Activating Identities and Taking Action

What are some motivating factors that prompt an individual to activate

an identity and take action?

In "Group Entitlement., Anger and Participation in Intergroup Violence", Christopher Claassen examines the causes of intergroup violence, and specifically focuses on anger as a cause of said violence. He examines anti-immigrant violence in Alexandra, South Africa in 2008 which does not appear to be explained by the classic "selective incentive" explanation for political intergroup violence. Claassen proposes that intergroup anger makes individuals more likely to participate in intergroup violence, as do "perceived violations of group entitlements". He finds support for his results; anger is a significant predictor of willingness/intent to participate in intergroup violence, and perceived violations of the perceived appropriate entitlements for other groups also increase the likelihood an individual will voice willingness/intent to participate in violence. 

Claassen presents a worthwhile but not exhaustive list of motivating factors that prompt individuals to activate identities and take action. According to Claassen, anger and a sense of perceived injustice are both such motivating factors. The perceived injustice may or may not actually be justice at all; justice is subjective, but generally speaking, the public has some shared idea of what constitutes justice.  In any case, perceived injustice is a motivating factor for action. Other motivating factors include the presence of the selective incentives that Claassen alludes to, whether material goods or something less tangible. Selective incentives are not a necessary condition for activating identities and taking action at the individual level, but they may be a sufficient one. Getting people to do stuff is hard, and the collective action problem is a well known phenomenon in political science. In order to activate an identity and take action, an individual's cost of taking action must be less than the perceived reward from taking action, or the cost of taking action must be less than the perceived cost of not taking action. Perceived injustice and anger will not always be enough to prompt action, but sometimes they will be. 

In the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests that have swept America, we see many examples of people being motivated to activate an identity and take action, though in most cases people are not resorting to violence. On the side of the protestors, people are experiencing anger at the injustice of black people being killed/murdered by police at a significantly higher rate than people of other races. Many of the protestors are white and/or have never been affected by police violence or abuse, but the perceived injustice spurs them to action. On the other hand, many people have vocally criticized or even attacked protestors on the basis of a perceived injustice. For these people, however, the perceived injustice is based on violations of group entitlements in their eyes; specifically, many people who oppose the protests do so because they do not believe that black Americans are entitled to not be victimized by police violence. They have a preconceived view of group entitlements and in their minds, black Americans are not entitled to the same equal protections under the law that white Americans are, and those who are protesting for those equal protections are pushing to expand the group entitlement of black Americans too far. Most of us in this class will agree that this perceived injustice (of actually protecting the equal rights of black Americans)  is in reality quite the opposite, and is rooted in racism. This fits into Claassen's framework; those who oppose the protests do not receive any selective incentives to do so, so they must be motivated by something else, and that something else is most likely anger, spurred on by perceived group entitlement violations.