The Appeal Podcast: How Activists Brought Down the Most Powerful Man in Chicago

Two pieces of news have rocked Chicago: the announcement by Mayor Rahm Emanuel that he will not seek a third term and the conviction of a white police officer, Jason Van Dyke, for the killing of a black teenager, Laquan McDonald. Both events were the result of years of activism, work that often goes unseen and unsung. This week’s guest, writer Kelly Hayes, talks about the lessons Chicago holds for activists throughout the country. Read her story here.

The Appeal is available on iTunes, Soundcloud and LibSyn RSS. You can also check us out on Twitter

Transcript:

Adam Johnson: Hi. Welcome to The Appeal. I’m your host Adam Johnson. This is a podcast on criminal justice reform, abolition and everything in between. Remember, you can follow us @TheAppealPod on Twitter.com, you can follow us on Facebook at The Appeal magazine’s main website and of course you can always subscribe and rate us on iTunes. Recently, two big events happened in Chicago out of a culmination of years of activism. The announcement by Mayor Rahm Emanuel that he will not seek a third term and the conviction of a white police officer, Jason Van Dyke, for the killing of a black teenager, Laquan McDonald, in 2014. While these may seem random they very much aren’t. They are the result of a decade of activism and pressure by city organizers that often goes unseen and unnoticed. Today’s guest writer, Kelly Hayes, is going to talk about this tireless activism and what other cities across the country can learn from Chicago.

[Begin Clip]

Kelly Hayes: Emanuel orchestrated the whole thing to make the police look good. They were just super polite about how they arrested people in front of the cameras and of course not so polite behind the scenes, um, people were treated pretty horribly in jail. He crafted the narrative really well to look like he was different than the other mayors around the country. Chicago is a resistance town. We have a lot of people here who are rising up against his austerity measures and he was unable to simultaneously institute these harmful policies and play himself off as being respectful of protestors. To be real, he was just getting hit from every corner of the city continuously for years.

[End Clip]

Adam: Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Kelly Hayes: Oh thank you for having me.

Adam: So you wrote what I would sort of call the definitive autopsy on the perspective third term for Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, one that you argue and I think pretty clearly argue, is a product of activist through various different sectors of the activist community and in many ways is a concession and a win by them. And I want to talk about that. It’s a pretty big picture thing and I think that a lot of people who operate in this space of activism, especially police and prison abolition and reform, uh, can sometimes feel like the world’s bigger than them and that they don’t necessarily move the needle. And this is a case where I think there’s a, it’s a very clear sign that the tide has changed in Chicago. Can you talk a bit about, just to kind of lay the ground for our listeners, what a Mayor Rahm Emanuel represented to Chicago and to activists kind of nationally? What sort of political threat he represented and what forces had worked against him over the years? And then we can kind of drill down on the details from there.

Kelly Hayes: Sure. Thing. So I was among those challenging Rahm Emanuel really early on when he had a very different sort of public perception around his work here. When he first came to be mayor of Chicago, he was trying to put a very friendly face on his dealings with protestors. He was trying really hard to avoid any controversy in that area and I thought pretty artfully at the time. I was kind of resentful of it to be honest because I thought he was doing his politician piece really well in a way that was preventing the message from getting out for some of us. Uh, for example, with Occupy in 2011, over three hundred people were arrested for trying to hold space. Emanuel orchestrated the whole thing to make the police look good. They were just super polite about how they arrested people in front of the cameras and of course not so polite behind the scenes, um, people were treated pretty horribly in jail. He crafted the narrative really well to look like he was different than the other mayors around the country. He was trying to treat protestors with respect and dignity. And so he got out of the gate with that messaging pretty well. But it didn’t stand up to time because Chicago is a resistance town. We have a lot of people here who are rising up against his austerity measures and he was unable to simultaneously institute these harmful policies and play himself off as being respectful of protestors. To be real, he was just getting hit from every corner of the city continuously for years, which is why it’s really hard to narrow down this story. It’s, it’s, I don’t want to call it like death by a thousand cuts, but really it was a relentlessness to what went on and even the part of the story that I tried to tell him that piece, it’s still just a snapshot because there are only a few campaigns covered there and there were so many people working to stop state violence under Rahm Emanuel. I think the key thing to understand is that his veneer eroded and his own storytelling fell apart and the face of the superior storytelling of movements.

