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The United States of America is not for black people. We know this, and then we put it out of our minds, and then something happens to remind us. Saturday, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Mo., something like that happened: An unarmed 18-year-old black man was executed by police in broad daylight.
By now, what's happening in Ferguson is about so many second-order issues—systemic racism, the militarization of police work, and how citizens can redress grievances, among other things—that it's worth remembering what actually happened here.
Michael Brown was walking down the middle of the street in Ferguson's Canfield Green apartment complex around noon on Saturday with his friend Dorian Johnson when the two were approached by a police officer in a police truck. The officer exchanged words with the boys. The officer attempted to get out of his car. At this point, two narratives split.
According to the still-unnamed officer, one of the two boys shoved him back into the vehicle and then wrestled for his sidearm, discharging one shot into the cabin. The two ran, and the police officer once again stepped from his vehicle and shot at the fleeing teenagers multiple times, killing Brown.
According to Johnson and other eye witnesses, however, the cop ordered the friends to "get the fuck on the sidewalk," but the teenagers said they had almost reached their destination. That's when the officer slammed his door open so hard that it bounced off of Brown and closed again. The cop then reached out and grabbed Brown by the neck, then by the shirt.
"I'm gonna shoot you," the cop said.
The cop shot him once, but Brown pulled away, and the pair were still able to run away together. The officer fired again. Johnson ducked behind a car, but the cop's second shot caused Brown to stop about 35 feet away from the cruiser, still within touching distance of Johnson. Multiple witnesses say this is when Brown raised his hands in the air to show he was unarmed. Johnson remembered that Brown also said, "I don't have a gun, stop shooting!" The officer then shot him dead.
After that, the narratives dovetail again. Brown was left where he died, baking in the Missouri heat for hours, before he was removed by authorities. The officer was placed on paid administrative leave.
Michael Brown is not special. In all its specificity, the 18-year old's death remains just the most recent example of police officers killing unarmed black men.
Part of the reason we're seeing so many black men killed is that police officers are now best understood less as members of communities, dedicated to keeping peace within them, than as domestic soldiers. The drug war has long functioned as a full-employment act for arms dealers looking to sell every town and village in the country on the need for military-grade hardware, and 9/11 made things vastly worse, with local police departments throughout America grabbing for cash to better defend against any and all terrorist threats. War had reached our shores, we were told, and police officers needed weaponry to fight it.
Officers have tanks now. They have drones. They have automatic rifles, and planes, and helicopters, and they go through military-style boot camp training. It's a constant complaint from what remains of this country's civil liberties caucus. Just this last June, the ACLU issued a report on how police departments now possess arsenals in need of a use. Few paid attention, as usually happens.
The worst part of outfitting our police officers as soldiers has been psychological. Give a man access to drones, tanks, and body armor, and he'll reasonably think that his job isn't simply to maintain peace, but to eradicate danger. Instead of protecting and serving, police are searching and destroying.
If officers are soldiers, it follows that the neighborhoods they patrol are battlefields. And if they're working battlefields, it follows that the population is the enemy. And because of correlations, rooted in historical injustice, between crime and income and income and race, the enemy population will consist largely of people of color, and especially of black men. Throughout the country, police officers are capturing, imprisoning, and killing black males at a ridiculous clip, waging a very literal war on people like Michael Brown.
"There's a long history of racial tension and misunderstanding in this region," St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Aisha Sultan told me over the phone yesterday. "Especially on the north side."
This sort of thing—especially on the north side—is what gets glossed over a little too easily when we try to fit a particular incident into a broader narrative. Ferguson is a small town of 21,000, mostly white until the 1960s, when whites fled anywhere but where they were. Today, Ferguson, which is a bit north of St. Louis, is mostly black; Ferguson and St. Louis County police are mostly white. That fits a metropolitan area flanked by two rivers that divide neighborhoods and regions by race, the sixth-most segregated in the United States.
To people, like me, from the coast—I'm from Maryland—St. Louis can seem like a blank in the the middle of the country, a place where people and even ideas get stuck on the way to somewhere better, or at least somewhere else. But St. Louis is like New York (the fourth-most segregated metro in America), or Los Angeles, or Miami, or Dallas, or Washington, DC, only more so. Far from a blank, St. Louis is often regarded as the most American of America's cities.
