The NY Times confirms what seemed apparent….
Less Black folks out there protesting then the ya might think….
Young white folks ARE the majority in most places….
As crowds have surged through American cities to protest the killing of George Floyd, one of the striking differences from years past has been the sheer number of white demonstrators.
And now, an early estimate of the demographics of the protests has found the crowds were overwhelmingly young and educated with large numbers of white people.
The researchers, Dana Fisher, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, and Michael Heaney, a political scientist at University of Michigan, used an established method for studying street protests. They said their numbers provided only rough estimates, but offer the first, more systematic look at who the protesters are.
White protesters made up 61 percent of those surveyed in New York over the weekend, according to the researchers, and 65 percent of protesters in Washington. On Sunday in Los Angeles, 53 percent of protesters were white.
More than three quarters of those surveyed were under the age of 34, and 82 percent of white protesters had a college degree, while 67 percent of black protesters had one.
President Trump also appeared to be a powerful driver. Forty-five percent of whites surveyed in Dr. Fisher’s work selected Mr. Trump as a motivation for joining the protests, compared with 32 percent of blacks. Whites were most likely to report having attended the 2017 Women’s March, but the second-least likely, after Asians, to report having attended the March for Racial Justice in 2017.
A number of factors have helped shape the demographics of the recent protests. The nine-minute video of a white police officer refusing to remove his knee from Mr. Floyd’s neck has horrified Americans as attitudes on race were already changing, particularly among white liberals. Another motivation is the opposition to Mr. Trump, who has drawn large crowds of protesters beginning the day after his election. Finally, there is the coronavirus pandemic, which has left millions of Americans — including college students — cooped up at home, craving human contact.
image….Credit…Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Actually,this is probably a good thing.
FBI misused surveillance authorities to investigate Black Lives Matter protesters
..According to a newly declassified memorandum order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, issued more than a year ago, the FBI ran a “batch query” related to 133 individuals “arrested in connection with civil unrest and protests” between May 30 and June 18 of 2020.
The analysts ran these names through information gathered using authorities from Section 702, which allows the intelligence community to surveil electronic communications by foreign individuals located outside the United States for national security purposes. But the data collected also includes information about Americans on the other end of emails or other communications.
Whether to renew Section 702 has been a heated debate on Capitol Hill this year, with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle raising repeated concerns about the FBI and other agencies exceeding their authority and violating the privacy rights of Americans…
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