Black Lives Matter panel discusses institutional racism

Members of the Black Lives Matter Los Angeles Chapter discussed the current treatment of African-Americans and the need for change at a panel Wednesday in the United University Church.

The discussion was hosted by the Price School of Public Policy, and the panel was composed of Melina Abdullah, a professor and chair of Pan-African studies at California State University, Los Angeles; Hector Villagra, executive director of American Civil Liberties  Union Southern California; Anya Slaughter, the mother of a child who was killed by Pasadena policemen; and Pete White, the founder and co-director of LA Community Action Network. The panel was moderated by Jody Armour, a professor in the Gould School of Law.

The panel opened with Slaughter sharing the story of her son, Kendrec McDade, who was shot and killed by two Pasadena police officers in 2012. She said that no justice was done to the individuals who were directly involved in the incident.

“They chased Kendrec with the lights turned on and never broadcasted that they were chasing him,” Slaughter said. “During the chase, one was driving the police vehicle and one was running behind him. They fabricated their stories to get off themselves of their wrongdoings,”

Abdullah said that stories like Kendrec’s become the fuel of their movement.

“For the families of people who have been killed, you cannot just keep moving,” Abdullah said. “Rather than simply wallowing in your sorrow, it is beautiful that you use it to help us get connected. What keeps us going is to recognize the way we are connected.”

Armour then asked the panelists about the power of social media in modern civil rights movements. Villagra explained the legality issues behind recording police abuse and introduced a mobile application, named Mobile Injustice, that the ACLU developed to encourage more people to participate in reporting injustice, using the 1992 beating of Rodney King that sparked the L.A. riots as a point of comparison.

“When Rodney King’s beating was recorded, it was almost one in a million,” Villagra said. “Now, the thought that somebody can have a cellphone on them and very quickly come to a scene and capture images of police violence, the odds are really high. Even if the officer were to grab your phone and delete the video you had recorded, it would not matter as the copy of it would be sent to our offices.”

White described what black people have gone through in the previous eras to achieve civil rights and proposed a guideline where the participants of the movement should stand now.

“We have to think about where the system came from – where it is rooted in,” White said. “Jim Crow, slavery, the Civil War, Martin Luther King Jr., the nationalist movement — the list continues on and on and no measure of tinkering is going to change that. The cell phone becomes a weapon and tool … it creates conversations that break through family table discussions.”

As the discussion reached its end, a student asked the panelists how they intend to advocate for people with different backgrounds, including the LGBTQ community.

“Among our co-founders of the organization, two of them identify as queer,” Abdullah said. “A core guiding principle for us is that ‘all black lives matter.”