General Opinions of Texas Tech University Community on Black Lives Matter movement

General Opinions of Texas Tech University Community on Black Lives Matter movement

Abstract

Since the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has attracted considerable public attention, many research institutions and websites have conducted some surveys among Americans to find out how American people view Black Lives Matter movements. In a similar attempt, we conducted a survey on the Texas Tech University (TTU) main campus to get general opinions of TTU community on the same issue. This report helped us get to know how TTU people treat the BLM movement. The key findings were that most of people in the TTU community were  not very aware of the motives of BLM movement. Also, most of the respondents thought police stereotyped African-Americans as having a tendency to commit crime more than other races.

Key words: Black Lives Matter, racism, African-Americans

Introduction

“Black lives matter” was a slogan used by people who were protesting the police brutality and violence toward black people at the very beginning, but now this slogan has turned into the name of an organization, following the death of the unarmed African-American teenager, Michael Brown, who was shot by police in 2014 (“Black lives matter or all lives matter”, 2014, para.4). Since then, Black Lives Matter activities have protested against police brutality a lot, when black people died because of incorrect police action; these movements included shutting down rail stations, stopping Christmas Eve shopping, and sitting in the middle of the way to the airport; and they also challenged politicians to state their positions on the Black Lives Matter issue. From The Movement for Black Lives official website, we can learn that their demands include “independent Black political power and Black self-determination in all areas of society.” and “an end to the criminalization, incarceration, and killing of our people”, etc. (McClain, 2016, para.2).

However, some Americans do not support the movements of Black Lives Matter. Most Americans have positive attitudes about their local police; they don’t think the police are brutal in general (“Half of voters don’t think most blacks victimized by cops”, 2014, para.1). Moreover, some of them are thinking these movements encouraged violence against the police. For example, after the Dallas shooting issue, Donald Trump even said, “I would say they’re dividing America” (Paul, 2016, para.2).

All of the different opinions that people have impelled us, a group of six Texas Tech University (TTU) students, to create a survey about how people think about Black Lives Matter in the TTU Lubbock campus.  We randomly chose participants and ensured we had equal number of males and females. Our goal was to get a general opinion of TTU students/staff toward Black Lives Matter. We were interested in several questions, such as “Do you think that Black Lives Matter movement is moving in the right direction?”, “Do you think police stereotype African-Americans with crime more than any other race?”, and “Do you think racism is a big problem in the U.S.”, etc. As for me, I was especially interested in the question, “Do you think Black Lives Matter movement will encourage violence against the police?”

Literature Review

Since this topic has attracted considerable public attention; many research institutions and websites have conducted some surveys among Americans to find out how American people view Black Lives Matter movements. In general, most of the surveys not only contained the question about general views, but also covered some specific issues about Black Lives Matter, such as the effects of movements, the goals of the movements, and the fairness of the U.S. justice system. Most of the above surveys also divided polls into white people and black people, which revealed that attitudes about the movements vary considerably between groups. Generally speaking, among white and black U.S adults, the general awareness of Black Lives Matter is widespread, but their views about the movement are very different (Horowitz, Livingston, & Posts, 2016, para.1). Most Americans have a positive attitude of their local police, and they even don’t think the police are using unfair practice, but blacks are more critical than whites and other minorities (“Americans back local cops even more”, 2015, para.1). Also, 82% of blacks think most of the blacks are treated unfairly by police. 30%-56% of whites don’t agree with that. And there is an important result that requires us pay more attention, which is that 70% of all voters believe the level of crime in the low-income class is a bigger problem in America than the police discrimination against blacks (“Half of voters don’t think most blacks victimized by cops”, 2014, para.2). Moreover, according to the survey (Holland, Swanson, & Press, 2016), 51% of white adults now strongly support Black Lives Matter instead of the 41% in June’s survey. Meanwhile, there are 42% of whites who said they did not favor the movement. Meanwhile, most young whites also think the movement of Black Lives Matter encourages violence against the police, and they think this is a more serious problem than talking about black people killed by white police.

