A new poll shows support for the Black Lives Matter movement is dwindling and has been in the year and half since police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Civiqs, a nonpartisan online survey firm, surveyed just over 282,000 people across the country and found that 53% of respondents said they oppose the Black Lives Matter movement –– opposition to the movement rose following the conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd and police shooting of Jacob Blake, Jr.
The survey found that 35% of respondents support BLM, though that support peaked in June 2020 and has decreased steeply and steadily since Floyd’s killing.
Eleven percent of respondents said they neither support nor oppose BLM.
Looking at race, 82% of those who support BLM are Black while more than half who oppose the movement are white, a trend of public opinion, experts say has been repeated throughout history.
“These polls are quite representative of America’s approach,” Vida Robertson, director of the Center for Critical Race Studies at the University of Houston-Downtown told NBC News.
“There’s no historical evidence whatsoever that America has ever been interested in Black liberation and building an equitable society,” Robertson said. “We are simply coming to grips with our romantic ideals that are running up against our political realities.”
Robertson noted that similar lack of support for social movements was seen during the Civil Rights Movement and even the Harlem Renaissance.
“The fact stands that America has constantly and will constantly struggle with the liberation of Black bodies, because we are endemically a racist society,” Robertson added.
The Black Lives Matter movement was started in 2013 following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin.
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