The March 2022 PNAS paper “Black Lives Matter Protests Shift Public Discourse,” by our colleagues Zackary, Harry, Jelani and Fabio was cited this past Wednesday in a NYT Guest Essay. Citing their findings on the sustained increase in public awareness and attention to the BLM agenda that followed the protest, the author writes:
Other scholars found additional benefits deriving from the protests. “Nationwide, Black Lives Matter protests occurred concurrently with sharp increases in public attention to components of the B.L.M. agenda,” Zackary Dunivin, Harry Yaojun Yan and Fabio Rojas, all at Indiana University, and Jelani Ince, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington, wrote in a March 2022 paper, “Black Lives Matter Protests Shift Public Discourse.” These increases resulted in “a change in public awareness of B.L.M.’s vision of social change and the dissemination of antiracist ideas into popular discourse.”
Longitudinal data, the four scholars continued, shows that “terms denoting the movement’s theoretically distinctive ideas, such as systemic racism, receive more attention during waves of protest.” These findings “indicate that B.L.M. has successfully leveraged protest events to engender lasting changes in the ways that Americans discuss racial inequality.”
You can read the full PNAS article here.
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