Along with the aforementioned surveys, there are many articles that have established connection between the deaths of blacks by police with Black Lives Matter. For example, after cops shot Philando Castile, and his girlfriend streamed it on Facebook, a lot of people spontaneously appeared at the scene of the crime to express their protest (Taylor, 2016).

Also, the news reported that a police shot a Pompano Beach black man, Gregory Frazier, after officers dealt with a domestic disturbance (“Black man shot, killed by police while enjoying meal,” 2016). Frazier argued with his nephew before police came, but the police still shot him while he was having dinner. One of friends of the Frazier family said the white police who killed Frazier needed to face criminal charges. Meanwhile, other articles described how Black Lives Matter had gained global attention after the conflicts between the blacks and the police in the United States (Tharoor, 2016).

The various views on the Black Lives Matter movements motivated us to give a survey among our Texas Tech communities. Based on the previous survey polls, I made five hypotheses as following.

Hypotheses

1: According to many surveys, about half of the voters aren’t convinced that black Americans are treated unfairly by the police, and some voters are not sure about that. So we think that there are more students/staff on the TTU campus believing the blacks are treated fairly by police than those who think the blacks are treated unfairly.

2: Based on our understanding of many articles about Black Lives Matter (Dreher, 2016), we suspect that most of the TTU students/staff are not familiar with motives of BLM.

3: From the survey, we want to figure out whether people on the TTU campus think the Black Lives Matter movement is moving the right way or not. Since we found a lot of news criticizing the BLM movement (Perazzo, 2016), we think most of the TTU students/staff believe BLM is not moving in the right way.

4: Considering the event of the shooting of Dallas police officers (Karimi, Shoichet, & Ellis, 2016), we suspect that most of the students/staff on the TTU campus will think the BLM movements encourage violence against the police.

5: We also suspect that fewer of the students/staff on the TTU campus will think the BLM movements disturb their life, since we haven’t noticed too many BLM movements in Lubbock.

Methods

Based on a rich amount of information about Black Lives Matter, a decision was made on a survey, which was conducted on Texas Tech University campus among American native students in regards to opinions on Black Lives Matter on the TTU Lubbock campus. 

In our survey, one of the main focuses was to find out American people’s views on the Black Lives Matter movement. For example, we asked our respondents how familiar they were with the motives of Black Lives Matter movements. Also, the question about how people think Black Lives Matter is moving the right direction was established; moreover, the survey also focused on whether police stereotype African-Americans as committing crime more than other races.  In addition, based on the literature we reviewed, we were also curious about whether the students/staff on the TTU campus would think the BLM movements encourage violence against the police. The questions in this survey were typical enough for me to get a brief understanding about the TTU students’/staff’s opinions on Black Lives Matter movements.

In order to answer all the questions aforementioned, students in ESL5315 made a questionnaire which had four parts in total. It included Demographic Questions and Survey Questions on Social Media (SM), Parental Leave (PL), and Black Lives Matter (BLM) (shown in Appendix I); every respondent was asked to fill out all four sections. Students in the class were separated into three groups (SM, PL and BLM), and all three groups were relying on all surveys for their data collection, but as for me, I was only interested in the demographic section and the BLM section.  All of the questions had multiple choices, and these choices were prepared in a simply reasonable logic, so that respondents would not take considerable time. Also, each student was required to ask six male and six female American students. There were approximately 300 surveys in total that were conducted; it was noted that the way we collected surveys was not representative enough, but from the perspective of gender, it was representative. And the majority of the questionnaires were distributed in the Student Union Building and most surveys were finished by students; however, there were a few finished by faculty. The results were updated and analyzed by Google Sheet and the detailed results are in the following section.

Results

We got 289 valid surveys back, and most of respondents were friendly enough to us. Based on the data we collected from surveys, here are some results related to the hypotheses we made previously.

First of all, we believed that there were more students/staff in TTU campus believing that blacks were treated fairly by police than those who thought the blacks were treated unfairly. And according to many surveys we did research on, about half of the respondents were not convinced that black Americans were treated unfairly by the police, and some respondents were not sure about that. However, it was observed from the results that the above hypothesis was not true. 179 out of 289 people thought police stereotyped African-Americans as committing crime more than other races, which means around 62% of respondents thought the blacks were treated unfairly; also, it can be seen that 19% of respondents were not sure about this question.

