Edgar Aviles Rosa
Knowing
the Perspective of the Texas Tech Community about Black Lives Matter
Abstract
Black Lives Matter is a new Afro American movement. Like the previous
Black movements, they are fighting for equal rights for the Afro
Americans. Recently they are doing a lot
of protests against the recent police killing incidents toward Afro Americans.
Unfortunately, some of them turned violent. The media are giving a lot of
coverage to those negative movement incidents, and Americans have different
opinions of this movement. Hence, the ESL 5315 class conducted a survey to find
what the Texas Tech community’s perception of this movement was. Our data
consisted of 293 surveys answered by student or faculty members of Texas Tech
University. We found that people from 18-22 years old, and people older than 29
years felt bothered by the movement. Most of the respondents in both categories
are also against Kaepernick’s anthem protest. However, almost a quarter of the
respondents felt that he has the right to do it. As we expected, most of the
respondents did not know what the real purposes of the movement were.
Additionally, the majority of the respondents felt that the movement was over
exaggerating the police killing incidents, even though, most of the respondents
think that not all the incidents were accidental. We conclude that in general
most of the respondents were not in favor of the movement. The small sample in
this paper, and the unbalanced data between age groups are some of the factors
that would not allow us to generalize these results to the whole Texas Tech
community. A further survey with a bigger sample, and more questions is needed
to be conducted to find if this result are representative of the whole Texas
Tech community.
Introduction
During the history of the United States of America, many
people have stood to defend an equal treatment of black people. In the 19th
century, Abraham Lincoln stood in favor of black people and attained
the abolition of slavery in the country. But even though blacks were no longer property
of whites, the bad treatment against them continues. They have been victims of violent
crimes and, segregation, and they have not the same rights as whites. It was in
1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white person, and at that
time an Afro American civil rights movement started. Besides Rosa Parks, Martin
Luther King Jr. was the main leader of the rights movement. On August 28, 1963,
he proclaimed his famous speech “I have a dream”. In that speech he was
advocating for an equal treatment and equal rights of black people. Due to the movement’s
efforts and the support of the black communities, improvement on the treatment
and rights of black were made.
Now in 2016, some
people are still asking if black people and white people have the same
treatment and rights in the United States. Recent incidents between police
officers and Afro Americans are making people argue if black people still do
not have the same rights as whites. As occurred in the 1960’s, the blacks’ rights
movement has surged and a lots of protests are taking place. Unfortunately, not
all of the pretests are peaceful and many more incidents between black and
police are being reported in the protests.
Many people are
confused about all the recent killings of blacks by the police. The media is
giving a tremendous coverage to them and different opinions about the treatment
of black people by the police are taking place. Even though police also killed
white people, the incidents with blacks are giving the perception that police
officers are discriminating against them. For that reason, our goal in this
project is trying to know what Texas Tech Students think about all the police
incidents with blacks and about the new black rights movement called “Black
Lives Matter”.
Literature Review
Actual Situation
During the past five years many incidents between police
and black people had occurred. The list is so long that to count them all would
take several literature reviews. From July 2016 to September 2016, there have
been at least four incidents in which Afro Americans have been killed by police.
In July at least two incidents between police officers and blacks had been
covered by the media. According to Alvarado et al. (2016), on Monday July 18,
2016, an officer in North Miami shots a disarmed Afro American who had his
hands in the air. According to the same article, Charles Kinsey was trying to
help an autistic man. The man had a toy in his hand and Kinsey was yelling to
the police that there was no need for guns. Unfortunately, the police did not
hear him and shot him. The most impacting aspect about this article is that when
Kinsey asked the officer why he shot him the officer reply to him “I don’t
Know” (Alvarado et al., 2016).
Besides this horrible
incident, Emmet (2016), reported another incident of police abuse that occurred
previously in Austin, TX the same week. A police officer stopped a teacher for
being out of the speed limit and abused her. The article tells how the officer
got the elementary teacher out of the car by force, pushed her on the ground,
and arrested her. According to Emmet (2016), the officer gave different versions
of the incident but neither of the versions matched with the police car video.
