Do Angry Black Lives Matter? The Role of Emotion, Race, and Politics in Social Movement Support

• In Event: 1566 - Influence

Abstract

Emotion work and identity work are important types of labor undertaken by political mobilizers to garner support for their cause. We investigate the effectiveness of this labor by turning the lens on potential social movement supporters. We ask how a social movement member’s characteristics interact with a bystander’s to influence whether they support protests of police officers’ usage of force. In this study, we test five competing models that predict various combinations of emotion, race, and political views in social movement support. We conduct an experiment using a 2x2 factorial design in which participants read a news story about a protest accompanied by an image of a neutral/angry, white/Black protestor, and measuring three types of social movement support. Results provide support for the politicized race model: the Black protestor is more motivating for liberals’ social movement support, while a white protestor is more motivating for conservatives. Both liberals and conservatives are more likely to label the Black protestor as angry and more likely to expect the protest to end violently when reading a news story with a Black protestor. Racialized perceptions of violence – but not racialized perceptions of emotion – mediate an important part of the politicized race effects we observe.

Authors

• Lauren Valentino, Duke University

• Daniel Adam Nicholson, Indiana University