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The Texas Tribune kicked off its weekend symposium by interviewing activist DeRay Mckesson.
Texas Tribune
AUSTIN, Texas—“We aren't born woke, something wakes us up."
By now, everyone's experienced a newsfeed full of #NoDAPL or long Twitter threads explaining some proposed legislation that threatens a certain cause. With years of social media experience behind us, it's easy for this stuff to feel like white noise.
But the next time someone shrugs off any of these posts in the name of social justice as useless, tell them DeRay Mckesson begs to differ.
All of it has the ability to help others get "woke," to newly realize there's a problem and a need to combat it.
So during his keynote Q&A at the Texas Tribune's weekend symposium on race and policy, the Black Lives Matter activist encouraged everyone to fight toward “equity, justice, and fairness” in the way that works best for them... even if starts as small as a tweet.
For Mckesson, in fact, social media initially proved to be the way of getting involved.
Back in August 2014 after the tragic police shooting of unarmed, black teenager Michael Brown, he wanted to go to Ferguson, Missouri, and merely participate in the peaceful response for a weekend. He had no grand plans of country-wide organizing at the time; then the protests spanned 300 days: “I drove nine hours for a weekend, but I guess it's been a long weekend,” Mckesson said of his work since.
Mckesson loved (and continues to love) Twitter, and he recalled having only 800 or so followers at the time.
But he thought of the platform as the friend who's always awake, someone you could reach out to no matter what was on your mind or when you thought it. "I didn't know anyone in St. Louis, but I tweeted all the time because I was experiencing the wildest stuff I've ever seen in my life," he said. "I didn't have anyone to tell, but Twitter was always awake."
As Mckesson and others shared what was happening on the ground with the world, more and more people started paying attention.
The idea of Black Lives Matter may have existed beforehand, but the response to the deaths of Brown and Eric Garner that summer sparked a larger movement.
"I never participate in the slander of slacktivisim, or social media activism.
I know some people got woke because of a tweet, a Facebook post, a one-on-one conversation at dinner, or something they heard in passing.
All of that stuff contributes to how people understand what the world can be and what the world is," Mckesson says. "We didn't invent resistance; we didn't discover injustice. We exist in a legacy of people who've done this work, but what's new is we have a different set of tools.
Today, I can talk to 600,000 people at the drop of the tweet in a way that King, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Coretta couldn't."
A need for more than Ustream
For Mckesson, one of the strongest tools for spreading awareness today is live video streaming, and he said this evolved rapidly in part because of those Ferguson Black Lives Matter social media efforts. Mckesson said that during the fall of 2014, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey had approached him and other activists about trialling the services’s potential live video options.
At the time, Vine was the most widespread option, but its time limits weren’t ideal for extended protest broadcasts.
"We tested Periscope before Twitter bought Periscope, and one of the reasons they bought it was the protests," he said. "They acknowledged they needed to be in this space and allow the platform to grow in the way the world is growing. We tested Periscope when like 30 people in the world had it, then Twitter bought Periscope and integrated it."
(Before Periscope? Mckesson said Black Lives Matter relied on Ustream, which is coincidentally what the Texas Tribune also relied on for things like the 2013 Wendy Davis Texas legislature filibuster.)
Twitter acquired Periscope the following spring in February 2015, and the rest remains history-in-progress.
The service has since captured everything from a House Democrats' sit-in over gun violence to evidence in possible criminal cases.
Mckesson is quick to acknowledge this democratization of information—social media changing who gets to decide what news is and who is a content creator—is a big part of why Black Lives Matter has found success so far. "Two years ago people thought only St. Louis was screwed up,” he said.
Today, the call for body cameras and police accountability has spread nationwide.
Both the public and federal government have taken notice, as evidenced by the recent, massive DOJ report on major metropolitan police departments.
But Mckesson is just as quick to recognize social media's current pitfalls. With Twitter in particular, some activists like journalist Lindy West have left the platform all together due to the service's lack of tools to effectively combat harassment.
Such abuse has even come over the mundane (see a Mortal Kombat producer leaving the service after threats against his family), and the sheer volume of it has inspired activists like Zoe Quinn to start their own support networks against online harassment. Mckesson and Black Lives Matter are no stranger to this type of online harassment (whether it's language or advanced DDoS campaigns).
Additionally, insularism and waves of misinformation plague many platforms today, meaning the next social activism breakthrough will likely not come from another influx of citizen reporters. "We're going to hit a critical mass, if we haven't already hit it, of too much content," he said. "People literally don't know what to take in anymore.
So the next power houses will be the Digital Oprahs, people who can tell us what to be looking at and how to start thinking about it." Mckesson then teased this is as an issue Black Lives Matter has been actively thinking about.
As we move forward in America with new leadership, Mckesson seems like an optimist but acknowledges lots of energy may get wrapped up in withstanding actions of the Donald Trump administration.
But whether future activism stems from resistance or progress, he believes social media will continue to be a tool possessing the potential to make change. Mckesson himself stands as living proof.
As he put it, President Obama’s mantra for the power of citizens—“get a clipboard and make it happen”—should have a digital component, too.
Listing image by Nathan Mattise