How BLM Activism Changed Parental Choices and Children’s Racial Socialization

• In Event: Political Psychology and Race

Abstract

Social movements aim to transform the political landscape by mobilizing public opinion, placing pressure on lawmakers, and ultimately changing hearts and minds. Social science documents the efficacy of organized social movements, typically examining outcomes such as bill sponsorship, congressional votes, media coverage, and public opinion. We argue that social movements may have deeper, more long-term effects by changing how parents socialize children and thereby creating generational shifts in attitudes. We leverage the Summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests to examine how White parents of White children responded to movement activism in their parenting choices.

We use two sets of data to explore our question. First, we analyze public Facebook data from parenting groups and pages to test whether the BLM protests had an agenda-setting effect for parents. We show that it did, with large and significant increases in posts about race, racism, and diversity in the summer compared to the three months leading up to the 2020 protests. Next, we collected original survey data asking whether and how White parents of school-aged White children changed their parenting choices in response to the BLM protests. We find evidence of heterogeneous reactions. Some parents increased discussions of racism, sought anti-racism training, and moved their children to more racially diverse schools; others invested in White privilege, and reported telling their children that the blame for police violence rests with Black civilians and that they are likely to face discrimination for being White. We test how these parenting reactions to BLM are associated with political ideology, partisanship, and geographic exposure to protest activity. We also draw on psychology research to examine whether these responses are linked to parenting styles that are more likely to transmit parental values to children.

Our work advances political science research as we explore a new outcome of social movements. This will help us to understand another of the many paths through which movements like BLM can alter our political landscape in both the near- and long-term.

Authors

• Allison Penelope Anoll, Vanderbilt University

• Andrew M. Engelhardt, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

• Mackenzie Israel-Trummel, College of William & Mary