Grateful to @them for running this story on HRC's deletion of a tweet praising #LoriLightfoot after Black and brown Chicagoans pointed to its hypocrisy.
I also want to challenge some of the analysis here, which comes directly from the her administration: them.us/story/hrc-dele…
From the article:
"In addition to the police beatings of protesters, Lightfoot also drew criticism for nightly shutdowns of transit service through downtown...The nightly road and transit closures, unrelated to protesting, were enacted after looting downtown on August 10."
The looting that occurred downtown and in other parts of the city WAS PART OF THE PROTESTS of policing. #LoriLightfoot's claim that the de facto separating of the predominately Black south side from the predominately white north side had nothing to do with protesting is a lie.
The point of this lie is a. to delegitimize certain types of protest i.e. those that destroy property, and b. to claim looting is the reason the wealthiest parts of the city were barricaded, and not the social and economic inequity the spurred it, which #Lightfoot is cementing.
Just because a protest isn't nonviolent, or isn't planed in the same way a march or rally is, doesn't mean it's not legitimate, and doesn't mean it's not occurring in response to the same conditions and events.
The goal of separating protests into "legitimate" and "illegitimate" is to make the massive response to police violence seem smaller than it is, and to turn protesters against one another, when their varied tactics are actually working towards the same ends.
Don't let #LoriLightfoot get away with claiming she supports one type of protest and not another. She doesn't allow for any dissent, any challenge to her power nor the power of her police. This is why she's so beloved by the police and the wealthy whose property they protect.
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