Adam: Yeah. I think, um, the, you know, the term “neoliberal” gets thrown around a lot, oftentimes incorrectly. And I think that for many, I think very correctly, Rahm Emanuel represented the kind of limits, if you will, of neoliberalism or the kind of most sinister manifestation, which is to say someone who sort of presents himself as being progressive or liberal but really operates under the interest of white sort of real estate in Wall Street interests in a way that was, like you said, it was effective for awhile then sort of wore off. Um, can we talk about specifically the sort of two major points of protest to start off with, which is Rahm Emanuel’s attacks on public education, the shutting down of schools and also his attacks on the mental health clinics. Uh, he oversaw the largest public school closure in US history. What kind of effect did this have to really kind of motivate and animate the forces against him? Those sort of two dual efforts that he did targeting specifically poor black neighborhoods?

Kelly Hayes: Well, I think that Rahm Emanuel didn’t realize the extent to which something as extreme as those school closures, like would have a polarizing effect in the city. I do not think that he understood in that causing that great an injury he was also like shuffling a great deal of energy and resentment towards the people who were already opposing him in an organized way. A lot of people who you know are really busy with their day to day lives and don’t necessarily have time for a lot of political engagement, it became a personal thing for them at that point. These people were engaged with trying to save their schools. Parents occupied schools to try to prevent their closures. I saw middle school children form blockades around school doors to try to prevent their supplies from being removed from the building on the last day of school. It was a heartbreaking time. Um, I went to jail behind one of those protests, a lot of people threw down in a spectacular manner and that had a culture building impact on this city. As much, as injurious as it was, it stoked 6:56 a lot of people in a really powerful way. Uh, with the mental health clinics I was deeply involved in the sort of closing months of that piece because of my background in direct action, I was asked to come in and help with some things and we actually occupied a clinic uh, briefly, it was overnight and eventually the police cut through the barricades and arrested everyone. But there were very dramatic acts of protest involved there carried out by people who were deeply affected who were telling their stories, who told Emanuel in front of the entire city that they would die without their clinics. Some of those people did. Helen Morley was one of those amazing and brave people and you know, people like her also affected the culture of this city and helped gel together communities that had a reason to move forward in concert in a powerful way. So every time he struck us with that violence and privatization and neoliberalism, he also connected people. And I think that that’s something that was beyond his understanding.

Adam: Yeah. Without getting too too far beyond the scope of this podcast, which of course does mainly legal system reform and abolition, but you can’t divorce the two, right? You can’t untether the austerity politics with the focus on policing. There are a number of statistics that show that people who are shot by police or have quote unquote “violent” encounters with police have mental health issues and there is a direct correlation between the shutting down of mental health facilities and the increase in violent confrontations. As someone who deals in the day to day, as someone who’s very close with the activist community, how does one work to sort of connect those threads right? We talk about Black Lives Matter, we talk about austerity and how do you, how do you sort of unite those into kind of one uniform ideology, um, specifically in the context of Chicago? For example, things like school “reform,” quote unquote, were hugely popular amongst liberals. They’re normally not anymore, but they were around 2009, 2010 because of things like Waiting for Superman and the kind of propaganda surrounding that. How does one get one to sort of see the connectivity of all these different things on a day to day basis for your kind of,  someone who sort of just, you know, it doesn’t necessarily follow it closely?

Kelly Hayes: Well, I would say that as a prison and police abolitionist, these things are inextricably connected to me every day and I think they’re also inextricably connected to a lot of the people in our communities every day. Prison abolition isn’t simply about the dismantling of buildings. It’s about the presence of something that is not there yet.

Adam: Right.

Kelly Hayes: So in my work and in the work of other folks who are acting against state violence in the city, there’s a lot of trying to model what we need and what’s being taken and why these conditions are the way they are such that, you know, crime is generated. We know that conditions foster crime and when people say they can’t imagine what a world without prisons looks like, I tell them to think of the more posh suburbs around Chicago because people whose needs are met, do you not have a lot of the issues we have here. So when we see schools, which are the heart of a community being ripped out of those communities, when you see people being deprived of mental healthcare and other services, there is an undeniable direct connection. And even the police and the prison administration will explain themselves, like, they wind up taking on, like, Cook County Jail is the largest mental health care provider in the state and I believe still the country. So these things cannot be separated and I think it takes a special sort of limited thinking to try to separate them.

Adam: Right. A lot of money goes into trying to separate them.

Kelly Hayes: Exactly.

