Professor: Discomfort necessary to spur action on police treatment of blacks

Hundreds of activists and supporters planned to gather in Minneapolis last night for a forum on the tactics and strategy of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The event was titled "discomfort and disruption," and was scheduled to focus on the history and theory behind disruptive protest tactics.

Interfaith and racial justice groups that sponsored it advertised the forum as a "private event," with organizers asking that media not cover it.

Among the panelists who spoke were Duchess Harris, the chair of American Studies at Macalester College. Harris told MPR's Cathy Wurzer that many people who find protest tactics like disrupting the Mall of America frustrating often don't realize that these tactics are similar to those used by earlier movements like Civil Rights.

"People need to step back and think about how much they romanticize Rosa Parks and how thoughtful the bus boycott was to boycott a city from December 1955 to December 1956, which was their Christmas season and impacted the Montgomery economy," Harris said. "That was a very similar strategy, it's just that people don't want to live through the inconvenience."

Harris said polls show more support for the goals of Black Lives Matter than previous movements like Civil Rights, but that many theoretical supporters don't realize the role that disruptive tactics play in bringing attention to an issue.

"Black Lives Matter has many issues in their platform, but one of these things we see a lot are these issues of police brutality, so that doesn't impact most Minnesotans," Harris said. "So, if it doesn't impact you and you don't see it, you're not going to be called to action unless it's brought to your attention."

While the protests have helped build support for practical policies like requiring police officers to wear body cameras, they've also helped the general public better understand issues of concern to African-Americans, Harris said. She points to the "mothers of the movement" speech at the Democratic National Convention this week, which included nine mothers whose children were killed by police officers or gun violence.

"That's a movement from margin to center where the notion of black lives is directly in the middle of a presidential platform," Harris said. "There really is more acceptance in being part of a major party's presidential campaign and I think people are becoming more aware of what it is like living in a black body in America."

Protests in the Twin Cities were sparked by the recent killings of African-American men by police officers, including Jamar Clark last year in Minneapolis and Philando Castile this year in Falcon Heights.