A racial reckoning? racial attitudes in the wake of the murder of George Floyd

Abstract Did George Floyd’s murder and its ensuing protests produce a racial reckoning? Conventional social-science accounts, emphasizing the stability of racial attitudes, dismiss this possibility. In contrast, we theorize how these events may have altered Americans’ racial attitudes, in broadly progressive or in potentially countervailing ways across partisan and racial subgroups. An original content analysis of partisan media demonstrates how the information environment framed Black Americans before and after the summer of 2020. Then we examine temporal trends using three different attitude measures: most important problem judgments, explicit favorability towards Whites versus Blacks, and implicit associations. Challenging the conventional wisdom, our analyses demonstrate that racial attitudes changed following George Floyd’s murder, but in ways dependent upon attitude measure and population subgroup.