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The former East Tennessee State University student who wore a gorilla mask and disrupted a Black Lives Matter protest on campus while carrying bananas and a rope has been indicted by a grand jury.

The Associated Press reports that Assistant District Attorney Erin McArdle confirmed that Tristan Rettke of Hendersonville, Tenn., was indicted by a Washington County grand jury on two counts of civil rights intimidation and two counts of disorderly conduct and disrupting a meeting.

As previously reported on The Root, Rettke showed up to the on-campus protest wearing overalls and gorilla mask. He carried bananas, a rope and a Confederate flag. He told Johnson City, Tenn., police that he used the items to provoke the protesters. Rettke reportedly dangled the bananas, tied with a rope, in peoples faces at the Sept. 28 protest.

AP reports that witnesses told the grand jury that Rettke used racial slurs, intimidated them and made them fearful.

From the Johnson City Press:

Thomas Madison, who was not part of the rally but stopped by on his way to a class, said he began videoing and asked Rettke what was his purpose for being there. On the video, Rettke can be heard saying in a muffled voice that he was there to support the protesters.

He said, I identify as a gorilla, Madison testified. I took that as a reference to me being black. And I took him wearing a mask at a Black Lives Matter protest the fact black people historically have been called monkeys.

Madison also testified that he took the bananas being tied up with rope as a very serious threat when you come offer me a banana this close to my face, its calling me a monkey, and Im not a monkey, he said, demonstrating that Rettke was just inches from Madisons face during the encounter.

Jaylen Grimes testified Rettke wrapped a rope around the bananas over and over, then pulled the ends of the rope, which sliced through the fruit. Grimes said he viewed the rope as a noose and took it as a reference to the historical lynching of African Americans.

Patrick Denton, Rettkes attorney, says that his client was exercising his freedom of speech and didnt intimidate anyone.

Read more at the Associated Press and the Johnson City Press.

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Student Who Wore Gorilla Mask and Disrupted Black Lives Matter Protest Indicted by Grand Jury - The Root

This the first installment of a two-part series that examines protesting in the era of Trump. In first installment, NewsOne explores the state of Black Lives Matter, which has all but disappeared from nightly news coverage. In the second piece, NewsOne explores the shift in mainstream media coverage to so-called White working-class protesters as they begin to experience the realities of Trumps America.

Donald Trump,racist,allegedchild rapist,xenophobe,misogynist, sexual predator, andnon-taxpaying celebrity businessman, is the 45thpresident of the United States.

Since his election, he has signed executive orders that directly target Black and brown folks, including Muslims, Mexicans and other Latinos.Other measures have been aimed at gay and transgender people, and women and children. He has even threatened to send in the feds to Chicagos South Side, which only serves to punish Black people for living in under-resourced neighborhoods, and where cultural pathologies around Blackness, crime, and violence are exaggerated in the White imagination.

The Trump administration promotes personal loyalty and fidelity to an old, discriminatory social and political order, WilliamsCollege Africana Studies professorJoy Jamestells NewsOne. [Their] economic nationalism is White nationalism favored by a sizable number of Whites and wrapped in the rhetoric of racial threat[s] in which Whites are always the victims.

But who is going to stop him? Surely not the Republican Congress or defeated Democrats. Indeed, today BlackLivesMatter activists, who were once a nightly fixture on cable and network news broadcasts from 2013-2016, continue their work at thegrassroots level away from the glare of the national spotlight. They are working to shield poor Black and brown folks, not only from Trumps harmful executive orders, but also working to dismantle intraracial violence, including murder, rape, interpersonal assault and attacks on Black transgender women, leaders tell NewsOne.

Nearly four years after its founding in 2013, whenGeorge Zimmermanescaped conviction for the shooting death of Trayvon Martinin Sanford, Florida, and almost three years after #BlackLivesMatter went viralwhenMichael Brown Jr.was slain by now ex-police officerDarren Wilsonin Ferguson, Missouri, the movement continues to grow and evolve.

Today, it boasts over 26 chapters across the United States, Canada and parts of Europe. Its prominence as a Black-led organizing project is due, in part, to community events like the Labor Day Weekend 2014 Black Lives Matter freedom rides, and theorganizing strategies of Ferguson and St. Louis residentsJohnetta Elzie,Tef Poe,Ashley Yates,Larry Fellows,Alexis TempletonandBrittany Ferrell, among so many others.

Their work continues even as some of their compatriots face political imprisonment and state surveillance. For example, California BLM activist Jasmine Abdullah has beencharged with felony lynching, and Ferguson, Missouri activistJosh Williams is serving an 8-year-sentence on arson and burglary charges.

What is working in our movement, from our direct actions to marches, is shifting a large lie about America being post-racial because we elected a Black president,Allen Frimpong, a member of Black Lives Matter NYC and Movement NetLab, tellsNewsOne. What this movement gets to shift is its capacity to support and absorb people, who are newly active as a result of the Trump presidency, to organize locally and be intergenerational in our approach.

