Photo from StrangerDanger Distro
This person I know collected tweets by Baltimore teens from April 23-May 2 2015, where they expressed their fears, outrage, sadness, and a sophisticated understanding of the Freddie Gray police murder.
The content is powerful, and the zine is beautifully assembled, as well. I got my copy when the creator was dropping them off at Bluestockings, but since the zine listing isn't online yet, I'll keep the publisher info to myself for now.
I'm recommending that my library purchase the dense little zine for our book collection. It should provide an unmediated-voices-resource for our political science, history, and American Studies departments.
Some of the tweets that really got to me:
Per the creator's approach in the zine, I've disincluded the original Twitter handles. That's not to avoid giving credit to the authors of the tweets; it's to gesture to protecting their privacy.
I can't believe this is actually happening..
5:10pm 27 April 2015
I couldn't grab a screenshot of this one.
These tweets are about how the teens of Baltimore are processing a new reality, tying it to concrete things like McDonalds (and also proms--a bunch of proms were canceled that weekend!). I can't tell if the 9/11 tweet is genuine wonder, or masterful snark. It causes me to think about how a young Black man dying in police custody (to borrow the passive voice construction so popular in mainstream media coverage of police violence) feels like, and is in fact, terrorism to people in the victimized community.