Last week after demonstrators gathered in Millennium Park and the South Loop to protest the Chicago Police Department’s delayed release of the video of officer Jason Van Dyke shooting Laquan McDonald to death, members of the activist communities in Chicago and across the nation proudly posted photos of the marchers and speakers on social media.
“As an organization rooted in a Black queer feminist framework, we take reports of sexual assault extremely seriously,” BYP100 leaders wrote on the group’s Facebook page Saturday. “When this allegation came to our attention, we immediately embarked on our accountability process.”
“He told me sexual violence prevention was something he was really passionate about and I felt relieved to finally be around someone who understood,” K. wrote in an open letter that several of her friends posted on Facebook on her behalf in order to protect her identity. “Because I thought he was a safe person, I disclosed to him that I had been assaulted a few months prior and that I was in the middle of a court process that was equally as traumatizing as the assault itself. He seemed outraged and concerned. I felt like I could trust him.”
After her previous experiences with the criminal justice system, K. decided she didn’t want to file a police report or press charges. “I’d already gone through the court process [around the prior assault],” she says. “It was more traumatic than the rape.” Instead, she decided, she would rather try to educate him.
Instead, K. began researching the history of rape within the civil rights movement. During a volunteer training session at Rape Victim Advocates, a Chicago nonprofit that works with victims and petitions for changes in the legal system, K. learned about Recy Taylor.
“I was getting frustrated,” she says. “I thought he needed to be educated. But I didn’t want to destroy his reputation.” She considered writing a private letter to the leaders of BYP100 telling them her story in the hopes that they would use that information to protect other women within the organization. “My intention wasn’t to disclose it to the world.”
When I came forward this week, there were activists who messaged my friends saying that sharing my story was damaging to the community, and that I needed to be quiet . . . because it was inconvenient timing. But liberation isn’t convenient, or easy. We don’t get to say “Hold up while we free these people real quick and then we’ll come back for the rest of you,” which is in essence what Black women have been told throughout history. Solidarity is for Black men and white women, not us.
As a Black woman, the idea of a “safe space” is currently a fallacy for me. I am not safe out in the world, I am not safe in my own community, and I am not even safe in activist spaces around people who claim to be working towards my liberation. You can’t fight for me while I’m awake then rape me while I’m asleep. I want be a bigger part of the movement, I want to join protests, I want to organize, but I can’t do that when the person who hurt me is a figurehead in those spaces.