Working at a grassroots level

For its part, BLM NYC does not need the glow of television klieg lights to do its work. The group, in partnership with the Coalition to End Broken Windows, the Black Youth Project, and the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, runs #SwipeItForward, a campaign designed to hand out free subway rides to prevent police from arresting poor people of color, especially undocumented immigrants, who cannot pay for public transportation. AndNYC Shut It Down: The Grand Central Crew #BlackLivesMatter, among others,continues its efforts to draw attention to racial injustice through demonstrations.

These efforts are not spectacular in the media gaze, but they dramatically impact the everyday realities of Black and brown people in communities that are victims of Trumps militarized policing and ICE raids.

White nationalism returned to the forefront of American politics in the wake of PresidentBarack Obamas two-terms in office and the people power of the Black Lives Matter Movement. To this point, BLM cofounderPatrisse Cullorsurges activists and people of color to resist, organize, resist words that echo the fortitude of activists like Stokely Carmichael,Ida B. Wells-Barnett,Angela DavisandMalcolm X.

Some argue that Black Lives Matter lost its political verve when leaders decided tonot endorse a presidential candidate, while others note the hypocrisy of gesturing towards some leaders implicit support offormer presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. These political differences are significant. Movements never have singular vantage points, and there is surely a spectrum with regards to Black liberation and leftist politics.

Charlene Carruthers, national Director of the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), a signatory of theMovement for Black Lives policy platform, contends that the movements emphasis needs not solely rest on what happens in Washington and on Capitol Hill, but rather on what happens at the local level to people of color.

Real power lies in our communities, towns, cities and states, said. We have to build local power. Our people cant afford for us to cower and move to the middle. This administration wont make any concessions just because we accommodate it.

Resist, Organize, Resist

Without question, the movements focus has not only been on Trump and police violence, but activists stress the necessity of dismantling intraracial violence, including but not limited to rape, interpersonal assault and the brutal murders of Black trans women, who often receive no public mourning or movement outcry.

Cis[gender] folks need to be in courageous conversations with other cis folks about the ways we perpetuate transphobia, Cullors says.

Janisha Gabriel, a member of BLM NYC and the founder and director of theSpeak My Name Project, says the adaptation of the movement requires internal searching and healing.

This moment necessitatesthat our work be intraracially intersectional. Black people must center and fight for all Black people, Gabriel says. Fighting for all Black life, as Black people, requires us to do some internal searching and healing.

Elle Hearns, executive director of The Marsha P. Johnson Institute and former organizing director and founding member of The Black Lives Matter Network says the power of the movement has never been in the White House, but in each other.

It is that power that will continue to build a movement reflective of how to address the issues affecting marginalized communities in this country and

Trumps cabinet may be filled with transantagonistic, racist, corporate elites, but our communities and our movements need not be a reflection of the administrations anti-immigrant, anti-women, anti-Black policies.

Black Lives Matter activists at the grassroots level continues to raise the mirror of righteous indignation toward Americas very White and angry faces. White supremacists may break the glass, reject truth, and believe in lies and alternative facts of their own making, but the shattered pieces remain with each broken piece illuminating pro-Black movements in an anti-Black world.

In fact, while being ignored by the mainstream media, Black Lives Matter remains standing and active as an indictment of the status quo, including Trump and all White supremacists.

Ahmad Greene-Hayesis a doctoral student in the Departments of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University. He also currently serves as an inaugural cohort fellow of theJust Beginnings Collaborative(2016-2018), where his project,Children of Combaheeworks to eradicate child sexual abuse in Black churches. Follow him@_BrothaG.

SEE ALSO:

Ferguson: Straight Facts On #MikeBrown Shooting Case

See the rest here:
Black Lives Matter V. Trump: Whats Next? | News One

Despite insistence that its not a moment but a movement, national attention to the Black Lives Matter organization has faded.

Nonetheless, as a scholar of black representation and political movements, its clear to me that if were worried about how to create social and political change, we must turn back to Black Lives Matter and its model of organizing.

Black Lives Matter began online after the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin and blossomed into a real-time organization in the wake of the 2014 police murder of Mike Brown.

And today, according to a recent study,it has the support of more than 40 percent of Americans. #BlackLivesMatter is no ordinary group of protesters.

Journalist Marc Lamont Hill, who has charted the organizations rise, writes of Black Lives Matter and network of allies, Pushing aside civil rights-era orthodoxies, these groups have embraced queer, trans, female, and shared leadership, rejected rigid respectability politics, and resisted (to varying degrees of success) co-optation by the dominant power structure.

In so doing, they have practiced an inclusiveness, what its founders have called an intersectionality, and a protective indeterminacy, that is urgently necessary for any political success in the coming years of the Trump presidency.

Intersectionality for #BlackLivesMatter is not just a matter of making sure a womans march reflects all women, for instance, and not just those with pink pussies (but also brown or trans women) or the folks who can afford to attend such a march (like working class or poor women); it is also a radical refusal to pursue methods or goals that leave behind large swaths of Black America.