For that reason, the Austin TX police department apologized to the victim in
public.
In September, two new
police murders were reported. The first one was conducted in a response to a
domestic violence incident. When police arrived to the Afro American house the
man did not cooperate and the police shot him, because previously he was warned
that the man was armed (Ebony, 2016). But the most recent incident toked place
in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Polices officers were called for an abandoned vehicle in
the street and the police ended up killing the owner of the vehicle (Blau et
al., 2016). This incident is still under the investigation of the Department of
Justice and this incident has provoked a lot of protests of Afro Americans
against the police.
Even though the medias
report more incidents between police officers and black people the statistics
tells the contrary. In 2015, 1,502 persons were killed by police officers
(Lowery, 2016a). Of those who were killed by the police 732 were white and only
81 were black. Blander (2016) reported that 50% of the persons killed by police
were whites and only 26% were blacks. White Caucasians represent the 62% of the
population in the United States while Afro Americans only represent 13% of the
population. For that reason, when comparing the number of blacks killed by
police, the proportion of blacks killed by police is going to be higher than
the proportion of whites killed (Blander, 2016; Lowery 2016a). Since 2015 police
have killed 175 blacks and 172 whites (Lowey, 2016). Of those 175 person 24
were unarmed and of the 172 persons 18 were unarmed. According to Bandler
(2016), the data suggest that more whites and Hispanics are killed by police than
black. He established that the probability that a police is going to be killed
by a black is higher than the probability that a black is going to be killed by
a police.
Even though the numbers
of whites and blacks killed by the hand of a police officer are similar,
statistically black Americans are more likely to be killed by the police
(Bialik, 2016). Many investigations have been conducted to determine if there
is any police bias against black people. Bialik (2016) suggests that racism
could play a role in the bias but other factors rather than racism are also
involved, because racism do not explain all the cases. Among this factors are
the fact that even though blacks represent a 13% of the population they are
responsible for more than 60% of violent crimes (Bandler, 2016). This fact and
others makes police react in a different way when they are intervening with
blacks. The evaluation of the real factors that are affecting the bias toward
blacks are really difficult to establishe due to the lack of information from
the police departments (Bialik, 2016).
Despite the fact that
the statistics and some studies revealed that police are more likely to kill
black people a recent study found the contrary. Jackman (2016) explains a study
conducted among police officers to determine how likely they were to shoot a black
person compared to a white one. The officers were subject to a virtual
simulation where they were submitted to a real situation they could face in the
labor of their duty. According to Jackman (2016) police are more likely to
associate blacks with guns, but they are less likely to shoot them. He attributes
that to reverse racism. Reverse racism is the phenomena were people are very concerned
about social and legal consequences of acting against a racial group (Jackman
2016).
Black Lives Matter Movement and other activists
After the Ferguson incident, where a black guy was
killed by a police officer, a social movement emerged. According to Miller
(2016) Black Lives Matter was founded by three women form California. The
movement’s objectives are to deal with racism, to promotes the rights of black
people, and to promote the fact that blacks should live with respect and
dignity. But this group is receiving a lot of criticism. The majority of the
critiques are because this group is not peaceful as the 1960s movement was (Reynolds,
2015).
But the efforts of the black community to stop the
police abuses do not depend only on the Black Lives Matter movement. Recently
Colin Kaepernick, a football player, has knelt down during the national anthem
in a football game (Levin, 2016). These actions are motivating other football
players and other athletes to do the same protest. Levin (2016), asked Kaepernick
about his actions and he replies that it was his way of protesting against the
bad treatment this nation gives to black people. Similar to what happened to
Black Lives Matter many people disapprove Kaepernick’s actions because some
people believe that Kaepernick needs to respect the anthem (Powel, 2016).