In addition, based on our understanding of many articles about Black Lives Matter (Dreher, 2016), we suspected that most of the TTU students/staff were not familiar with the motives of Black Lives Matter. Results from the survey were in accordance with the above hypothesis; students/staff on TTU main campus were not familiar with the motives of BLM. 44% of TTU students/staff knew a little about it, 20% of them did not know it much, and there even were 6% of them who did not know it at all; also, about 30% of respondents claimed they were familiar with the motives of Black Lives Matter very much. From the results we got, it was obvious that most of TTU students/staff were not familiar with the motives of Black Lives Matter.

Also, we wanted to figure out whether people on the TTU campus thought BLM movement was moving the right way or not from the survey; since we found a lot of news criticizing the BLM movement (Perazzo, 2016), we thought most of the TTU students/staff believed BLM was not moving in the right way. Results from the survey were in quite good agreement with the above hypothesis. It was observed that around 54% of respondents believed BLM was not moving towards the right direction; also, some of them commented the movement caused too much violence and riots which displayed an opposite effect. However, it was also observed that there were 44% of respondents who thought BLM was moving towards the right direction.

Moreover, considering the event of the shooting of Dallas police officers (Karimi, Shoichet, & Ellis, 2016), we also suspected that most of the students/staffs in TTU campus would think the BLM movements would encourage violence against the police. In fact, most of the TTU students/staff believed BLM movements would encourage violence against the police. Based on the results, it showed that nearly 50% of TTU students/staff thought Black Lives Matter movements will encourage violence against the police; although this amount was not more than the half of the respondents, there only 20% of TTU students/staff who thought BLM would not encourage violence against the police, which means the other people were not sure about the effects of movements.

Furthermore, we also suspected that fewer of the students/staff on the TTU campus would think the BLM movements disturbed their lives, since we didn’t notice too many BLM movements in Lubbock. In fact, TTU people reported not being bothered much by the Black Lives Matter movement. 54% of respondents did not think the BLM movement disturbed their peace at all. Also, it was observed that the BLM movement disturbed 26% of TTU students/staff, and 10% of respondents chose the option “strongly bothered” by BLM movements.

In addition to all the above hypotheses, it was observed that 71% of TTU students/staff believed that racism was a big problem in the United States, and 70% of above people thought police stereotyped African-Americans with crime more than any other race. Also, we observed that 35% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the BLM movement was overly exaggerated by media and thus not necessary; on the other hand, 43% of respondents disagreed or strongly disagreed with the above opinion.

Discussion

The survey was conducted among 141 females and 148 males of Texas Tech University community, to identify their opinions about Black Lives Matter movements.  The discussion section is based on the results from the survey of 289 respondents, and these respondents are solely students/staff from the TTU main campus; 96% of them were students and 4% of them were staff. In this pool of survey, 85% of respondents were Americans; 15% of the total respondents were internationals. Meanwhile, amongst Americans, the survey showed almost 77% of them came from Texas, and the others, about 23%, came from other states of the U.S. Also, the survey showed that 51% were male and 49% were female in our data pool, which could ensure our survey was representative from the perspective of gender.

Based on the articles and the surveys studied online on Black Lives Matter movements, several hypotheses and assumptions were made when conducting the survey on the Texas Tech campus. Some hypotheses turned out to be supported while some were not. Based on the data collected from the surveys filled out by the students/stuff on the Texas Tech campus, we came out with some findings. The results could provide us a general trend of people’s perception and viewpoints on Black Lives Matter.

It was hypothesized that there were more students/staff on the TTU campus believing that blacks were treated fairly by police than those who thought the blacks were treated unfairly. However, this hypothesis turned out to be wrong, because we found that most of the respondents thought police stereotyped African-Americans as having a tendency to commit crime more than other races; meanwhile, some respondents were uncertain about that, which means most of the TTU community believed that black people in America were treated unfairly by the police, although based on our research about Black Lives Matter movements we did online research that showed that more than half of the Americans believed that Black people were treated fairly by police. This result is not within our expectation, and the reason we perceive this happened is due to the size of our data pool and the diversity of the respondents. We believe the news or surveys from the internet have a marginally larger size than the survey we conducted. From the data we received, we cannot draw a definitive conclusion to speak for the whole population of Americans as to whether black lives were treated unfairly or not, but we can draw a conclusion for a particular region.  It was clear from the results that most of TTU students/staff believed that racism was a big problem in the United States. Additionally, it was observed around 80% of the respondents who thought the police stereotyped African-Americans as tending to commit crime believed that racism was a big problem in America. Again, it can be seen that people think the racism is severe, and the blacks are treated unfairly by police in the United States.