As scholar Keenanga Yamhatta-Taylor points out in From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, as a woman-founded organization with critical distance from more mainstream movements, #BlackLivesMatter has also made a much more deliberate intervention to expose police brutality as part of a much larger system of oppression in the lives of all Black working-class and poor people and, in so doing, has set its sight on broader goals than those of centralized national organizations like the NAACP with ties to government-backed funders.

Such breadth is clear in its mission statement and its policy demands, which insist not only on reparations but also ground-up change through the dismantling of the police apparatus itself.

Indeed, its #BlackLivesMatters wide-ranging vision, along with its intersectionality and its insistence that its efforts reflect its diverse and often locally, rather than nationally, organized constituents, that have set #BlackLivesMatter apart from both former and current civil rights movement organizations.

To be sure, today the assaults on Black life come not only in the form of police violence or even the resurgence of a discourse of hate directed at Mike Brown, whose spectral image is again back in the news.

Trumps governments defunding of the NEH will affect Black artists; climate change and the governments dismantling of the EPA will disproportionately affect Black children, who often live in more polluted and environmentally fragile neighborhoods; and the proposed increases in military spending will result in an increasingly militarized nation, again disproportionately affecting Black Americans, who have repeatedly suffered at the hands of the national guard and militarized police. And so it is only a movement with a deep understanding of how racial oppression works systemically, how it reaches out across branches of the government, social structures and institutions, that can help us fight against the violence this government is wreaking not only on our most vulnerable citizens, but on us all.

Instead of arguing about the goals or inclusiveness of the Womens March or the general strike as many of us have over the past months or planning interest-group event after interest-group event (the Scientists March, for instance), we should all join Black Lives Matter, find our local chapters, and work to revitalize its visionary protests, which serve not only what scholar Robin D. G. Kelley has called the freedom dreams of Black America, but the hopes of all of us that someday, somehow, the government will work to better our lives.

Liz Reich, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of film studies at Connecticut College, where she teaches and writes about race and cinema. She is author of Militant Visions: Black Soldiers, Internationalism, and the Transformation of American Cinema, and is a Public Voices fellow.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

Original post:
Black Lives Matter is not a moment but a movement | TheHill

BLOOMINGTON Representatives of Black Lives Matter say a photo that shows a 10-year-old boy in handcuffs surrounded by Bloomington police is an example of children of color being disproportionately targeted by police.

The youth was in juvenile court Wednesday to face charges resulting from an incident last June in which he allegedly spray painted graffiti at a neighborhood park. Because he had not written a letter of apology and served 10 community service hours as ordered, he returned to court where he was granted an extension until April 25.

On March 12, police were called for a report of a youth throwing rocks in a church parking lot. When officers arrived, the same 10-year-old reportedly ran to his home. Once there, officers handcuffed him. He does not face any charges in that incident.

A picture of the boy in handcuffs appeared on social media sites last week.

The image of the large officers standing over the small child offered the community a clear view of the Bloomington Police Departments heavy-handed criminalization of children of color, read a statement from the group.

While Bloomington police Assistant Chief Ken Bays said he could not address the specific incident because it involved a juvenile, he said that in general, there are various reasons why multiple officers would be called to a scene.

A call may look benign at first, and not require much, but other individuals could arrive at a scene and inject themselves into it and escalate it, he said. At some point, an officer has to make an assessment of what the motives of those individuals are and how that is impeding their responsibilities.

Bays said the safety of officers and the public is most important.

We have to make sure we have control of a scene and that is done by calling in additional officers, he said. So those officers may be on the scene and not have had anything to do with the original call.

Anyone can be put in handcuffs, including juveniles, Bays added.

If the individual is not listening to officers, that could be a reason, but again, it is more about adding some control to an unknown situation, he said.

Follow Kevin Barlow on Twitter: @pg_barlow

Continued here:
BPD, Black Lives Matter differ on photo - Bloomington Pantagraph

Photo Courtesy: YiouTube/Melina Abdullah

Todays police officers evolved from slave catchers, according to a Black Lives Matter organizer who spoke at a California State University, Fullerton, event last week.

Melina Abdullah also a professor and chair of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles described Black Lives Matter as police abolitionists because ofthe history of American law enforcement, the Daily Titan reported.

Police that we now have were the slave catchers, Abdullah continued, the paper reported. So that is where it comes from. You literally have a target on your back. That is what policing was founded on, and that is what it evolved out of. So the former slave catchers or paddy rollers, they were called slave patrols.

When Abdullah asked the audience what slave patrols are called today, the Daily Titan said the response was patrolmen.

LA Weekly characterized Abdullah as a key figure in the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter and noted she called the citys police department the most murderous police force in the country.

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Black Lives Matter: Police Officers 'Evolved' From 'Slave Catchers' - LawOfficer.com