Adam: I am reminded of The New York Times editorial when, uh, when, when Martin Luther King came out against the Vietnam War, they rushed to the presses saying ‘poo poo poo,’ you know, ‘talk about racial justice, but don’t talk about a US violence oversees.’ That he, you know, the sort of, the worst thing you can do is start connecting things like race and class and austerity and war, you know, you can keep them in their little separate compartments, but. So one thing I wanted to discuss when discussing Rahm Emanuel’s legacy and really what, what the city sort of faces moving forward is, was the movement, this is sort of really fascinating and a lot of people know about it as the movement for reparations around Jon Burge, who was the former police commander who ran a torture regime for about 16 years in Chicago from 1972 to 1988. This was something I think truly radical, truly subversive. Limited in many ways, but really set a standard for what activists could do. Can you talk about the movement, the Chicago Torture Justice movement in the early 2010s and sort of how that happened and how that happened under Rahm, um, in spite of him?

Kelly Hayes: Certainly. So in 2010, uh, some folks started having conversations, community members, lawyers who for quite a while had been working to free Burge’s victims, artists, organizers. They decided that they needed to create some manifestations, some artful manifestations to really force this into the public consciousness. Like people, you know, this had been a news story. People knew these things had happened, but it really wasn’t seizing upon people’s, like, you know, the city’s conscience in the way that it should. And it wasn’t pushing for, this knowledge wasn’t generating change that transformed conditions or really benefited those who had been most impacted. So it began with the exhibition. But from there, a lot of work began including the, the ordinance that was written, which as organizer Mariame Kaba said, it was truly a transformative document. Providing financial compensation is of course very important, but providing for the educational and medical needs of the torture survivors and their families, of creating a monument to torture survivors of police torture and really doing the work of making sure that these people’s needs were met and their stories were told in the Chicago Public School curriculum. I mean, to be quite honest, I didn’t believe it was possible. I thought it was more of a political statement than an actual policy pursuit. But in the closing six months or so of the, uh, of the campaign, I was approached by someone I really respect and told that we need to take some of the momentum of the moment and direct it towards this because this is doable. And that was organizer Mariame Kaba. And I agreed to do it because I tend to do what that brilliant woman asks me to do (chuckles) and sure enough, you know, with a relentless campaign in those closing months to drive it home of direct action and, you know, creative, artful protest, you know, the battle was won. But that also included a great gift we received, which was a mayoral runoff. And I think that this plays a lot into why Rahm Emanuel decided not to run again. Uh, that runoff was brutal. We hit him with everything we had. We went to his house, we set up a pop up art exhibit outside of his mayoral office. He couldn’t get away from us and there was really nothing he could do any about any of it because he was under such close media scrutiny that if he, if any of us were arrested or attacked by the police, it could have cost him the election. So he had to stay very hands off. And I think he just didn’t want to live through that again.

Adam: Um, let’s talk about negative campaigning for a second. I know that in certain leftist or anarchist or sort of general circles of organizations and people who are skeptical of electoral politics, a lot of people embrace negative campaigning, which is a sort of general philosophy, for our listeners, of engaging in electoral politics specifically to criticize or to bring down someone who is uniquely evil. They do this very successfully with Joseph Arpaio in Arizona. Um, I know that Chicago activists did this in a district attorney race recently and this was something I know a lot of people were gearing up for Rahm Emanuel if he was to run next year, he is not now. Um, can we talk about the efficacy and the logic behind negative campaigns and what your personal thoughts are on that as an approach to politics?

Kelly Hayes: I think negative campaigning is incredibly important in this political moment. Um, particularly given the disengagement in the electoral system that we see among marginalized groups. People are disillusioned. They’ve given up hope in investing in a candidate who claims to represent their interests. So personally, I’m not going to walk into those communities and tell them that some of these candidates who I don’t believe in personally are going to help us, are going to make things better, but what I can make a case for is that the people who’ve done us great harm need to be held accountable. There needs to be consequences. So in that way I think that we can get people to act against folks and set a standard and show people that there are consequences for wicked actions and maybe that’s a step towards something else and maybe it’s all some people are going to do, but states attorneys have a 95 percent retention rate and Anita Alvarez was bumped from office. So to me it sent a very powerful message that you don’t have to endorse a candidate to affect the course of electoral history. And I think any tool right now that we have to effect the course of electoral history is a crucial one.

Adam: Speaking of wins, I know that there is some internal debate as to the value of the verdict in the Van Dyke trial, which has recently concluded with a guilty verdict for second degree murder. That one’s ideologically complex. Can we talk about the view across the board about what these kinds of trials do? Are they considered wins? Are they considered kind of window dressing? And for those who don’t know, uh, in 2014 he was convicted of shooting a young African American man, Laquan McDonald sixteen times, and then was found guilty, which is, for anyone who follows these things, is an extreme rarity. But can you talk about how activists in Chicago are kind of absorbing this? I know it’s very recent, but can you talk about that and what the sort of long term outlook is in terms of police accountability and building systems of police accountability?

