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Phantom Pains: The Effect of Police Killings of Black Americans on Black British Attitudes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2021

Ayobami Laniyonu Open the ORCID record for Ayobami Laniyonu [Opens in a new window]
Ayobami Laniyonu*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
*
Corresponding author. Email: a.laniyonu@utoronto.ca
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Abstract

What effect does black politics in the United States have on the attitudes of black citizens in other national contexts? Literature on the black diaspora and transnationalism has characterized cultural and political linkages between black communities in North America, the Caribbean, and Europe, especially during the mid-20th century. In this article, I exploit random timing in the administration of a public attitudes survey to demonstrate that such linkages persist and that the police killing of Eric Garner in 2014 negatively affected black Londoners’ attitudes toward the Metropolitan Police. Notably, I find the effect was largely concentrated among black Londoners: estimates of an effect on white and South Asian Londoners were small and largely insignificant. The evidence presented here demonstrates that racial violence in the United States can affect racial politics in other national contexts and helps frame the emergence of Black Lives Matter chapters and protests beyond the United States.

Keywords

policingblack diasporaBlackLivesMatterblack transnationalism
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 1651 - 1667
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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