"It is a microcosm of the rest of the country," Sultan said. "If this can happen in St. Louis, it can happen in any city."
It does. On August 5 in Beavercreek, Ohio, 22-year-old John Crawford was killed in a Walmart when a toy gun he had picked up from inside the store was apparently mistaken for a real gun. LeeCee Johnson, who had two children with Crawford, said that she was on the phone with him, and that his last words before she heard gunshots from police officers were, "It's not real."
On July 17 in Staten Island, New York, 43-year-old Eric Garner, a well-known presence in the neighborhood who sold illicit cigarettes and kept an eye on the block, was killed after breaking up a fight when NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo used an illegal chokehold on the asthmatic man. "I can't breathe," he said, before he died. "I can't breathe."
On the night of September 14, 2013 in Charlotte, N.C., 24-year-old Jonathan Ferrell was killed after getting into a car accident. He climbed out of the rear window of the car, stumbled to the nearest house, and banged on the door for help. The homeowner notified the police, who showed up to the house. Ferrell was tased, and then an officer named Randall Kerrick shot and struck Ferrell 10 times.
There was Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., and Oscar Grant in Oakland, Calif., and so many more. Michael Brown's death wasn't shocking at all. All over the country, unarmed black men are being killed by the very people who have sworn to protect them, as has been going on for a very long time now. It would appear that cops are not for black people, either.
After Brown's death came his demonization. First, we heard that Brown had run for stealing candy from a store. Then we were bombarded with a photo of Brown in a red Nike tank top on a stoop, posing for the camera.
This photo, in which Brown was flashing a "gang sign"—a peace sign, actually—was presented as proof that the teenager was a thug; his friends and family now not only have to work through their grief, but against a posthumous slur campaign. Johnson described his friend in an MSNBC interview as cool and quiet. Brown's uncle, Bernard Ewings, said in a Sunday interview that Brown loved music. Brown's mother, Leslie McSpadden, said that he was funny and could make people laugh. He graduated from high school in the spring, and was headed to college to pursue a career in heating and cooling engineering. Monday would have been his first day.
By all accounts, Brown was One Of The Good Ones. But laying all this out, explaining all the ways in which he didn't deserve to die like a dog in the street, is in itself disgraceful. Arguing whether Brown was a good kid or not is functionally arguing over whether he specifically deserved to die, a way of acknowledging that some black men ought to be executed.
To even acknowledge this line of debate is to start a larger argument about the worth, the very personhood, of a black man in America. It's to engage in a cost-benefit analysis, weigh probabilities, and gauge the precise odds that Brown's life was worth nothing against the threat he posed to the life of the man who killed him. It's to deny that there are structural reasons why Brown was shot dead while James Eagan Holmes—who on July 20, 2012, walked into a movie theater and fired rounds into an audience, killing 12 and wounding 70 more—was taken alive.
To ascribe this entirely to contempt for black men is to miss an essential variable, though—a very real, American fear of them. They—we—are inexplicably seen as a millions-strong army of potential killers, capable and cold enough that any single one could be a threat to a trained police officer in a bulletproof vest. There are reasons why white gun's rights activists can walk into a Chipotle restaurant with assault rifles and be seen as gauche nuisances while unarmed black men are killed for reaching for their wallets or cell phones, or carrying children's toys. Guns aren't for black people, either.
Sunday was Brown's vigil, and several hundred people congregated in Ferguson. They began to march toward the Ferguson police station in protest. Police met them in full riot gear, with rifles, shields, helmets, dogs, and gas masks. Protesters yelled, "No justice, no peace!" They called the police murderers. They raised their hands in mock surrender, saying, "Don't shoot, I'm unarmed."
And then the protest turned violent, as some citizens began to break into, loot, and set fire to storefronts in their own community.
Police officers shot tear gas and rubber bullets. Thirty-two people were arrested that night. Two policemen were injured. There was nothing easy to make of it. It was a senseless and counterproductive attack on the community; it was the grief-stricken flailing of people who knew it could have been them, or their friends, or their brothers or sons. Whatever it was, it was met with force.