Kelly Hayes: That is indeed quite complicated. As you know, Chicago has a pretty large presence of abolitionist organizers. As major cities go, I’d say we’re kind of a hub for that. So some of us do not believe in the prison system, um, policing or the punishment system. So personally I wasn’t super engaged with calls for the conviction itself, but that said, this isn’t, this isn’t just any case and this isn’t just any climate and I definitely understand these political objectives and the statements that people were trying to make and also the comfort that people were trying to win for a community that has been hurting. I think we have to remember that movements aren’t just about actions and strategies they are also about community and culture building. And the community really wanted this and I hope that folk find some peace in it. My personal feeling on police trials is that they do not offer systemic change and I think the general risk is that you actually create a scenario where the system is validated. That it can work. I don’t think we’re seeing that in Chicago though, and I think part of that is the very careful organizing that was done by folks like Black Lives Matter Chicago. You may have seen that after the guilty verdict folks were still in the streets in great numbers, shutting things down and I was really grateful for that because, you know, they were delivering on their message. You know, Jason Van Dyke is not an aberration. He is an emblem. This conviction here I don’t think is going to turn into a sense of complacency.

Adam: Yeah, that’s interesting cause I know that a lot of people who are curious about abolitionism or the sort of general approach to it sometimes there’s these kind of, um, tension points where people aren’t quite sure what the right route is. And I think it’s good to sort of consistently engage in that. We have this a lot with some communities, and we talked about this briefly when we talked to Willy Anderson, we talked about sort of alternate justice systems are kind of accountability systems that exist outside of the state. And it can be hard because sometimes the state is the only option and so things get a little, a little dicey. So the term “Chicago” is a very racialized term. The word itself is shorthand and right-wing circles for kind of liberalism run amuck and African American violence, black on black crime right? It’s sort of used as a shorthand. The president uses it as shorthand to racialize Obama, has for years. This has kind of led to a sort of soft liberal racism around gun control, which is a topic we’ve discussed on the show before and it’s something that’s also not very clear cut and dry. Can we talk about the ways in which gun control in inner cities is not as clear cut as we kind of want it to be in terms of tacking on long prison sentences and who it really affects. We discussed this with Josie Duffy Rice in the first episode, which is um, you know, most gun control, most automatic weapon laws don’t really affect Cletus and in the hills of Virginia, they really manifest in the inner cities. Can we talk about how to balance the need for public safety with the use by, specifically Rahm Emanuel, this gun control issue to police black communities in Chicago?

Kelly Hayes: Well first I think it’s important to understand that Rahm Emanuel is Trumpian in so many ways and just labeled differently. He also blames the community for its own struggles. Every time it happens, you know, if he talks about personal responsibility and families. That’s functionally not that different from the president talking about people in the terms that he does, it may seem more respectable, but at the end of the day, it’s still abdicating responsibility, blaming people for their own suffering and you know sort of throwing your hands in the air when you actually have the power to effect the situation. Rahm Emanuel has overseen the conditions that fuel violence and he has consistently uplifted these notions of more mandatory minimums and we have consistently fought against those policies because there is no evidence that they work. There is no evidence that stiffer prison sentences or more arrests or fueling the prison industrial complex will make anything better in our community. But people like simple solutions to complex problems. So when people hear about large crime numbers and then hear about heavy prison sentences, people want it to be that simple. And Rahm Emanuel thrives on people’s desire for things to be that simple when nothing is. There’s also some amount of feigned ignorance behind all of this because if Rahm Emanuel were to acknowledge that he knew that conditions fuel violence, that people who are desperate do desperate things, that people who will live in a state of despair experience more crime, then he might be obligated to do something about that. So there’s this very thick air in the city government of people just sort of covering their eyes and ears pretending to not understand how anything works and then speaking to the public accordingly.

Adam: One of the things you mentioned early on was that Rahm Emanuel presented himself in a kind of slick fashion to kind of, uh, you know, obviously he came from the Obama administration, he was his chief of staff, um, as someone who could sort of be seen as an ally or, you know, he kept his policies kind of vague. My question is moving forward now ten years later, eight years later is with the election coming up and, you know, we don’t want to endorse or not endorse candidates on the show obviously, and I don’t think it’s good to do in general, but what, what should it be something that people are gonna look out for in terms of how to avoid that fate again?

