The timing of Vic Mensa’s high-profile response this past weekend to a Chicago police sting operation was more than a little serendipitous.
To those unfamiliar with Mensa’s past work and activism, that might sound like an appropriation of the past for the sake of street cred. It could come off as bold bluster coming from the mouth of an artist famous for incendiary songs like “16 Shots,” a track in which the Hyde Park native furiously spits rhymes about his outrage over the shooting death of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer. But the anti-bait truck event was further proof that Mensa’s radicalism is much more than rhetorical.
“We’re living without resources over here, and much of the community is beneath the poverty line, and you’re pulling up a truck with basketball shoes next to where poor kids are playing basketball?” he says. “It’s like they want it to seem like black people are inherently criminal.”
Mensa believes the underserved communities in Chicago need to begin organizing and helping themselves, part of his motivation behind the anti-bait-truck event.
Save Money Save Life is reminiscent of the kind of community service programs—termed “survival programs”—that the Black Panthers developed in the late 60s and early 70s. After Fred Hampton founded the Panthers’ Chicago chapter in 1968, it almost immediately started free breakfast programs for schoolchildren, established a medical center that didn’t charge patients for care, and instigated a project encouraging community supervision of the police.
He answered with a line from Chairman Mao, the Chinese revolutionary whose Little Red Book of quotations was once required reading by the Panthers.
