Laquan McDonald should be questioning how he’d celebrate his 20th birthday today. Period. Let’s start with that assumption. There is no doubt whatsoever that Chicago PD Officer Jason Van Dyke murdered Laquan in cold blood in the most vicious way whatsoever. Furthermore, the only reason the City of Chicago has brought Van Dyke to trial (and apparently are stacking the cards against him so that he may lose) is because the people of the city revolted and were showing no signs of relenting until Laquan saw some justice. However, I can almost guarantee that the fall of his most direct murderer is the only sign of justice that City Hall is willing to offer Laquan and others in his circumstance.
Let us look at the trajectory, the path that young Mr McDonald was put upon from his birth not as the bourgeois press does, as a failure of family members and a ring of choices that an individual Black youth made, but looking at the situations and where they arose from, realizing that trauma, for instance, affects the brain and how we relate to the world. And how bourgeois society addresses the injustice it creates by containment.
Laquan was born to a 15-year-old girl who was in foster care due to her own mother’s drug abuse, according to the Chicago Tribune. His mother was also on substances apparently when she gave birth, and he reported that he was smoking marijuana every day by the age of 11 in order to stay with “a smile on my face.”
Substance abuse doesn’t just happen. People choose to escape through such means largely because there are few other options available to them. Escape is powerful when life is nearly unbearable. So we need to ask if and why it was important to escape life, and how accessible the routes for escape were and which routes were available. We also know that drug abuse is similarly high among White poor, middle class, and rich people in the US. However, the surveillance system operates differently among White communities, and wealthier people are never questioned and have means to cover their abuse, such as treatment centers, private employees who can watch the children, reproductive options often absent to poorer families, etc.
Ronald Reagan’s wife used to preach to young Black kids that they should “Just Say No” to drugs while he flooded their streets with crack and opioids in his efforts to shut down socialist states. He was neither the first nor the last to do so. George Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W Bush only added to the problems by increasingly criminalizing Black youth and limiting their options to engage in the mainstream economy, thus creating a fully enclosed circle of drug selling and use and prison life.
Drug abuse isn’t about individual choices nearly as much as it is about governmental and economic forces, whom are never held to account for their crimes against Black and Brown people.
We learn, further:
Arrested 26 times since the age of 13, [McDonald] was in and out of juvenile detention in the last three years of his life.
This young man was arrested an average of 6 1/2 times a year. That’s once every 60 days. To see a teenager with mental health issues run into the police — let alone be arrested! — this often is to acknowledge that the entire state apparatus failed him.
CPD failed Laquan looooong before Van Dyke shot him 16 times in his back. Before his co-conspirators ran into the Burger King to wipe away evidence. Long before the Thin Blue Line shuffled around his murderer. Hell, they failed him even before his first run-in by setting themselves in place so that he would inevitably run into their sites several times over his short life.
City Hall failed Laquan looooong before they decided to cover-up the truth about his murder to protect Rahm Emanuel’s image and re-election prospects. They have also failed his family and thousands of families in similar situations by its policies of economic and racial segregation and containment, by relying on the police and incarceral system to handle mental health needs of Working Class Black people, by in fact relying on the incarceral system to be the main line of contact and service with Black youth and setting up the school system for these contacts. The state of Illinois’ inadequate foster care system and mental health coverage, as well as the United States’ own racist and classist systems and policies (going back to the Constitution) have failed them as well.
And the mainstream Chicago press failed Laquan by always taking the word of the CPD from the jump and leaving it to underfunded independent journalist-activists to actually do any sort of investigation of police misconduct.
The fact that Jason Van Dyke is being held to account for his crimes IS significant. Is important. But will the government of the City of Chicago, its agents (the Police) and its Bosses (the Capitalist Class) be held to account for their continuous crimes?
I hope so.