Public Perception of Racial Problems
The public perception
of the racial problems in our country is very variable among people. Lowery
(2016 b) in his survey found that 58% of Afro Americans thinks that more
attention is needed to be given to the racial issue while only 41% of the
whites surveyed believe so. The study also found that Democrats are more in
favor of blacks than Republicans and that the majority of blacks interviewed
think that the president is doing something to help them.
Similar results have
been found when people were asked about the Black Lives Matter movement. Blacks
and Democrats are more supportive with the movement than whites and Republicans
(Horowitz, 2016; Lowery, 2016). The study also found that even though most the
surveyed support the movement, only one third understood the real purpose of
the movement.
Objective
As mentioned earlier, the number of blacks and whites
killed by the police are very similar, even though the media and the public
perception is that police killed more blacks than whites. Also the public
perception of this topic varies a lot depending on the type of person surveyed.
For that reason, the aim of this project is to know the perspective of Texas
Tech community about this subject. Because our resources are limited, we are
not going to be able to have a representative sample of the Texas Tech
community, but it would allow us to trace a trend about it. Due to the
different news, we have previously cited, we believe that young people would support
Black Lives Matter movement, and the Kaepernick anthem protest. Even though
they are in favor of Kaepernick and Black Lives Matter we also expect that they
will not know the real movement purpose. Also, we are expecting that because of
the fact that Texas is a Republican state, the majority of the persons over 29
years old would be against Kaepernick protest and would think that Black Lives
Matter is exaggerating.
Methodology
To
study what the Texas Tech community perspective of Black Lives Matter and
recent police incidents with blacks was, we conducted a survey. Both sections
of the course ESL 5315 of Texas Tech University proposed several questions for
three themes: Black Lives Matter, Social Media, and Parental Leave. The
questions were discussed in class and students selected the ones that helped
them to prove their hypotheses on any of those themes. Once the questions were
approved by the professor and students, each student got thirteen surveys to
distribute. Between the two sections we were expecting to be able to survey 300
people.
We all agreed that students
were able to be surveyed anywhere as long as they met the established
conditions. The first condition was that all students needed to ask at least
six American men and six American women. The second condition was that all
students needed to guarantee that all the respondents were part of the Texas
Tech community. For this research, we focused our attention only on the Texas
Tech community. This university is located in West Texas, and has around 33,000
students. The variety of people in it made it a very good place to do a survey.
Because of the limited resources, and time, this experimental scenario helped
us get a more variable sample. However, this sample is not a representative one
of Texas Tech University, due to the sample size and the lack of representative
students from all the departments.
A period of one week was given
to the students to find thirteen volunteers who would participate in the survey.
After all the data was gathered, a Google Sheet was created and shared with all
the students by Achintha Bandara. Every student was required to transfer their
results to the Google Sheets document and share it with the other students.
After all students submitted the information, the data was analyzed using the
same program.
The
survey given to the volunteers consisted of four parts, each one for a specific
theme. The first part was designed to obtain demographic information of the
participant. No personal questions like name or race were asked, to guarantee
the participant’s privacy. The second and third part were designed to gather
information about the participant’s views of Social Media and Parental Leave
respectively. Subsequently, in the last part of the survey were the questions
related to Black Lives Matter. This order was deliberately made to prevent any
participant from feeling uncomfortable with some questions at the beginning of
the survey and stopping his participation.
Even
though the survey consisted of three parts, for the purpose of this paper we
only discussed some questions associated with Black Lives Matter. Reports of
the other parts of the survey are available in the blog of the ESL 5315 class
for reference. We focused our discussion on determining what people think of
Black Lives Matter and the Kaepernick protest. Additionally, we discussed if
people older than 28 years were likely to believe that the movement was exaggerated
and were rejecting Kaepernick’s protest.
