughout the remainder of her book, Taylor goes on to chronicle how the spirit of the Occupy Movement emboldened young, urban African Americans in cities like Ferguson and Baltimore to engage in populist activism to challenge both the white power structure and “Black faces in high places” (pp. 75-107).
While there is no doubt that the African American community would benefit from a populism of the sort that Harris, Ransby, and Taylor suggest is animating the Black Lives Matter movement, the fact of the matter is that there has not yet been any empirical evidence to substantiate the class conflict thesis. This paper examines the extent to which public opinion research can generate evidence in support of the class conflict thesis. In short, it asks the questions: Are lower-class African Americans more supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement than middle- or upper-income African Americans? Do evaluations of the effectiveness of the movement within the African American community diverge based on the class positionality of the respondents? Finally, does class positionality inform what African American respondents want from the movement?
The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. The next section presents a discussion of the theoretical context for the study. It describes both the evolution of the class conflict theory of African American politics over the past three decades within the literature on race and representation. This section also presents some important alternative explanations to this theory and presents the research hypotheses examined in the paper. Section Three describes the survey questions, mode of data collection, and presents the descriptive findings of the Qualtrics survey commissioned for this study. Section Four presents the main findings from statistical analyses of the Qualtrics survey. The final section summarizes the implications of the findings for our understanding of the populist dynamics of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The populists exist on both sides of the polarized USA political factions. They are not extreme. They are not violent. The biggest concern for the powerbrokers is that the populists will unify and alter the power dynamics. I predict that they will.
You aren't reframing the discussion with these sources. It just reinforces what defines populism is a strategy or inflection defining conflict as being between the pure people and corrupt elite.
You imply there is some virtue in this because it can be seen across the political spectrum in the US, and found among diverse activist movements. You seem oblivious still as to how that can be and the definition of populism still not only hold but maintain superior explanatory power.
Last edited by honorentheos on Mon Nov 08, 2021 8:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The populists exist on both sides of the polarized USA political factions. They are not extreme. They are not violent. The biggest concern for the powerbrokers is that the populists will unify and alter the power dynamics. I predict that they will.
Cultellus. I want to understand what you're saying. You're suggesting that BLM was a populist movement. You're also maintaining that their mantra of "defund the police" wasn't extreme. Additionally, you're pointing out that the BLM movement wasn't violent.
An article arguing extreme activism needs to reframe populism as positive and a big tent revolution?
Huh.
Do I need to remind you that the elites were against gay marriage and other LGBTQ rights? You recall that Obama ran a campaign AGAINST gay marriage? The Clintons too.
Your reframe is being rejected. Black Populism goes way back in our history. You can stop your racist reframe anytime. Don't let the shame get in your way, pal.
The populists exist on both sides of the polarized USA political factions. They are not extreme. They are not violent. The biggest concern for the powerbrokers is that the populists will unify and alter the power dynamics. I predict that they will.
Cultellus. I want to understand what you're saying. You're suggesting that BLM was a populist movement. You're also maintaining that their mantra of "defund the police" wasn't extreme. Additionally, you're pointing out that the BLM movement wasn't violent.
An article arguing extreme activism needs to reframe populism as positive and a big tent revolution?
Huh.
Do I need to remind you that the elites were against gay marriage and other LGBTQ rights? You recall that Obama ran a campaign AGAINST gay marriage? The Clintons too.
Your reframe is being rejected. Black Populism goes way back in our history. You can stop your racist reframe anytime. Don't let the shame get in your way, pal.
You fail, yet again, to realize that populism framing is unnecessary and actually damaging compared to positive reframing and ideological foundations FOR positive changes.
Populism is negative framing by definition. It is used by strategists because being against "whatever" leaves a person far more easy to manipulate and entice into questionable behaviors. Being "against" fueled January 6th. Being FOR led to the change that resulted in Obergefell v. Hodges.
Cultellus. I want to understand what you're saying. You're suggesting that BLM was a populist movement. You're also maintaining that their mantra of "defund the police" wasn't extreme. Additionally, you're pointing out that the BLM movement wasn't violent.
Do I have that right?
Is BLM not a populist movement?
Inherently, no. It's a human rights movement. People who use pure people vs corrupt elite rhetoric to incite the masses may be using populist strategies to move it but it's cause is based on rights.
