Calling the Facebook Live abuse video a Black Lives Matter kidnap is racist
Though there’s no material link between the group and the Chicago attackers, their shared race is apparently enough to make each of them guilty of the others’ crimes
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Earlier this week in Chicago a heinous incident took place. Four young people took to Facebook to live stream their attacks on a helpless and disabled peer who they had seemingly taken hostage. Now that video is circulating across the web, the suspects have been arrested and the victim is receiving support. But some have labelled this a ‘Black Lives Matter kidnapping’ and are looking to obfuscate the true cruelty of the acts.
The video reveals horrible and sadistic behaviour. The young man is obviously distraught whilst he is tormented with physical attacks, forced to drink toilet water and pursued through a property under threat of a knife. Throughout the four attackers bully him whilst saying ‘fuck Donald Trump’ – which they force him to repeat – and ‘fuck white people’. There is no doubt, the images showcase brutality not often witnessed. It looks likes torture, but given there is no discernable purpose to their violence it’s even more senseless than that.
All this is evident from the footage and deserves condemnation, but where has the confusion that this is a ‘Black Lives Matter kidnapping’ come from? Neither the video itself nor information from the police suggests a link to the Black Lives Matter network in the United States. Moreover none of the video’s content implies that the four individuals who carried out this attack were moved to do so by politics promoted in the movement fighting against racist state brutality – unless it’s simply enough of a link to hate Donald Trump. The charge against Black Lives Matter seems to be based solely on the fact that the four attackers are African Americans and their victim white.
Similar arguments have been made before and perhaps most loudly when gunmen Micah Xavier Johnson shot and killed police officers in Dallas, Texas at the end of a protest against two police killings. Black Lives Matter was supposed to take responsibility for his actions with some labelling the incident an example of their ‘black supremacy’. On the White House’s ‘We the People’ website 141,444 people, enough to meet the threshold for an official response, signed a petition comparing Black Lives Matter to Isis and calling on the Federal government to treat them as a ‘terrorist organisation’.
At its root racism is taking the characteristics, actions, flaws and even virtues of a few and attributing them to everyone else you believe is also part of that race. It is a hideous practice and over much of its history some racist ideas and practices have become so second nature that they are now structural and deeply embedded in our society. Group criminalisation of black people – often based on a reputation of being unreasonable and uncivilised brutes – is one such historical racist habit. In leading a popular campaign to expose racism, Black Lives Matter has unsurprisingly become victim to this old and tired prejudice. Though there’s no material link between the group and the Chicago attackers, their shared race is enough to make each of them guilty of the others’ crimes.
Racist judgements about groups are one problem, but that beast becomes even more dangerous when taking the form of a conspiracy theory. The idea that Black Lives Matter is orchestrating a campaign of hate and terror against white people is exactly that, a conspiracy theory. In reality they are fighting for their lives by trying to end forms of racism that are killing them. By pretending otherwise some people are deliberately whipping up dangerous fear – rest assured, black people are not coming to start a war against white people. They never have and white people have never collectively been the victims.
If we really care about justice for what happened to the young man being subjected to horrible violence in that video, we ought to correctly identify what is happening to him. It is a video of person with disabilities being subjected to the sort of cruelty we have become unable to grapple with head on, instead preferring to obfuscate. It is not footage from a Black Lives Matter kidnapping.