Why is No One Asking What Chicago’s White Progressives Will Do?

In other cities uprising and unrest have come as rapid reaction after police murders severed spines or left bodies in the street for hours at a time. But Chicago is bracing itself ahead of time for how the city may react when it releases the video that it has sat on for the year since Officer Van Dyke shot Laquan McDonald 16 times.

Or rather, not how the city will react, but specifically how Chicago’s Black youth will react.

For a system that speaks in power, the last minute scramble of the mayor to try to placate Black youth and buffer with calls for peace shows who holds power, who is seen as a threat, and what potential flashpoints moments like this have.

In his efforts to maintain the status quo, I haven’t seen the mayor nervously reaching out to figureheads among Lakefront Liberals or the heads of organizations that receive the bulk of social change funding streams in order to ensure that their response is contained. It doesn’t stand out because he should have been but because he obviously calculated that he didn’t need to be.

As the clock tics toward the release of the video and the likely protests, I have to ask why is no one worried about what white progressives will do? In a moment of bare racism and injustice, why is no one afraid of our response?

This is not to re-center the conversation on white people as protagonists but to investigate why the state assumes its violence can be exposed with no expectation of outrage or resistance from us. To question our organizing, strategies, institutions, and sense of power and ask; are we non-players in moments like this? If so, why? And what can be done to change that?

In a press conference of Black youth who rejected the mayor’s invitation for a meeting, Veronica Morris Moore of Fearless Leading by the Youth (FLY) explained, “We have no faith that the same Mayor that allowed people to starve for 34 days over a school, will be accountable to Black people just because we respond calmly to a documented hate crime committed by a Chicago police officer.”

Tweak Harris of the same organization added, “I did not know Laquan McDonald but let me tell you how he’s my brother. You know why? Because I’m Black… They’re saying we shouldn’t riot. Well they shouldn’t be killing us. You can’t dictate how we express ourselves.”

In those two statements are three of the things that explain what makes the power holders so nervous 1) an abandonment of any faith in the system to provide justice on its own or if petitioned within ‘acceptable’ means 2) unwavering solidarity with Black people targeted by the state and 3) commitment to defending whatever tactics people take up.

That would explain why in the past 24 hours the police officer who has worked for the past year on the force is now being charged with murder (though some raise flags that the first degree charge may be a legal set-up to prevent actual conviction). That would explain why the campaign to #FireServin, the murderer of Rekia Boyd finally saw its demand met last night. That would explain why the Mayor is surrounding himself with as many people with melanin as possible to call to keep the peace.

But there is no peace to keep when police are killing people in the streets. That’s injustice. No Justice. No Peace.

In his 1972 book, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, former head of the civil rights group, Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) James Forman penned the question to white people, “What will you do when they seal off the ghettoes of America?” Knowing that Black youth are not the only ones preparing to respond but the police are as well, in 2015 the question is not rhetorical. And when white supremacist vigilantes are shooting Black protestors the answer is extremely urgent.

What will we do to support whatever may occur Wednesday when the video is released?

• Will we provide rides to and from marches and the likely jail support rallies?
• Will we gather friends in house parties to contribute to the bail fund to get organizers out of police custody?
• Will we shift our own organizational resources to support the undeniable effectiveness of Black youth organizing that is currently making leaps forward in the city?
• Will we craft strategies for power-building that make us just as unpredictable?
• Will we disrupt Rush Street or Lakeview, Logan Square or Wrigleyville so that the police cannot concentrate their forces on the South and West side and so Black youth do not face the entirety of the force of the state alone without it being drawn to other fronts?
• Will we be as steadfast as Harris in our condemnation of state violence and our support of resistance no matter the form it takes?
• Will we be ready to contest the defamation of protestors and distraction from state violence that almost always comes in moments like this?
• Will we refuse to allow those who express their anger to be isolated or condemned?

Black rage can be treated as a spectacle or a call to action. In this case, all Chicagoans have advanced notice. It’s up to us to decide.