Allies, Antagonists, or Ambivalent? Exploring Latino Attitudes about the Black Lives Matter Movement

Abstract

While many Latinos suffer the injustices of racial profiling at the hands of law enforcement and immigration officials, differences in immigration status, racial identity, contact with the Black community, and the prevalence anti-Black sentiment pose challenges for coalition building with Blacks. This study explores the factors that lead to an avenue for allyship from the Latino community to the Black community. Using attitudes about the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, a series of hypotheses are tested to examine the structure of Latino-Black compared to white-Black coalitions. Two major findings emerge from the analysis; first, differences between whites and Latinos reveal that the effect of harboring anti-Black stereotypes are extraordinarily predictive of rejecting calls for racial social justice and combatting the scourge of police killings of unarmed Black men among whites but not among Latinos. Second, differences according to Latino racial identity and indicators of acculturation also impact support for the BLM movement in ways that both reaffirm but also challenge previous scholarship. These results suggest that while on the whole Latinos, and especially immigrants, are uninformed about BLM, once aware they exhibit a generally supportive stance toward the movement’s goals of criminal justice reform.