As crowds have surged through American cities to protest the killing of George Floyd, one of the striking differences from years past has been the sheer number of white people.From Minneapolis to Washington, D.C., marchers noticed the change and wondered what it meant that so many white Americans were
As crowds have surged through American cities to protest the killing of George Floyd, one of the striking differences from years past has been the sheer number of white people.
“This is utterly different from anything we’ve seen,” said Douglas McAdam, a Stanford sociologist who studies social movements, referring to the recent protests. Since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, every highly publicized death of an African American man while in police custody brought protests, he said, “but overwhelmingly in the black community.”
It’s not just protests. White Americans are going through a wave of self-examination, buying books about racism, talking to black friends and arguing within their own families. Still, how much of this translates into broader change remains to be seen. The researchers who collected data last weekend found that the crowds were overwhelmingly young and well educated. More than three-quarters of those surveyed were under the age of 34, and 82% of white protesters had a college degree, while 67% of black protesters had one.
Trump also appeared to be a powerful driver. Of whites surveyed in Fisher’s work, 45% cited Trump as a motivation for joining the protests, compared with 32% of blacks. Whites were the group most likely to report having attended the 2017 Women’s March but the second-least likely, after Asians, to report having attended the March for Racial Justice in 2017.
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