A new poll is showing that support for the Black Lives Matter movement among Americans has fallen in the past year.
The poll was conducted nationwide by Civiqs, a nonpartisan group affiliated with Daily Kos, and it has been tracking the support for BLM since 2017. Support was at its highest last year when it reached 52% as protests sprung up across the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd.
However, the latest numbers show support has waned in recent months and now sits at 43% with 44% of respondents stating they oppose the movement.
Analyzed along racial lines, 82% of those who told the poll they support the movement are Black, while more than 50% who say they oppose it are white.
Vida Robertson, director of the University of Houston’s Center for Critical Race Studies, said the numbers reflect a historical pattern when tracking racial justice movements across time.
“These polls are quite representative of America’s approach,” Robertson told NBC News. “There’s no historical evidence whatsoever that America has ever been interested in Black liberation and building an equitable society. We are simply coming to grips with our romantic ideals that are running up against our political realities. And the fact stands that America has constantly and will constantly struggle with the liberation of Black bodies, because we are endemically a racist society.”
She said the nation is simply regressing towards the mean as other issues, like the global COVID-19 pandemic, divert the public’s attention.
“Our country is simply going back to default,” Robertson said.
“Our job is to reconstruct the game, so that we can actually move beyond winning them over to becoming the American Dream that we longed for.”
Black Lives Matter traces its history back to 2013 as a movement that began after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Black teenager Trayvon Martin, eventually evolving into a worldwide organization.
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