For this post, we asked Dr. Jamil Scott to speak with Dr. Tabitha Bonilla and Dr. Alvin Tillery about their APSR article, “Which Identity Frames Boost Support for and Mobilization in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement? An Experimental Test.“

Jamil Scott: Tell me about the paper in general, what were the aims?

Tabitha Bonilla: I think the paper really rose out of some of Al’s work on Black Lives Matter and Twitter, as well as just observing what the leaders of Black Lives Matter were really trying to do with the movement. We recognized that a lot of the language that we see on Twitter and in public spaces about Black Lives Matter differs from what the leadership is trying to do, and particularly along the lines of Black Lives Matter as an intersectional movement. We really recognize the particular burdens that Black women, or Black trans women, or any people within the LGBTQ+ community face. And we recognize how a movement that was situated to be deeply intersectional sometimes will come across in general conversations as a movement that was really for Black men and policing.

Alvin Tillery: Yes, I think that’s right. I’m a traditional social movement scholar. I mean for me, I still work within the boundaries of the kind of existing theories about social movement cycle, framing, how framing shapes mobilization, and political opportunity structure. For me, the most interesting thing about the Black Lives Matter movement, from some of the earlier papers that I had read and some of the earlier public polling that I had done through the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy (CSDD) at Northwestern, was that there seemed to be something of a disconnect between the mobilization piece–what people in Black communities were actually saying was happening and what they wanted to happen and how they saw the movement, and what the leaders of the movement were saying the movement is about.

We’ve got really great studies of the leadership from the fabulous Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Barbara Ransby. I mean, they’ve been basically “curating” the conversation about Black Lives Matter. Most of that work is coming out of the kind of interpretive, soaking and poking ethnographic tradition, and it’s not really speaking to the traditional social movement literature.

What I wanted to do was bridge the gap. I just said, “Okay, well this is what the leaders are saying is their intentionality, or the curators of the conversation, let’s look at their Twitter feeds.” When I looked at their Twitter feeds, I found that there was a pretty large disconnect between what they’re posting or what certain groups affiliated with the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) website are posting, and what the main, global Black Lives Matter organization is posting. And then, the 2017 CSDD survey found that Black people loved the movement. It got like an 88 percent approval rating. Our respondents said that they wanted centralized leadership. They wanted a tight focus on police brutality. It didn’t matter very much if the leaders were men or women. And I just thought, “How can this be?” We’ve got three years of messaging about the importance of intersectionality, Black feminism, centering trans lives, and I thought it would be really good if Tabitha and I could see if in my first survey people are just missing what’s actually getting them to mobilize. We actually started thinking, “Let’s go prove that the 2017 survey is wrong!” Right, that people are just–they’re responding to these mobilizations even if they don’t realize it. We designed the experiment to kind of test how potent the intersectional and the Black feminist vs. the Black nationalist frames of the movement were. And we got results that surprised us, I think.

JS: Given those points, what would you say we can learn from your article and how does this speak to the development of social movements in general, or how people are thinking about social movements?

AT: The social movement literature has historically been built around the paradigmatic case study of the classic civil rights movement. From the Montgomery bus boycott in ’55 up to passage of the Fair Housing Act in ’68. They won by adopting a particular strategy of engagement and negotiation with elites. Most Americans want all movements for racial justice to look like that movement, and that’s just not what most movements have been.

I mean, you think about the violence of the labor movement, for example, or the counter-movements to things that were happening in the early 20th century over the decline of the economy during the Great Depression–think about the Townsend movement, for example, for assistance to the elderly. Most movements are chaotic, emotional, raucous, and so what’s so interesting about the Black Lives Matter movement is that it arises and everyone wants to say, “It’s so different from the Civil Rights movement! It’s so different!” And the point that I wanted to make is that almost every movement is different from the civil rights movement, and it’s also interesting that the activists themselves, elite activists, always make this point about how different they are.

I wanted to find out whether we use existing theories to understand the Black Lives Matter movement. I think what we are seeing with our paper is that yes we can. They clearly fall into this realm of social movement theory called New Social Movements theory. There’s a lot of focus in social movement literature on emotions. They clearly fall into that realm. Identity matters much more in post-industrial movements. We haven’t had a lot of analysis of that dynamic in America. Most of that shift in our thinking about movements is happening in Europe, with the rise of say the Green Power movements or the queer rights movements in Europe. Really, we only have two examples–Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter–that fit the theories that we have regarding social movements. The paper is really a way to kind of bridge that existing literature on the new social movements, and to show that organizing, getting people to mobilize for a long time, is really messy in the modern context.

And, what we bring to this paper through Tabitha’s brilliance is that no one in the social movement literature has been using experiments to really drive home this point about how messy things are. How complicated it is. I think that’s really what we’re offering. We’re confirming that, yes, Black Lives Matter is not like the civil rights movement, it’s more like these other movements, but then we’re also pushing them to see that the neat, tightly constructed story that activists tell themselves about their movements often doesn’t resemble what’s happening on the ground. That’s something that we know from the literature. That’s what I see as our main contribution.