Results
Our
final data consisted of 293 surveys. In general, all the persons surveyed were
very cooperative and answered all the questions. Afro Americans did not feel
offended when they were asked of Black Lives Matter and racism. Surprisingly,
many young people did not know what parental leave meant and asked for more
information, but this fact did not affect the current paper. In general
students went to their own academic department building or to the student union
building of Texas Tech University to find volunteers. The majority of the people
in this survey were between 18-22 years old (61.8%), and originally from Texas
(64.8%). One of our goals was to study the perception of people over 29 years
old; unfortunately, only 30 persons surveyed were in that category. This fact
limited the comparisons between age categories and by consequence the
conclusions we made.
We
wanted to determine young and old people’s differences in the way they saw
Black Lives Matter. We expected that young people would be in favor of the
movement, while older people would reject it. Contrary to what we were
expecting, people over 29 years were more in favor of the movement than people
between 18-22-years. Of all 18-22-years people we surveyed, 40.78% said that
the movement bothered them, and 24.6% felt strongly bothered. Additionally, we
found that 52% of the 18-22-year-old people category who said that Black Lives
Matter bothered them were female. Opposed to those results, only 16% of people
over 29 years felt bothered by the movement
Our
third and fourth hypotheses were based on Collins Kaepernick’s protest. Our
hypotheses were that younger people would be in favor of the protest while
older people would be against it. As what happened with our first hypothesis,
our data showed that we were wrong. Only 32.5 % of the people in the
18-22-years category were in favor of Kaepernick anthem protest, while 52% of
them rejected it. However, 82% of those who did not approve the anthem
protests, believed in Black Lives Matter. Females tended to be more in favor of
the anthem protest than males. Females represented the 54% of all people who
agreed with the anthem protest. Some respondents did not agree or disagree with
Kaepernick protest: instead they selected the option “other’. This option was
selected by 24% of the surveyed and some of them wrote a comment to this
answer. In summary, they argued that they did not support Kaepernick’s actions
but they believed in the freedom of speech he has. We also expected that people
over twenty-nine years would be against Kaepernick’s anthem protests. Our
results supported our theory. Like what was mentioned above, much of the people
were against the protest but were in favor of Black Lives Matters.
Another
purpose of this research was to determine the knowledge of people about Black
Lives Matter’s motive or purpose. We expected that people in the category of
18-22 years-old were not familiarized with the movement’s motives. The results
confirmed our hypothesis. The majority of the young people said that they were
not familiar with the objective or motive of Black Lives Movement. In the
18-22-year-old category, 67% percent of the young people said that they knew
nothing or a little about the movement. A similar result was found in the
29-years-or more category, where 73% of those surveyed said that they knew a
little or nothing about Black Lives Matter’s motives.
This
survey also had a question that allowed us to know if people believed that
Black Lives Matter was exaggerating about the police killing incidents. We
expected that the majority of the people over 29 years old would think that the
movement was exaggerating. Our data did not support what we expected. We were
unable to confirm or deny our hypothesis, because the answer of that questions
was almost fifty-fifty. Half of the people believed that the movement was
exaggerating and half believed that the movement was not exaggerating or were
not sure about it. We also found that even though they were not sure if the
movement was exaggerating or not, they did not believe that the police killing
incidents were accidental. In the 29 year or older category, 40% believed that
the police killing incidents were not accidental.
In
addition to what we were determined to study, this survey gave us extra data we
think was good to share. As we expected, the vast majority of the respondents
said that they believed that racism was a problem. Of all the people asked, 55%
of them believed that Black Lives Matter movement was promoting violence. In
accordance with these results, we also found that people thought Black Lives
Matter was not going in a good direction. Not all the respondents answered why
they believed so, but the one that responded to the question said that the
movement was violent.
Discussion
In
general, the study was done with the purpose of identifying what the Texas Tech
community’s perspective of Black Lives Matter was. We believed that the most
important finding of this survey was the effect of age on the appreciation of
the movement. We were expecting that young people would be more supportive of
the movement, but we found the contrary. Surprisingly, 40% of the respondents
in the 18-22-years old category responded they felt bothered by the movement
while only 16% of the people over 29 years old felt this way. These drastic
differences could be due to the small sample of people over 29 years old. The
fact that only 30 people out of the 293 surveyed were in this category did not
allow us to make a just comparison. With that limited number of people in this
category, we were not able to have a representative sample of this group.
