Competitive victimhood as a lens to reconciliation: An analysis of the black lives matter and blue lives matter movements

Abstract

Literature on intergroup conflict and identity is well established; this literature includes work on competitive victimhood—the process by which groups attempt to establish that they have suffered more than opposing groups (Noor et al., Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2012, 16(4), 351–374) to restore feelings of moral identity, or cache often for use in a political context (Sullivan et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2012, 102(4), 778). Within prior work on competitive victimhood, models of reconciliation based on the particular needs and identities established within the competitive victimhood dynamic have also been posited (SimanTov‐Nachlieli et al., European Journal of Social Psychology, 2015, 45(2), 139–145; Shnabel et al., Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2013, 49(5), 867–877). While competitive victimhood theory has been applied in prior work to several cross‐national settings, there exist other important areas of intergroup tension that have not been explored. We propose that the concept of competitive victimhood can be fruitfully used to understand movement‐countermovement dynamics, including those related to conflictual race relations in the United States. Specifically, this article will examine the dynamic between the movements “Black Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” as a salient paired research case of a movement and countermovement for investigating identity and victimhood. In our present article, we map the discourse of the Black and Blue Lives Matter movements as illustrations of collective victimhood (Schori‐Eyal et al., Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2014, 44(12), 778–794) and competitive victimhood (Noor et al., Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2012, 16(4), 351–374). We find that while both movements demonstrate competitive victimhood, they are also qualitatively different. Due to differences in threat, power, and history of those the movements advocate for, each movement demonstrates different needs (Burton, Conflict: Human needs theory, Springer, 1990). We posit that the identity dynamics of competitive victimhood within social movements specifically lead to important and different identity needs for agency and morality (Shnabel & Noor, in Restoring civil societies: The psychology of intervention and engagement following crisis (pp. 192–207), Wiley‐Blackwell, Chichester, England, 2012). We examine what these differences would mean in these particular movements, as well as for potential avenues of community building based on addressing these needs. In all cases, we aim to show that what has largely been considered a criminal justice phenomenon in the United States is fundamentally political, with roots and possible solutions in intergroup identity dynamics that can be fruitfully explored within political psychology.

Whose lives mattered? How White and Black Americans felt about Black Lives Matter in 2016

“…The first possible explanation is that divergent views of a movement concerned with police misconduct are a consequence of race differences in police contact (Braga et al, 2019). People of color-and people in communities of color-experience a greater quantity of police contact, including stops and 5 Captured in the "Blue Lives Matter" (Solomon & Martin, 2019) and "All Lives Matter" (Gallagher et al, 2018) counter-frames, respectively.…”

Dynamics of an American countermovement: Blue Lives Matter

“…Such acts deny the historical and systemic factors that prompted the need to identify protected classes (Olson, 2017;Thusi, 2020). Within this group's narrative, police are the new victims despite no supporting historical or contemporary empirical evidence (Lynch, 2018;Solomon & Martin, 2019). Solomon et al (2021) argues, the final category are people that manipulate support for Blue Lives Matter to further their racially divisive agenda.…”

In the Shadow of Transitional Justice

“…However, there are alternatives: as few other organizations of economically poor South Africans have done, the shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo has argued that migrants are not the cause of South Africans' poverty and that removing them, depriving them of rights or taking other similar drastic measures does not bring about its end. Moreover, the shack dwellers' movement practises an alternative politics of solidarity which emphasizes the de facto shared rightlessness of both migrants and citizens who are black, poor, landless and treated as illegal in various ways by the state (Solomon 2019;Abahali baseMjondolo 2015).…”

“…For example, overly inclusive victim narratives that are abstract and do not specify any group (e.g. "All Lives Matter"; "Crimes against Humanity") deny or diminish the unique experiences of victim groups (Vollhardt 2013;Leach and Allen 2017;Solomon and Martin 2019). Additionally, they can reduce empathy and raise undue expectations of forgiveness among the perpetrator group (Greenaway et al 2012), while demobilizing collective action among the victim group demanding justice (Greenaway et al 2011).…”