In addition, we also thought that most people in the TTU communities were unaware of the motives of the Black Lives Matter; we made this hypothesis based on our understanding of an abundant amount of articles about Black Lives Matter. In accordance with this hypothesis, the results showed that among the TTU students/staff, most of them were not very aware about the motives of Black Lives Matter; only three-in-ten people claimed they were familiar with the motives. The results are not surprising; the majority of the respondents are students who are most likely not to tie their lives to watching TV news on a daily basis. Although social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. heavily influence college students’ lives, the use of those social media in promoting social awareness by our respondents is only at 24%. Another reason that could describe the result is people do not want to be involved in such a thing in their daily lives. One reason for not involving BLM is not willing to advocate such activities, mitigate public pandemonium. The other reason could be simply not bothered.

Focusing on the students/staff on the TTU main campus, we also suspected that most of the students/staff on the TTU campus would think the BLM movements could encourage violence against the police. Our hypothesis was observed to be wrong by the results. Although It showed that only two in ten people in the TTU community did not think the Black Lives Matter movements would encourage violence against the police, and the number of people who believed the Black Lives Matter movements would encourage violence against the police were not more than half of the total respondents, considering the rest of the people were not sure about the effects of the Black Lives Matter movements, we couldn’t conclude that most of the people tend to make the decision that the Black Lives Matter would encourage violence against the police.

To further support the above hypothesis regarding people’s opinion on effect of the Black Lives Matter movement, it is curious to see from the survey whether most of them thought the BLM movement was moving the right way or not. It was hypothesized that most of the TTU students/staff believed BLM was not moving in the right way, since we found a lot of news criticizing the BLM movement (Perazzo, 2016). The results from the survey showed that more than five in ten of the people in the TTU community believed the Black Lives Matter movements were not moving towards the right direction; some people even commented that the movement caused too much violence and riots, which displayed an opposite effect. But surprisingly, there were little more than four in ten people who believed the Black Lives Matter movements were moving towards the right direction. With the current amount of data we collected, we observed both opinions, but it almost showed a 50/50 split. From this, we cannot draw a solid conclusion. In my opinion, though it cannot be definitely concluded that TTU community believed that Black Lives Matter was moving the wrong way, most of them thought this movement was not moving the right way.  

In addition to the above hypotheses, we also suspected that fewer of the students/staff in TTU campus would think the BLM movements disturbed their lives. In accordance with this hypothesis, TTU people reported not being bothered much by the Black Lives Matter movement. Also, the results somewhat support the “not surprising reason for the unawareness of BLM” from the second hypothesis. We concluded that unless a matter or an affair is not a direct threat or a benefactor, the majority of the people will choose to not be bothered or will know very little about it.

Furthermore, we also observed that most of TTU students/staff believed that racism was a big problem in the United States, and seven in ten of above people thought police stereotyped African-Americans with crime more than any other race.  However, due to the limitations associated with this study, a specific correlation could not be established between the racism and police discrimination towards African-Americans.

As mentioned above, the difficulty of drawing out a correlation between certain aspects is due to few limitations associated with the study.  Though we focused on conducting the survey among equal numbers of males and females, we believe that questions about the Black Lives Matter based on gender would have helped us get a general idea about TTU people’s perspective about the Black Lives Matter movement. Also, we believe that this study would have been a lot better if we had analyzed a specific topic, such as views of the event of Collin Kaepernick, or views based on age differences in detail, as we would be in a better position to make conclusive statements, than we are now. Moreover, we believe more general questions, instead of only nine questions, would have definitely helped us in collecting more sample points, though a wide range of questions was posed to the audience. Furthermore, we would like to point out that this study does not represent the entire community of TTU, as the sample size was small, so we only can treat the statements made from this survey as estimates of TTU people’s perspective about the Black Lives Matter movement.

