Social Protests in Times of Social Distancing: Black Lives Matter and Covid-19

Abstract: Why did the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement gain unprecedented momentum in the midst of a pandemic? In this paper, we use county level variation in the timing and magnitude of exposure to COVID-19 to causally identify its effect on protests. Using super spreader events as a source of plausible exogenous variation, we find that counties that are more affected by the pandemic also experience a higher level of protest following the murder of George Floyd. We present several alternative identification strategies and a battery of robustness checks to confirm the validity of our results. We find that the effect is mainly driven by the mobilization of new allies that join the movement for the first time during the pandemic. Around half of the counties that protested never had any BLM protest before. Our evidence suggests that this change can be attributed to a rise in the salience of racial inequalities in the United States. At the same time, counties that traditionally engaged in protest (urban counties with large Black population shares) respond less to an increase in COVID-19 exposure as they are also the ones most severely affected by the pandemic and caught in what we call the "protest poverty trap".