Adolescent civic engagement: Lessons from Black Lives Matter

Abstract

In 2020, individuals of all ages engaged in demonstrations condemning police brutality and supporting the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Research that used parent reports and trends commented on in popular media suggested that adolescents under 18 had become increasingly involved in this movement. In the first large-scale quantitative survey of adolescents' exposure to BLM demonstrations, 4,970 youth (mean_age = 12.88 y) across the United States highlighted that they were highly engaged, particularly with media, and experienced positive emotions when exposed to the BLM movement. In addition to reporting strong engagement and positive emotions related to BLM demonstrations, Black adolescents in particular reported higher negative emotions when engaging with different types of media and more exposure to violence during in-person BLM demonstrations. Appreciating youth civic engagement, while also providing support for processing complex experiences and feelings, is important for the health and welfare of young people and society.

Keywords: Black Lives Matter; adolescents; demonstrations; race.

Fig. 1.

Stacked donut plots display the frequency of engagement with TV/radio/Internet media, social media, in-person demonstration (recoded as attend/not attend for visualization), and family demonstration attendance (recoded to combine parent and sibling for visualization). Bar charts display the difference between the mean feelings for Black adolescents and each racial/ethnic group for each mode of engagement (0.0 on the y axis [orange] represents the Black adolescent mean; positive values indicate Black adolescents report lower levels of positive or negative feelings; negative values represent Black adolescents report higher levels of positive or negative feelings).