Replication Data for: A Racial Reckoning? Racial Attitudes in the Wake of the Murder of George Floyd

Did George Floyd’s murder and its ensuing protests in the summer of 2020 produce a racial reckoning? Conventional social-science accounts, emphasizing the stability of racial attitudes, suggest such a reckoning is unlikely. In contrast, we theorize how these events may have altered Americans’ racial attitudes, in broadly progressive or in potentially countervailing ways across subgroups. We engage four separate data sources that enable us to trace the information environment and then to examine these events’ effects across several attitude measures. Our original content analysis of partisan media grounds our expectations for how the information environment surrounding the murder may have framed Black Americans before and after the summer of 2020. Then, because racial attitudes can take many forms, we analyze data from Gallup, the Democracy Fund+UCLA’s Nationscape surveys, and Harvard’s Project Implicit website to examine temporal trends across racial and partisan subgroups using three different attitude measures: most important problem judgments, explicit favorability towards Whites versus Blacks, and implicit racial attitudes. Challenging the conventional wisdom, our analyses demonstrate that racial attitudes changed following George Floyd’s murder, but in ways that depend upon attitude measure and population subgroup.