Conclusion

              We conducted a survey on the Texas Tech University main campus to get people’s perception on the Black Lives Matter movement. A questionnaire which had four parts in total was prepared with appropriate queries focusing on our aim; it included Demographic Questions and Survey Questions on Social Media (SM), Parental Leave (PL), and Black Lives Matter (BLM). There were approximately 300 surveys in total that were conducted; it was noted that the way we collected surveys was not representative enough, but from the perspective of gender, it was representative.  Based on our study, it was concluded that people think the racism is severe, and the blacks are treated unfairly by police in the United States. Also, the results showed that among the TTU students/staff, most of them were not very aware about the motives of Black Lives Matter. In addition, most of people in the TTU community thought BLM movement was not moving the right way.  Furthermore, we also concluded that unless a matter or an affair is not a direct threat or a benefactor, the majority of the people will choose to not be bothered or will know very little about it.

Appendix I

Thank you for filling out our survey!

(Black Lives Matter, Social Media, Parental Leave)

Demographic Questions:

1.     ___ Undergraduate   ____Graduate    ____ Faculty/Staff/Other

2.     ___ Male      ____Female

3.     Age ____ 18-22____ 23-28     ____ 29 or more

4.     Where are you from, originally?   ___ Texas    ___ USA, not TX      ___international

Survey Questions on Social Media

1- Do you use social media as a tool for social change? For example, sharing news, film, or an article that you think is important for promoting social awareness regarding an issue? 

___ Often        ___ Sometimes                        ___ Rarely             ____ Never     ___ N/A don’t know

2- How much do you think social media helps you to have a dialogue with the people you don't know?    `  ___ meet a lot of people I didn’t know         ___ sometimes    ___ doesn’t help/rarely   ___ N/A

3- Do you think social media has a positive impact on your social life or a negative impact?

___ positive                 ____ negative  ____ N/A, not sure, no impactWhy? 

4. How long do you use social media each day?

____ > 4 hrs/day         ___ >2 hrs/day ____>1 hr/day ____ >1/2 hr/day     ____ <1/2 hr/day

5. Do you agree social media makes you happy?___ Yes a lot   ____ sometimes  ____ usually not ____ N/A/don’t know

6. If you were allowed to use only one social media application what would it be?                                  ___ Facebook    ___ Snapchat     ___ LinkedIn    ___ Instagram      ___Twitter

___ Any other____________

7. Social media sites are nowadays extensively used for networking. Are you in favor of it?               ___ Yes        ___ No        ___ Maybe        ___  I don’t care

8. What is the social media tool you most frequently use everyday?                                                              ___ Facebook        ___ Instagram   ___ Twitter     ___ other: __________________________________

9. What is your passion for using social media applications? ___ Checking news      ___ Making new friends      ___ Shopping    ___ Other: _______________________

10. Have you ever been worried about personal privacy being compromised in social media?      

___ Yes   ___ No      ___A little

11. Do you think the government needs to protect the personal privacy in social media?              

___ Yes   ___ No       ___It depends

12. Do you think social media is useful for expressing your opinion?___ Yes   ___ No     ___ It depends

13.Do you feel satisfied when you get “like” from your friends for what you post online?

___ Yes    ___ No     ___ Not sure   ___ N/A, Never use social media

14.When reading posts on social media, I would rather use simple “likes” and facial expressions to give posters feedback instead of detailed feelings and comments.

___ Yes    ___ No   ___ It depends    N/A, Never use social media

15. When socializing online, I find memories are easier to recall when social media posts previous photos and events to me.___ Agree    ___ Neutral    ___ Disagree    N/A, Never use social media

16. Do you think posting violent scenarios in social media sites should be allowed?

___ Yes     ____ No      _____ Not sure/N/A

17. What is your opinion about using social media during the class? (choose the best)

___ always do ___ do & think it’s ok ___ do but it’s bad            ___ try to avoid it

18. Do you think social media can be helpful for better studies?    ___ Yes     ____ No

If yes, how does it help?

