The Effects of the 2020 BLM Protests on Racial Bias in the United States

The 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in response to the murder of George Floyd highlighted the lingering structural inequalities faced by Black people in the United States. In the present research, we investigated whether these protests led to reduced implicit and explicit racial bias among White U.S. Americans. Combining data from Project Implicit, Armed Conflict Location Event Data Project (ACLED), Google Trends, and the American Community survey, we observed rapid drops in implicit and explicit measures of racial bias after the onset of the protests. However, both types of racial bias slowly increased again over time as (attention to) BLM faded. We use directed acyclic graphs to show under which assumptions causal inferences are warranted. We discuss our results in light of situational models of bias, their implications for protest movements, and raise questions about when and how social norms play a role in large-scale attitude change.