On Monday morning, Sultan went back to Ferguson, where she witnessed citizens cleaning up debris from the night before. Some were shocked by the violence; others said that they'd been backed against a wall, forced into necessary evil. Sultan interviewed an 11-year-old boy about the rioting. "It seems like police are about to go to war with the people," he said.*
On Monday night, police again took the streets as demonstrators again marched in nonviolent protest, holding their hands high. Police again fired rubber bullets and tear gas, and again blocked off the main streets, not allowing anyone in or out. Police were photographed sweeping into side streets, and pointing guns over fences into backyards. It spilled over into today. They ran helicopters and drones over all of it; they shot tear gas; they ran up on citizens with guns drawn.
"Return to your homes," they yelled over megaphones.
"This is our home," the people of Ferguson answered. There wasn't—there isn't—much more to say. This essay was prepared or accomplished by Greg Howard in his personal capacity for deadspin.com. The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect the views or opinions of Dorian Gray
Every case is different. However, overall I think good progress is being made. I do think we need independent review boards of LE across the country to hold them accountable, where they no longer get to investigate themselves and the penalties for corruption are severe. It's my opinion that many of the problems we see are a direct result of the continual infiltration and flow of KKK into police forces across the country for the past 50 yrs or so. The laws are disproportionate and LE realize this so they take advantage of the situation.
Here's a good example (goes on way more than we care to acknowledge)
The situation in Ferguson is terrible. Personally I'd like to see more publicly available police accountability for officer involved shootings. Hell, there isn't even any national data collected on the matter despite there being a mandate for it years ago. Without such data it is impossible to track trends and locate problem areas.
This is an interesting but inflammatory article. I noticed he didn't mention the fact that police only used tear gas and rubber bullets after having bottles thrown and being threatened with Molotov cocktails. Nor does he mention the looting, burning, and property destruction being perpetrated by the protesters. Journalists filming the riots have been threatened and police have reportedly been fired upon.
I get that the author is trying to make an impassioned argument, but by cherry picking data and presenting only one side it comes across to me as manipulative.
The situation in Ferguson is terrible. Personally I'd like to see more publicly available police accountability for officer involved shootings. Hell, there isn't even any national data collected on the matter despite there being a mandate for it years ago. Without such data it is impossible to track trends and locate problem areas.
This is an interesting but inflammatory article. I noticed he didn't mention the fact that police only used tear gas and rubber bullets after having bottles thrown and being threatened with Molotov cocktails. Nor does he mention the looting, burning, and property destruction being perpetrated by the protesters. Journalists filming the riots have been threatened and police have reportedly been fired upon.
I get that the author is trying to make an impassioned argument, but by cherry picking data and presenting only one side it comes across to me as manipulative.
I agree to some extent. I think Journalists are being threatened more by the cops than the protesters. At least that's what they're reporting. The people of that town need to speak up against the looters and bad guys causing havoc and stand their ground on the basis of decency. The cops are all to eager to take 1 or 2 cases of bottles being thrown at them to justify the over the top use of military style tactics. The irony of this is that some military personnel have spoken up and said they'd never use such tactics and it's misguided.
Not saying that it hasn't happened but it's hard to trust the police saying they've been fired upon (at least the extent to which) when they've shown utter incompetence to this point.
Side note: I think the militia groups around the country (while they generally dislike black people) are taking note since they seem to be prepping for a war with the government.
and for the record. I absolutely love America and wouldn't want to live anywhere else. Despite the unjust legal system (that's still better than most) there's just too much action going on here for me to give it up.
World class sporting events, sex crazed chics, Las Vegas, Madison Sq. Garden, Hollywood. I think I will chill right here in America and vacation to other parts of the world.
If accounts hold up he certainly didn't deserve to die like he did it was murder but I saw his strong arm robbery video just minutes before he was killed and he was not a good guy just based on that video alone.
I agree to some extent. I think Journalists are being threatened more by the cops than the protesters. At least that's what they're reporting.
