Since protest erupted across the country after the killing of George Floyd, I’ve been working to collect data on the protest participants. Over the weekend of 6-7 June, I worked with teams to collect data from the protesters in Washington, DC, New York City, Los Angeles, and London. We were testing out the viability of a methodology that we proposed in a recent paper in on studying protests in Science Advances. To facilitate coordinated data collection and quick analysis, we collected data with cellphones and QR Codes.
Many have asked about the diversity of the crowds. As pieces in the New York Times and on CNN have reported, at the US events, we found more than half of participants at every protest were White. In other words, white allies have joined this struggle like never before. Here’s the breakdown of the protesters by race:
I also wrote about this diversifying movement more generally in a recent piece in Business Insider. There is a lot of evidence that the diversity in the crowd is due to The American Resistance showing up in solidarity, in terms of the demographics of the crowd, their previous protesting experience, and what is motivating participants to get involved.
Another big day of protest is called for the weekend of Juneteenth (which starts on Friday). For details, see this site, which is being coordinated by the Movement for Black Lives.
Dana R Fisher 