TB: I think that I would add to that we are trying to understand social movements. I think we also do some work trying to understand identity, and the way that people understand identity. While I think there is a ton of work on intersectionality, we’re just kind of starting to understand how the public understands intersectionality.

JS: What can scholars learn from activists?

TB: I think what we observe, particularly in the qualitative data that we collected, was a real desire to control this message and this narrative. We found a lot of pushback there: that this isn’t a movement about the police, this is a movement about protecting our communities from violence. I think maybe one thing that we can learn is that simple messages are good, but that you need to work really hard within your message if you’re trying to teach communities something new or you’re trying to give attention and shine light on the most marginalized people within a community.

There’s this piece of education that needs to happen. You can’t just assume that everybody is going to see what you’re describing in the same way if you’re really trying to lift up those who are most marginalized. There’s this education piece of work that also needs to be done, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily how it started. And I think—tracing back through the hashtags— that this is where #sayhername comes in. That happens when the message has already been lost. There are some instructive pieces on what we can learn from what happens when you have a really high-level message that can go a lot of different places. From what we’ve seen within our data, people really like that singular, tight—“This is about pushing back against police violence” message—which I think makes a lot of sense. But, maybe there could have been some nuance added and some explanatory work done in the beginning. That’s what I learned. I’m sure there are many other lessons.

AT: I think scholars can learn from activists to broaden their range of what questions should be asked. I think we’re still somewhat gobsmacked that this paper landed in APSR. I mean, I’m willing to be honest about that! I think that one of the reasons it landed is because we took the activists and their terrain seriously.

TB: We learned that it is difficult to educate a community. We also learned something about what particularly matters for what intersectionality theory is saying. A lot of the leadership within Black Lives Matter, certainly within the initial three curators, but also on the ground (and I think very much specifically within Chicago), is a lot of Black queer feminist work. It shows the challenge and the difficulty of changing conversations even within the community. It’s not that they didn’t do work to educate, they did a ton of work to educate. But in the education, people may not always see the full picture.

AT: That’s true, even thinking back to the 2017 survey, everyone says police brutality is the most important issue, but the fact that 7 out of 10 Black men in that sample say, “Yes, BLM should be pro-gay rights!” that’s crazy high! And that to me is an artifact of the work that these women have been doing in putting that work out there, even if in our experimental data it doesn’t mobilize men or women. It’s not quite as potent as some of these other frames are, but that doesn’t mean it won’t reach potency if they continue to do the work that Tabitha is talking about. That’s because they’ve already had an impact on the baseline support that the Black community has for LGBTQ rights in these surveys. I think that part of what’s been happening since 2014 is that this kind of conversation has opened quite a bit, and that’s because of the Black Lives Matter activists.

TB: I think it’s also important to note that mobilization is still really high. The level of support for Black Lives Matter, even when we give an intersectional message that slightly demobilizes men, there’s still on average 3.78 on a 5 scale. That’s really pretty high, and there’s also something to be said in going from “support a whole lot” to “support.” We also might be approaching a ceiling effect, technically not in the data (maybe a little), but I think this is also a good point to bring in Jenn Jackson’s work on mobilization by gender. In her work, she’s showing that Black women are socialized to be more politically active than Black men, and so there also can be a gendered uptake on intersectionality; it might be something that is rooted deeply in socialization too. It’s not necessarily a failure of the leadership.

AT: Can I flip this question quickly? For me actually, the bigger lessons are what scholars need to learn about studying movements. Because I think we all signed up to be pro-BLM from the start, and I think that the way that a lot of people have approached the study of BLM as allies of the movement has led to our acceptance of the standard narratives and interpretations of the activists themselves as our theoretical frames. That’s very problematic from the standpoint of knowledge generation. Particularly knowledge generation that can actually help the movement. This is not the classic Popperian “Be objective, try to falsify!” But if the movement comes along and we’re all just studying the leaders, and what they say, and we’re applauding, and saying, “Yes! I, as a scholar-activist, I support this,” —which there’s nothing wrong with—but then we’re not asking hard questions about the other ends of the equation. The demand side of the equation. How it’s landing in Black communities.

JS: I want to end with asking is there anything else that you want the public to know about your work, or how you think about this line of work moving forward?

AT: I want the public to know that despite what I just said, I love the Black Lives Matter movement; I’m pro Black Lives; and everything I’m trying to do I see as trying to help the movement.

TB: I’m still really fascinated with how the public understands intersectionality, and I’m pulled very much into this idea about whether the difficulty in message uptake is one of understanding it or agreement with it. That’s really important as a woman of color, but it’s also important as society becomes more aware of identity.

Jamil Scott is an Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University.

Tabitha Bonilla is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.

Alvin Tillery is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.

The authors’ recent APSR article is available free of charge until the end of February 2021.