Beating aired on Facebook seen as posing test on race

CHICAGO — A white teenager cowers in a corner, his hands bound with orange cords and his mouth covered with tape. Four African-Americans kick and hit him, and slash at his scalp. As a cellphone camera captures their blurry images and broadcasts the ordeal on Facebook, the attackers hurl racial insults and denounce President-elect Donald Trump.

Last week, as a groundswell of online outrage over the incident laid bare racial tensions before the presidential transition, four people who police said participated in the assault were charged with hate crimes.

Police said the victim, an 18-year-old from the suburbs with mental disabilities, spent hours tied up and terrified on Chicago’s west side before officers Thursday found him wandering the streets in a daze.

“They admit that they were beating him, kicking him,” Cmdr. Kevin Duffin of the Chicago Police Department said of the four defendants. “They made him drink toilet water.”

Police officials said the victim knew one of the suspects, several of whom seemed intoxicated.

While it was one incident of violence in a city where young people are killed almost every day, the incident — particularly on social media and conservative news outlets — for many turned into a test of how the country views race.

It also was seen as tapping into the very issues that have grown the rawest around the nation of late — a divisive political climate, a painful racial split and an increasingly fierce and polarized social media universe.

“If this had been done to an African-American by four whites, every liberal in the country would be outraged, and there would be no question it is a hate crime,” Newt Gingrich, a Republican and former speaker of the House, said on “Fox and Friends.”

A hashtag linking the incident to the Black Lives Matter movement exploded on social media, prompting a leader of the movement, DeRay Mckesson, to respond on Twitter: “It goes without saying that the actions being branded by the far-right as the ‘BLM Kidnapping’ have nothing to do w/ the movement.”

Pat Brady, a former chairman of the Illinois Republican Party and a former prosecutor, said the attack should not be viewed as having some larger meaning.

“To be fair, we can acknowledge that we’ve had some really bad political discourse in this election, but this is about four sick kids who probably can’t even spell Trump let alone know anything about the election,” Mr. Brady said.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said he had been urgently trying to reach the victim’s family. “We want to do whatever we can do to help, to show our love for the child,” he said.

In Washington, the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said the beating demonstrated “a level of depravity that is an outrage to a lot of Americans.”

Police officials said they had sought the hate crime charges because of comments about the victim’s race and diminished mental capacity. Cmdr. Duffin said the police did not know whether the victim had voted in November, or whether that had influenced the attack. But the invocation of Mr. Trump’s name, and the simmering racial tensions after a contentious election season, convinced many on social media that it was an act of racial hatred with political overtones.

In Chicago, city officials and black leaders condemned the attack and offered support to the victim.