Additionally, the way the question was designed was not the best way to study
our hypothesis. We wanted to know how supportive the people were of Black Lives
Matter but the question does not ask this specifically. Instead the survey
asked the respondents if the movement bothered them or not. For this paper, we
assumed that people who felt bothered by the movement were not supporting it.
However, this was not an accurate measure, because a person can feel bothered by
something but not necessarily disagree or be against it. The huge media
coverage of the recent incident in the movement protest, could have made people
feel uncomfortable, but it doesn’t mean that they disagree with the movement’s
objectives. To have a better
understanding of the supportiveness that people of different ages have toward
the movement, we should have formulated a specific question, and had a larger
sample of people over 29 years old. Further experiments with a specific
question and more respondents of the 29-year-old category would be necessary to
see if the age trend reported in this survey is real.
The
second most significant finding of this survey was the feeling of the
respondents toward Kaepernick’s anthem protest. As mentioned before, we were
expecting that young people were in favor of Kaepernick’s protest, but the data
showed the contrary. Only 32.5% of the respondents in the 18-22-years old
category were in favor. We believe that the reason for this is that people in
Texas Tech are very patriotic and they have a profound respect for the anthem.
This respect for the anthem is what made them disagree with the anthem protest,
even though they supported Black Lives Matter. Another fact that supports our
argument about patriotism is that most of the students were from Texas, and
Texas is a very patriotic state. Additionally, we found that some young people
(24%) did not agree with the protest, but believe that he had the right to do
it. They all said that they respected his freedom of speech right. Freedom of
speech is one of the most valued rights in the United States. For many
Americans, the freedom of speech is very important, and if they opposed
Kaepernick’s anthem protest they could feel like they are against the
constitution of the United States. This could be the reason why some of the
people tolerated Kaepernick’s protest even when they did not agree. These results coincided with a previous
article where it was also reported that most of the people disagreed with
Kaepernick’s protest (Powel, 2016). To have a better understanding of why
people disagree with the anthem protest, future investigations should have more
questions related to this theme. This would allow social scientists to have a
better understanding of people’s perception toward an anthem protest, and why
they think in a particular way.
Another
finding we believe is important to highlight is the fact that the majority of
the people surveyed did not know about the movement’s purpose. The survey
supported the theory for this question. Respondents in the category of
18-22-years old and older than 29, showed to have little or no knowledge about
the movement’s motives. We believe this could be a consequence of two reasons.
The first one is that the only thing you hear about the movement is the violent
protests that are recently occurring. Secondly, the movement is not promoting
or letting their motive or purpose be known to the public. We may hear movement
representatives some times in the news interview, but they do not have a
concrete way to promote the movement or the movement’s purpose. For that
reason, if you want to know about the movement you need to do your own research
and learn about it in the internet. As we found in this surveys, Horowitz
(2016) and Lowery (2016 b) also reported that only a few people knew the
movement’s purpose. For subsequent studies, it would be helpful to include
questions about why they don’t know about the movement, and what they believed
is the real purpose of the movement. This could give more information about why
people are in favor or against Black Lives Matter.
Our
survey also revealed that half of the people believe that the movement is
exaggerating and the other half that they are not. However, most of them
thought that the police incidents were not accidental. At first hand, it seems
that the respondents are contradicting themselves. One possible explication to
this result could be the fact that they believed that the movement is
exaggerating the amount of cases of police killing, but they believed that the
few that occurred are not accidental. But we can’t be sure of this or of any
other possible explication of why they answered like that with the information
gathered. We believed that the way questions were asked was not very clear to
the respondents. Instead of asking them a direct answer (yes or no), the
question gave many options, and some of them mean the same thing. Additionally,
the question designed to find out if they believed that the police incidents
were accidental was a bad one. Instead of giving a concrete answer the
respondents were requires to answer the question with a numeric scale. This may
have made difficult the respondent’s question interpretation, and the student
data analysis. For future investigations, questions need to be written more
effectively and we need to give to the respondents more easily understandable
answers. With simpler questions, we could get more accurate data that could be
analyzed more effectively and precisely.
