What to say about Ferguson?
It’s been on my mind nearly every minute of the day, and it perplexes me
that so little is written about it in my facebook feed by the very political/post-happy virtual acquaintances. I
mean, I would kind of expect the guy who gets really into the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict to have something
to repost about the state of race relations in America today, but I guess it’s
too concrete? Not abstract and distant
enough? Confusing to deal with as an
American citizen? I don’t know, man. I know that I lived in MO for the first 13
years of my life, and racism was a part of the cultural fabric—all the white
kids moving to share seats when our school bus unexpectedly had to pick up kids
in public housing; my nascent self staring in the mirror and wondering what it
would be like if I was really black, because even though I couldn’t fully
understand or articulate why, I knew that it must be unimaginably unfortunate;
everyone in town referring to the local Piggly Wiggly as the “nig pig”. I guess it’s why I am so confused as to why
there is the pretense of discussing the “facts”. Did Brown rob a convenience store? Did he start an altercation? Who cares?
It completely detracts from any kind of critical analysis of the larger
picture—the role of race in these authority-citizen encounters and what it
means to be black in cities like St. Louis and Chicago--cities that experienced
an influx of poor black people from the south who were subsequently
systemically disenfranchised and quarantined in their new homes. I kind of feel like every US citizen should
have to go to Mississippi for a week and immerse themselves in our shared
history of oppression and racism. At
least Mississippians, an artifact of a horrendous and commonly acknowledged
history, now have to deal with this racial history openly. People in MO and IL don’t, because, after
all, they aren’t Mississippi! They were
lands of acceptance and settlement! I
guess I’ll just quote some words from MacArthur genius grant winner and
personal intellectual hero, David Simon, on the missteps of the police department (his book, The Corner, was the ultimate distillation
of race in America for me. So much better even than The Wire, because of his voice and direct analysis of poverty, drugs and being black in America.):
In Baltimore, I covered many police shootings, most of them
necessary, if tragic, and a few that were indeed questionable or dubious, if
equally tragic. But in all of those incidents, a police department that
remained fully accountable to its citizenry never failed to do one basic thing
when a life had been taken: It stood by the body. All of those officers who
took a life owned both their authority and their responsibility. They were
identified before their public, and the sunlight of public knowledge was never
denied to any moment when an agent of the state, as a matter of personal
deliberation and presumed professional necessity, ended the life of a fellow
citizen. This was elemental, and democratic to its core. If our country is to
cease its drift toward a militarized police state, it is elemental still.
And beyond the democratic imperative, one other practical cost to Ferguson of
your professional failure has yet to be tallied, but is certain and fixed: Your
department, in order to solve crimes and maintain order, is dependent on the
cooperation of witnesses — fellow citizens willing to trust in the process of
arrest and prosecution, and in their own personal safety should they properly
contribute to that process. Yet by offering up the dishonorable claim that your
department, and all the authority of the supporting law enforcement and
judicial communities of Missouri, cannot protect a single officer from a series
of unsubstantiated threats, or that the officer might be more vulnerable to
public ridicule than, say, Mr. Brown was vulnerable to actual police gunfire,
you have made this question entirely relevant:
If Ferguson police can’t protect one of their own — a fellow officer who is
armed, who is allied with an entire department of armed comrades, who are
themselves buttressed by their jurisdiction’s prosecutorial arm, who have the
full weight of the law at hand in support of that officer — then how in hell
are they going to protect me when I go down to the courthouse and testify? How
can they ask me, an ordinary citizen with no armament, alliance or authority,
to stand up in open court and be identified?
