The following story is featured in the next issue of our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review.
Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson isn’t a musician, but he knows how powerful the right song can be in the fight for justice. “Music helps shape the way people think about the world and act in the world,” he says. He’s seen that influence firsthand: In August 2014, he took a leave of absence from his job as a Minneapolis public school administrator to go protest the shooting death of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri. Mckesson’s unsparing on-the-ground Twitter commentary quickly vaulted him to national prominence.
Of course, the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s also had its protest anthems, like “We Shall Overcome,” along with motivational hits by stars like Sam Cooke and Curtis Mayfield. And much as civil rights icons like Rep. John Lewis of Georgia went from demonstrating to passing laws, Mckesson finds himself at a similar crossroads. This year, he made the leap from activism to politics by running for mayor in his hometown of Baltimore, though he was defeated in the Democratic primary.
But like this movement’s music, which has grown more and more political from figures as lofty as Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé, Mckesson hasn’t stopped. In June, the 31-year-old went to work for the Baltimore public school district. The following month, he was arrested while demonstrating in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and as of press time his lawsuit against that city over his treatment is still ongoing. He also remains a vocal and influential presence on social media, where he continues to advocate for racial equality.
Reached immediately after he visited Washington, D.C.’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture, Mckesson spoke with Pitchfork about the music of modern activism, what it means to be an ally, and the stakes of the 2016 presidential election.
Pitchfork: What’s the role of music in Black Lives Matter and modern activism?
DeRay Mckesson: We didn’t invent resistance or discover injustice in August of 2014. We exist in a legacy of struggle. And through all of it, music has played an important role, whether we think about the old Negro spirituals, or the birth of hip-hop and rap, or today’s chants in the street. Whether it’s through Kendrick’s song [“Alright”], or Beyoncé’s album Lemonade, music continues to be a way that we both process the world that we live in today and imagine what is possible.
Why is it so powerful when artists like Kendrick and Beyoncé speak out about these issues in their music?
We aren’t born woke. Something wakes us up. For some people, that’s a video of police violence, or their proximity to a friend, or a protest. For some people it’s art. There are many ways that people begin to understand the world better and deeper, and music is one of those ways.
Especially in blackness, liberation music has been key to our understanding of the current state and has helped imbue a sense of hope even in the most trying times. Kendrick’s “Alright” does that—it acknowledges the trauma and says we’ll be OK. And Lemonade is one way that Beyoncé has used her public platform to express her love and appreciation for blackness, specifically as a black woman.
Beyond your Kendricks and Beyoncés, what other artists do you think are making work that really matters now?
I thought D’Angelo’s last album [2014’s Black Messiah] was a liberation album. It deeply talked about what it meant to be vulnerable, to be black, to be a man, to be a partner, and it came out in a context of unrest, which is important to remember. The line “I will never betray my heart” [from the Black Messiah song “Betray My Heart”] is in my profile on Twitter.
And I remember there was a lot of Lil Boosie playing at the protests in August and September of 2014, along with a lot of people making and remixing chants.
What do you feel you accomplished with your run for mayor of Baltimore?
We have to be as organized on the inside as we are on the outside. That has to be part of the strategy. I haven’t written about the election yet, but it was so powerful to connect with the voters every day. And it was a short campaign: If I would do anything differently, it would have been to start earlier.
But it was powerful to connect with people who believe in a different type of possibility in the city and use technology to do that. After that, I became the interim chief of human capital for Baltimore City Public Schools. So I’m there for now. My career after college was education. I was a teacher, I worked in an after-school program, I trained teachers. I’ve returned to that work because I believe in the new superintendent and I believe in kids.
What do people outside Baltimore need to know about what’s going on there these days?
The problems are at scale, and the solutions need to be. There’s a lot of promise in the city, but, like in so many cities, we have to start thinking about how to marshal resources to be at scale.
How are all these social issues affecting the culture and the music in Baltimore?
The arts scene in Baltimore is really rich and very vibrant. It’s one of the untold stories of the city. Trauma takes away people’s power, and part of our collective work is to help people reclaim their power at the individual level and restore power at the system level. Art and music has a role to play in that. I think about so many people for whom music is one of the ways that they process the world, the way they’ve understood their own gifts, the way they’ve relearned or learned anew how to believe in themselves, or how they’ve been exposed to new ideas and new perspectives. In liberation work, it’s a conversation about how we process the world to make it better.
What role can white allies play, and at the same time, what shouldn’t white people do?
Part of the work moving forward is building a coalition that leverages our collective power to make an impact and effect serious change. White people have a role to play in that. It requires the white people to understand that they are to use their privilege to disrupt injustice, that it is about asking people what they need. It is not about telling people what they’re supposed to do and how they’re supposed to fight for liberation. I’ve seen well-intentioned white people say, “This is what you need to do to get free.” That is not what it means to be an ally. It means you can use your resources, access, and skills to assist people as they ask for it. To partner with people.
I just saw someone tweet about a black woman who got pulled over by police, and how a bystander stopped and used her privilege as a white woman to engage in watching the police officer. She knew that her whiteness provided a different level of protection in that moment, which she leveraged. That’s what it means to be an ally.
What do you think is at stake with this upcoming presidential election?
In general, all of this is a question of: Can we organize? No matter who the next president is, black people need to be organized. We need to continue to innovate in the way that we think about leveraging the collective power of black people.
Trump is dangerous. This is not an election about the lesser of two evils. There is one clear evil. There is another candidate that people have real concerns about. And if Trump is president, I think that his administration will do real structural damage that will take years or decades for us to undo.
How does your identity as a gay man inform your politics?
The goal is that we live in a world where people don’t experience injustice, and the movement has been focused on making sure that it’s true across identities. I’m a black, gay man, and I should be able to live in a world where I’m able to live in the complexity of my identity in a way that is safe and secure, like everyone else.
It’s important to me to talk about the fullness of my identity, because I’m in it. I also know that people experience my blackness before they experience my sexuality. If you don’t know anything about me, you just see me and you see my blackness. But I experience my full identity as full each time, even though other people might not.
It’s important that people fight for and build a world that is not racist, that is not homophobic, that is not sexist. But we have to fight across all of those intersections. We can do that and not lose focus on race. This is not an either-or. This is a both-and.
What are your thoughts about social media as a tool? You have used it for justice, but then somebody like Donald Trump has also harnessed its power. Is it a double-edged sword?
We’re at the beginning of seeing the power of social media. The landscape of what is news and who gets to tell their story to the public is suddenly changing, and social media is fueling that change. The reality is that there are people with wildly varying perspectives on the world, and everybody has the potential to become a storyteller, whether the stories are dangerous, damaging, and bigoted, or whether they’re productive and powerful. People continue to manage how those conversations rise to the top better and better.
Donald Trump is only dangerous because people are listening. As the way the crowd interacts becomes more sophisticated, I’m hopeful that we’ll see the bigoted, sexist, and racist messages overcome by a crowd that is healthy and accepting. I think about how there’s a community on Black Twitter that continues to refine over and over—how it shifts, moves, and responds to trauma and joy.
What’s next for you?
I’m interested in continuing to build out ways of organizing that allow as many people that want to be part of it as possible, and that doesn’t require or pretend that chapters and members are the only way to organize people. The next part of the work is to get a critical mass of people with the skills to keep thinking about it and move in tandem. I’m excited about that.