Kelly Hayes: I am far less interested in what a politician promises or what they say then what they’ve done and I think it would be a catastrophic mistake for us to get hung up on rhetoric or talking points. I think we need to look at the history of the candidates and what they have done. Have they supported privatization? Have they supported tough on crime solutions? Like these are the things I’ll be looking for and I don’t think I’m going to find a candidate who I think ‘this is my person,’ who I think is worthy of my investment, but I will definitely be looking at people’s records and figuring out who I think would be the most catastrophic and avoiding them. Like in the grassroots as a street organizer, whoever wins is my next opponent. Like I’m going to go head to head with whoever wins and that’s the way this works and that’s the way politics works. So I’m looking for, you know, the weakest opponent in terms of who’s going to try to further privatize my city and further militarize the police.

Adam: Right. Um, obviously a lot of these lessons go beyond Chicago. The austerity politics are crippling communities throughout the country, privatization of education, the closing down of mental health facilities. Just as someone who’s been in the weeds in these scenarios for some time, what advice would you give activists or politically engaged people in these communities in terms of what lessons can they learn from Chicago?

Kelly Hayes: So lessons that folks can learn from Chicago in terms of some of these bigger fights I think one thing is that you can’t wait for the big nonprofits or, you know, you’re more money sort of activist institutions to do anything. What I’ve seen is that if an idea seems too aggressive, if it seems like too much, you’re not going to get the buy in from the people with the resources, but once you create momentum, everyone wants a piece of it. You start bringing people into a room who share your objectives, start creating educational opportunities, start educating ourselves. We all have important books we haven’t read yet and when we build power in the street at the grassroots level, we see things happen that folks who have a lot more structural, economic and social currency suddenly want to be a part of it. You know, Bye Anita campaign had a budget of less than a thousand dollars and they brought down a prosecutor against all odds. So I would tell people, you know, it’s okay to start small and think big. It’s okay for your idea to seem impossible and too radical for everyone else because nobody makes the impossible happen without just disregarding what people tell them and saying, you know, I’m not going to agree to this inevitability. I’m going to factor inevitability out of my political view and demand what’s just. I would say it’s okay for us to do that and I think it’s an important thing to know right now when people are being told ‘just vote Democrat because we’re up against these terrible Republicans’ and the truth is it’s a yes and both, you know, we can go after the Republicans and still demand from Democrats life giving policies that will help our peoples.

Adam: Yeah. I think on the issue of moral vision, it’s, it’s hard for a lot of people to sort of comprehend because we have been drilled into this kind of reductionist thinking about what the possibilities of political power are specifically this kind of preemptive defeatism with terms like “electibility” or “feasibility” or “realistic,” right? These are kind of ways you maintain the status quo and sort of stunt moral thinking and I always think of that line from, there’s a Neil LaBute play called The Shape of Things where she says, ‘everything is nothing until it’s something,’ which I think is clearly the case with what you talked about with how people say, well, that’s not gonna happen and the second these movements gain momentum and then suddenly everyone wants a piece, then it’s something, right? But of course, you know, things are not always something. So I think that’s a sort of good note to lead on and sort of maybe a broader moral question, but one I think that really needs tackling. Is there anything that you wanna like talk about or plug before we go?

Kelly Hayes: Basically I would just say that my collective, Lifted Voices, offers direct action trainings. There are a lot of groups around the country offering organizing trainings and I think getting trained up and getting education is one of the most important things people can do right now if they want to organize. So I would suggest people like, in your area look into who’s offering those kinds of trainings. If you can canvas, then you can talk in front of large groups of people. Like there are lots of important skills to pick up right now that we need to be building. Even if it’s an organization that you’re not super into that you don’t plan on working with, I go to those trainings too because I want to know what skill sets they have to bring to what I can do, so the thought I’d like to leave with is just education, pursue as much of it as you can.

Adam: Awesome.

Kelly Hayes: I do tweet about a lot of these kinds of things, so if people want to follow me on Twitter it’s @MsKellyMHayes. I do tweet out some of the opportunities that people have to find those educational events.

Adam: Thank you so much. This was extremely informative.

Kelly Hayes: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Adam: Thanks to our guest Kelly Hayes. This has been The Appeal podcast. Remember, you can follow us on Twitter @TheAppealPod or subscribe to us on iTunes and follow us on Facebook at The Appeal magazine’s main Facebook page. The show is produced by Florence Barrau-Adams. The production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Executive producer Sarah Leonard. I’m your host Adam Johnson. Thank you so much. We’ll see you next week.