Revelations of “Postracial” Ferguson

Much blood and ink have been spilled around Ferguson. Together they have revealed deep cleavages across the United States around race as well as novel modes of racist repression and resistance. And the differences in conception and rationalization, attitude and response, and media coverage and public comment regarding race are deeply racially etched. Here then […]

Much blood and ink have been spilled around Ferguson. Together they have revealed deep cleavages across the United States around race as well as novel modes of racist repression and resistance. And the differences in conception and rationalization, attitude and response, and media coverage and public comment regarding race are deeply racially etched. Here then is a list of driving if not completely comprehensive Ferguson revelations regarding race and racism in the United States today. Together, they constitute something of a current temperature-taking on racial matters and the public “debate” on racism across the country.
First, it is now undeniable that far more black than white people in the United States, especially young black men, are likely to be accosted, violently treated and ultimately killed by the police. Over the past 30 years, blacks have been shot by police 21 times more readily than whites. And while the numbers differ some from region to region, city to city, black and brown residents are far more likely to be stopped by police than are whites, both relative to their demographic representation and, more tellingly, in absolute numbers. The more people are stopped, the higher the likelihood some wrongdoing will be established, and the higher the probability of disproportionate arrest and criminal records that follow. Black citizens as a consequence are far more likely to be stopped by police, arrested, indicted and ultimately imprisoned than any other racially defined group.
If one didn’t know before, there is now no excuse for not knowing that black and brown men make up 77 percent of the all-too-large prison population nationally while constituting something like 26 percent of the population. It is telling that young black folks can be imprisoned for a number of years for marijuana possession while privileged young white men of the same age hardly get expelled from elite colleges for serious rapes, including gang rape, and most avoid any criminal charges.
Police, and perhaps most white people more generally, seem readily disposed to regard black men as suspect, as weaponized, as violent for little or no reason other than they are black. What else convincingly explains the account Darren Wilson has given publicly about his sense of Michael Brown as a large, violent, probably armed young black man? Or the shooting with absolutely no warning of 12-year-old Tamir Rice for carrying a pellet gun in an otherwise empty snow-filled park, mistaking him, as the policeman put it, for a 20-year-old? Or the luckily unsuccessful shooting at a black father by mistaking for a weapon the 6-year-old daughter he was rushing to save from a severe asthma attack? And on, and on.
Second, Ferguson publicly revealed that police departments, equipment, tactics and dispositions to civilians are increasingly militarized. It was little known by other than a few experts before the massively militarized response to the outbreak of Ferguson protests that local police departments were acquiring significant military equipment such as armored vehicles, rocket launchers, night goggles, and now increasingly, drones. Some who had been following urban crime control and the “war” on drugs had noticed the surge in use of armored vehicles in raids on suspected drug dealers. But Ferguson revealed both the rapidly expanding program of militarizing urban control across the country and the coherent Pentagon program to pass along to police departments at almost no cost to local budgets some of its technologies of weaponized violence and control. Perhaps this was all too predictable in the wake of declarations of war on almost every major social condition since the 1960s as well as the dramatic expansion of local securitization in the wake of 9/11 and the massive proliferation of intrusive personal data collection across the United States in the past few years. But Ferguson let us know very visibly that we have supplemented the carceral state of the 1980s and 1990s with the securitized state of late.
Third, Ferguson made palpable for all to witness that police who have killed in the line of duty are highly unlikely to be indicted, and even less likely to be convicted almost no matter the circumstances. And given that more black than white people are killed by police, this lack of accountability is especially racially charged. There is no doubt that police work subjects many officers to heightened dangers. But there is also plenty of evidence that well-designed community policing programs where identifiable police have a notable presence in the community they are policing not only significantly reduce crime but also the dangers police on the ground face. Such programs will tend to mitigate the need to artificially establish authority in fraught confrontations, and reduce the likelihood of anger when authority is disrespected, as more readily occurs in more alienated, depersonalized environments and events. After all, almost all the police shootings in question recently are a product of police having no personal presence in the communities they have been literally driving through and by or called into occasionally in moments of emergency.
Fourth, when young black people are subjected to police violence, the mainstream media will more readily drag up ignoble characterizations of the victims as mitigations if not rationalizations of the institutional violence at issue. Michael Brown was a bully, a thug, a violent thief high on marijuana, the most recent characterization has gone. Recent release of the grand jury testimony on Darren Wilson, Brown’s police killer, has revealed that the prosecutors – after all, supposed at least neutrally to present the evidence regarding Wilson’s actions to determine whether an indictment is warranted – repeatedly referred to Brown’s marijuana usage to indicate his inherent criminality (he had no prior record) or his unpredictable behavior. The parents of Tamir Rice, it was repeatedly reported, both have violent histories and criminal records. John Crawford III, the 22-year-old black man killed for “brandishing” an air rifle in a Walmart, was actually leaning on it as a walking stick while talking on his cell phone when he was shot within a second of police entering the store and shouting “down.” He would later be characterized as aggressive and suffering from mental illness, neither of which was borne out by evidence. (The policeman in the shooting was likewise not indicted.)
To be continued.