And that's what sells. Journalism and media today is definitely not like it used to be. Opinions are focused on and popularity seems to be the coverage.
I get that police are fucked in this situation but Zanzibar does have a point regarding the looters. Most of the looters are just dumbasses who are taking advantage and fucking shit up. If you ask half of them they probably don't even know who Brown was.
If that was him in that tape robbing that guy. I don't really care he got shot. If he was working to buy his blunts he wouldn't have got shot. The people rioting don't give a shit he got shot either they are even worse. Just stealing shit to steal it. And isn't that what started this current situation anyway.
This post is about Ferguson … but not really.
This post is about about racism … but only kind of.
Honestly, it is more about me … but maybe you.
I grew up in a middle-class home in a mid-sized town in Southern Illinois. I am white. Very white. Not just in color but in culture. Diversity was not a part of my upbringing. This was not an intentional decision. My hometown was just not diverse. The number of non-white students in my high school was limited and, therefore, my exposure to different cultures was limited.
As a result, I do not know America.
I know a small part of America, but I do not know America as a whole.
It wasn’t until I moved to Chicago that I realized just how little I knew. My pastor there, Tim Hoekstra, has a huge heart for bridging the gap between suburban life and urban life. He exposed me to a world I never knew existed. (I had seen urban life before, but only through the lens of Hollywood.)
What I learned was shocking … and heartbreaking.
My parents (and teachers and pastors) taught me “the American dream” — the idea that, if I worked hard enough, I could be anything I wanted to be. And, for the most part, this was true … for me. If I wanted to be a doctor, I could have gone to medical school. If I wanted to be an astronaut, I could have dedicated more time to studying math (and not making fun of my trigonometry teacher and her weird sense of style). I could pursue my dream.
The emphasis was always placed on my ability to work hard. The opportunities that enabled my hard work were typically taken for granted. What Chicago taught me is that not everyone has those same opportunities. There are young men and women, living in the inner-city, who could easily out work me, out think me, and deserved it more than me, but because they were born in a sub-standard school district or their family is less capable of securing a $20,000 loan, they won’t get to attend college and pursue their dream.
The more time I have spent discovering the diversity of our nation, the more I have realized how sheltered I had been. Racism, oppression, and (systematic) slavery still exist. They had just been hidden from me. I had been blinded by my upbringing. I had been too white to see the colorful, often messy reality of our American canvas.
And I am still very blinded. I still have a lot to learn and a lot to understand.
There was a time in my life when I had an opinion about everything. (Just ask my parents.) If the past few years have taught me anything, it is that there are some issues on which I am too ignorant to have an opinion. Any issue that deals with race falls into that category. I am too sheltered. I am too white.
Because of this, I have had to learn to shut up. (For those of you who know me, this has been a challenge.) I have had to learn to listen. Anything I say prior to listening is not only ignorant but arrogant. I have had to realize that the goal is not to have a voice but to understand the voices already speaking. I must follow Jesus’s example and sit down at the table with those who are different than me. I must hear their story.
Why am I writing this? Because Facebook. Because Twitter. Because of the many racist comments I have seen posted over the past few days. Too many updates beginning with, “Why don’t black people…” Too many tweets ending with, “I knew it.” Too much ignorance, too much arrogance.
The writer of Proverbs says…
Fools find no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing their opinion. (Proverbs 18:2 CEB)
And then…
Those who answer before they listen are foolish and disgraceful. (Proverbs 18:13 CEB)
Maybe that last one could be better translated…
Those who tweet before they listen are foolish and disgraceful.
Racism, oppression, and (systematic) slavery still exist. Repeatedly, they are pushed under the surface. We try to pretend they aren’t there. But then something happens — something like Ferguson or Donald Sterling — and they rise to the surface. It is as if someone drills a hole in the dam. Unchecked passion and emotion break forth and flood the social landscape, often crushing those who stand in the way. To avoid drowning in the debate, many just start yelling — speaking without listening, expressing without understanding.
This must stop. We must stop. We must become people who — like James instructs us to do in the New Testament — are slow to speak and quick to listen.
We must take time to hear their story.
Then and only then can we truly join the conversation.
America Is Not For Black People
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