Conclusion
The
Texas Tech community perspective of the Black Lives Matter Movement was
studied. We found that most of the people in the 18-22 years old category and
over 29 years old, felt bothered by the movement’s actions. Most of them are
also against Kaepernick’s anthem protests. However, they felt that he has the
right to do it, because the constitution of the United States guarantees the
freedom of speech right. Additionally, most of the respondents in both
categories believed that the movement is exaggerating the police incidents, but
they did not believe that all the police killings were accidental. The limited
data gathered and the limitations that some of the questions had, would not
allow us to generalize our results to the whole Texas Tech community. Further
investigation with more respondents and with better formulated questions are
needed to have a better understanding of the real Texas Tech community
perception of Black Lives Matter.
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Appendix
Thank you for
filling out our survey! (Social Media,
Parental Leave, Black Lives Matter)
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
5. Do you have a child/children? ___
Yes ___ No
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
impact Why?
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. If
you were allowed to use only one social media application what would it be?
___ Facebook
___ Snapchat ___ LinkedIn ___ Instagram ___Twitter ___ Any other ____________
6.
What is the social media tool you most frequently use
every day?
___ Facebook ___ Instagram ___ Twitter ___ other:
__________________________________
7. What is your passion for using social media
applications?
___
Checking news ___ Making new
friends ___ Shopping ___ Other: _______________________
8. Are you worried about personal privacy being compromised in social
media?
___ Yes ___ No ___ A little
9. Should the government take to protect the personal privacy in social media?
___ Yes ___ No
___ It depends
10. Do “likes”
or lack of them alter your mood? ___ Yes ___ No
___ Not sure ___ N/A, Never use
11. When
reading posts on social media, would you 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
12. When
socializing online, do you find memories are easier to recall when social media
posts previous photos and events? ___ Yes ___ No
___ N/A, Never use social media
13. Do you like
it when Facebook posts my “memories” or old posts. ___ Yes ___ No
___ not sure/NA
14. Do you
think posting violent scenarios in social media sites is controlled enough?
___ Yes ____
No _____ Not sure/N/A
15. What is your opinion about using social media during the class for
non-class purposes? (choose the best)
___ always do ___ do & think it’s ok ___ do but it’s bad ___ try to avoid it
16. Do you
think social media can be helpful for better studies? ___
Yes ____ No
If yes, how
does it help?
17. Do you use
social media to help you remember things to do every day? ___ Yes ___ No
18. How do you
respond to conflicts in social media? __
Avoid ___ Stir up ___ Work for peace
Survey Questions on Parental
Leave
1. Should a parental leave policy be made and mandated
by the government? ___ Yes ___ No ___Don’t know
2. 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
3. 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
4. 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
5. 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
6. To what extent
do you agree with this 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 disagree 5-Totally disagree
7. 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)
___ Paternal leave is not necessary ___The existing proportion is sufficient ___ other/don’t know
___ Paternal leave should be extended ___ Paternal leave should be equal to
maternity leave
8. Do you think that unmarried men would vote for paid
parental leave?
___ Yes ___ No
___ Maybe ____ Don’t know
9. 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.
To what extent does the #BlackLivesMatter movement disturb your peace?
___ Strongly bothered ____ Bothered ____ Not bothered at all ____ not sure/NA
2. Do you think police stereotype African-Americans
with crime more than any other race?
___ Yes ___ No
___ don’t know/not sure
3. How familiar are you with the motives of the #BlackLivesMatter
movement?
___ very ___
a little ___ not much ___ not at all
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. Recently Collin
Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem at football games. How do
you feel about his protest and others like it?
___ Agree & support ___ believe in BLM but not anthem protest ____
No ___ Other
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
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