Survey Questions on Parental Leave

1. Should males get equal number of days of leave as a female gets in case of expecting a baby?        ___ Yes  ____ No      ___ don’t know

2. Should a Parental leave policy be made and mandated by the government?___ Yes    ___ No     ____ don’t know

3.If you are working at a company offering paid parental leave, will you take parental leave if your boss and peers do not take it?___Yes  ___No   ___Maybe

4. Do you prefer companies with parental leave over companies without parental leave when you look for a job, given that other conditions of the companies are similar?___Yes  ___No   ___Maybe

5. Will you support a presidential nominee more than before if he or she announced a proposal of paid parental leave?___Yes  ___No  ___Don't care

6. Do you think the presidential nominee will be able to actually make a policy of paid parental leave after he or she becomes a president?               ___Yes ___No ___Depends

7. To what extent do you agree with the below statement?

“Maternity and paternal leave favors the economy and leads to investment return, as satisfied employees work better and feel more responsible”

1-Totally agree 2-Somehow agree 3-Neutral    4-Somewhat disagree5-Totally disagree

8. What do you think the right proportion of the paternal leave is to maternity leave? (Assume maternal leave is 12 weeks and paternal leave 1-2 weeks)

1-Paternal leave is not necessary 2-The existing proportion is sufficient

3-Paternal leave should be extended4-Paternal leave should be equal to maternity leave

9. Do you think that unmarried men would vote for paid parental leave?

___ Yes              ___ No

10. Extend the length of paid parental leave for pregnant women, and broaden the coverage of people to paid parental leave. Which is more important?

___ Extend the length  ___ Broaden the coverage    ____ Both equally important   ___ neither

Survey Questions for Black Lives Matter:

1. Do you think police stereotype African-Americans with crime more than any other race?

___ Yes               ___ No     ___ don’t know/not sure

2. How familiar are you with the motives of the #BlackLivesMatter movement?

___ very    ___ a little ___ not much   ___ not at all

3. Do people of color need to be treated and approached more fairly by police in the USA?

___ Yes      ___ No       _____ don’t know/not sure

4. Do you think that #BlackLivesMatter movement is moving in the right direction?

___ Yes    ___ No       if not explain why?

5. Do you think racism is a big problem in the U.S.?  ___ Yes    ___ No        ___ not sure/don’t know

6. Do you support Colin Kaepernick’s Anthem Protest?Do you agree or not with him?

___ Agree & support   ___ believe in BLM but not Anthem protest    ____  No   

7. Do you think #BlackLives Matter movement will encourage violence against the police?

              ___ Yes   ___ No   ___ not sure

8. Some people argue that the Black Lives matter movement is overly exaggerated by media and thus not necessary. Do you think this movement by black activists is not necessary and that it should stop[ a] Agree  [b] Strongly agree   [c] Disagree  [d] Strongly disagree  [e] Not sure

9. Several media have reported loss of many black lives that have occurred in due confrontation with Police. To what extent do you think this is accidental?  (5-purely accidental)

[ a ] 1    [b]  2       [c] 3      [d] 4     [e] 5

10. List any ways you think this vice can be alleviated, by the Chief of Police or by society.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Reference

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Karimi, F., Shoichet, C. E., & Ellis, R. (2016, July 9). Dallas sniper attack: 5 officers killed, suspect identified. CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/08/us/philando-castile-alton-sterling-protests/

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Paul, R. (2016, July 20). Think Black Lives Matter is “divisive”? The civil rights movement split the U.S. far more. Salon.Retrieved September 30, 2016, from: http://www.salon.com/2016/07/20/think_black_lives_matter_is_divisive_the_civil_rights_movement_split_the_u_s_far_more/

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Taylor, G. (2016, July 7). Cops shot Philando Castile, his girlfriend streamed the horrific aftermath on Facebook. The Daily Beast. Retrieved September 30, 2016, from http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/07/cops-shot-her-boyfriend-she-livestreamed.html

Tharoor, I. (2016, July 12). Black lives matter is a global cause. Washington Post. Retrieved September 30, 2016, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/07/12/black-lives-matter-is-a-global-cause