Just minutes before the Chicago Police Department released a video Tuesday of a white police officer shooting a black teenager to death, several groups of black activists marched to Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez’s office on the near west side of Chicago to attend a community forum. She had waited too long to charge officer Jason Van Dyke for the murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, they said. It was more than a year after the October 2014 shooting and the charges came only after a judge had ordered the release of the video showing his death.
Claims to “black-only” space are as much a defense as they are an action, activists say—a defense from manipulative messages, as well as a proactive strategy to reclaim the protest narrative. A distrust of media, political figures, and public opinion has grown in the absence of meaningful reform.
“Black people please meet at Roosevelt st and Halsted Ave at 5:30pm. This is a space for Black rage for Black people,” a BYP100 Facebook event page read.
“They wrongly assume we all enjoy such luxury and are blindly seeking something even more extravagant,” author Roxane Gay wrote in a New York Times column. “They assume that we should simply accept hate without wanting something better. They cannot see that what we seek is sanctuary. We want to breathe.”
The underlying assumption, activists said, was that young black people are likely to riot and commit criminal acts. By spreading the pleas for peaceful protest coming from public officials, they said, media was endorsing the idea that violence was impending.
Later in the week, Morris-Moore described her mixed feelings on the media’s interactions with activists: “Media has both been doing harm to our cause and at the same time getting our message out there.”
The @dailybeast made the killing of a 17-year-old kid into an animated gif in case you were wondering how much #BlackLivesMatter in America.
— Katie Mack (@AstroKatie) November 25, 2015
#BeforeYouWatch know Black death is not a spectacle. it is a brutal truth. it is not a joke. it is normalized but it should not be normal.
— BLACK POWER ranger (@MalcolmLondon) November 24, 2015
