The Politics of Reparations for Black Americans

Balfour, Lawrie

doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-062521-090002

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 49 publications

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“…We show that mainstream sources reinforce the longstanding official practice of treating Black protest and Black communities as inherently dangerous (Cunningham 2003, Cunningham 2009, Cunningham 2022, Mian 2020) and episodes of police violence as unusual. By contrast, Black newspapers treat police violence as a systemic problem (Weitzer and Tuch 2002) that is the object of ongoing community struggle (Balfour 2023, Berger 2009, Florini 2012, Hall 2005, Jackson 2022, Jackson 2021, Moulton , Santoro 2015.…”

Section: Introduc�onmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unarmed Violence, Police Perspectives, Community Struggle: Black- and White-centric news accounts of Black Protests about Policing in the U.S. 1994-2010

Oliver,

Gaede,

Milewski

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Perceptions of Black protest movements by both the public and most academics are filtered through White-centric news sources that tend to associate Black people and Black protests with violence and downplay systemic inequality. Intentionally centering Black perspectives provides an important balance and corrective to mainstream distortions. Using a much wider range of original data than any study addressing comparable issues, this paper compares mainstream White-centric newswire and Black newspaper coverage of Black protests about policing between 1994 and 2010 using several different quantitative measures: whether an event was covered at all, the volume of coverage an event received, and the prevalence of significant keywords in stories about a given protest episode. All approaches show the mainstream newswires much more focused on Black violence and on official and police perspectives, as well as exhibiting more concentration of their attention on fewer episodes in media cascades. Black newspapers not only covered a more diverse array of episodes but gave more attention to systemic issues, Black perspectives and Black community organizing. The data show how markedly different collective memories of policing and protests about policing have been constructed in different news sources. These differences matter both for current politics and academic research about Black movements. Note: This is a working paper in process. Comments welcome. Please check with the authors for an updated version if you are citing after June 2024.

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Section: Introduc�onmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unarmed Violence, Police Perspectives, Community Struggle: Black- and White-centric news accounts of Black Protests about Policing in the U.S. 1994-2010

Oliver,

Gaede,

Milewski

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Democratic Policymakers’ Ambiguous Support for Reparations: Implications for the Policymaking Process

Rigby,

Griffie

2024

J. Race Ethnicity Politics

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This paper investigates the increasing, but complex, support for reparations among Democratic elected officials—highlighting their tendency to endorse the concept while deferring discussion of policy details. This strategic ambiguity is common in policy discourse and can be embedded within policy design, such as legislative proposals to create commissions tasked with studying and recommending future actions on reparations. The effectiveness of these reparations commissions is uncertain. They could represent productive steps toward genuine reparations or simply serve to alleviate political pressure without any substantial policy changes. We explore these potential outcomes in three inter-related analyses: a compilation and comparison of all bills mentioning slavery reparations introduced at the federal and state level, the first nationally representative public opinion poll asking about support for reparations commissions, and a content analysis of legislative bill texts establishing reparations commissions. Our findings suggest that while reparations commissions offer an effective way for Democratic policymakers to manage conflicting constituency pressures in the short term, their potential to propel forward, rather than stall, the reparations debate hinges on their design and execution.

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