Revelations of “Postracial” Ferguson (II)

A 50-year-old black woman was viciously beaten along a busy Los Angeles highway by a large white policeman when she failed to respond to his commands. That she had a history of mental illness was quickly mentioned as explanation of her failure to respond and perhaps as mitigation of the policeman’s beating. And in public […]

A 50-year-old black woman was viciously beaten along a busy Los Angeles highway by a large white policeman when she failed to respond to his commands. That she had a history of mental illness was quickly mentioned as explanation of her failure to respond and perhaps as mitigation of the policeman’s beating. And in public debates, conservative defenders of such police action, such as Rudy Giuliani, all too readily point out that black people are far more readily killed by other blacks than by the police. None of these sorts of claims justify the police violence in question, or come close to being relevant to excusing the killings at issue. Indeed, these are all post hoc attempts to reverse the focus of accountability for the wrongdoing from the killer to the victim. As such they are common, if unfortunately all too commonly effective, logical fallacies in practical reasoning. White and black responses to the likes of Ferguson and other instances of police repression of blacks have been as segregated and differentiated as the structural conditions soiling the society.
The United States remains an entrenched segregated society. All too ironically, the deep line of racial division runs from Plessy v. Ferguson to Ferguson, Missouri.
It is revealing, then, fifth, that the events surrounding Ferguson have made obvious that the United States remains an entrenched segregated society. All too ironically, the deep line of racial division runs from Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case that in 1896 rendered segregation constitutionally acceptable, to Ferguson, Missouri, today. Ferguson, not untypically for smaller US cities, is deeply divided in terms of where people live, are schooled, work, play and party, pray and shop, in terms of access to political representation and power, as well as quality legal representation.
Not untypically for small suburban cities, Ferguson is a segregated city on almost every index. Its population is 60 percent African-American and 40 percent white. Yet there is very little integrated life. The 53-person police force has only three black members. The city council has just one black council member. Blacks, in Ferguson as more generally, live in far more impoverished housing stock than whites. Nationally, median wealth of a white family headed by someone with less than a high school diploma today is almost double that of a black family headed by someone with a college degree, and 20 percent more than that of a Latino family headed by a college graduate.
There are even more hidden structural differences Ferguson made evident, too. In the wake of austerity cuts across states following the Great Recession from 2008, small cities like Ferguson instituted a range of revenue generating fees, most notably regarding traffic violations, to cover the costs of policing and the like they would otherwise have to cut deeply. In 2013, Ferguson police made a staggering 33,000 traffic stops in a city of 21,000 people (you are not hallucinating these numbers). Obviously, given the demography, most stops were of African-American drivers.
 In addition to any fines assigned, violators were subjected to filing fees, as well as mileage fees to deliver subpoenas for failing to pay the fine by the deadline. A $100 fine could quickly spiral to $1,000. And given structural segregation in the city, the fact that national unemployment is always double for blacks compared to whites (in Ferguson, the overall unemployment rate at 12 percent is double the national average, and the city’s black unemployment rate is two to three times that of whites from 2008 to 2012) means that these burdens of revenue collection fall disproportionately on those least able to afford it.

Finally, this all tells us something quite deep about the nature of the supposedly “postracial” United States today. To say that the United States is consequently far from being a postracial society is at once a truism and much too simplistic. We are indeed very much a postracial society in the non-standard sense that postraciality is the new modality in which race today is expressed.
In the absence of race as a tool for identification, racisms – the perpetuated contemporary legacies of racially driven structures and their effects – float free of racial significance. They become literally meaningless even as especially vicious racist acts and expression proliferate all around us, as we have been witnessing. Race disappears, and racisms are “freed at last” of any constraint.
What Ferguson likely predicts then, not for the first and far from the last time, is that we will be seeing much more rather than less police targeting, militarizing, surveillance and regulation of communities of color across the United States as the society becomes more diverse and white power grows nervous in being more subjected to challenge. We will witness more, not less, disciplining of black bodies, the technologies of enablement more likely less visible, and less obvious in their routinized – their droning – indiscernibility. They will become increasingly evident, not in their application, but in their repressing effects.
The one encouraging outcome as a result of these turns, likewise revealed by events in and around Ferguson, is that youthful counter-activists are beginning to realize something novel is afoot. They are beginning as a result to respond by shifting tactics, too. They are increasingly engaging in a mix of now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t performance interventions and potentially viral social media campaigns alongside the more traditional large-scale street protests. They are thus calling attention to and into question these conditions of sustained injustice at key sites of their sustenance: at elite cultural events such as the St. Louis Symphony, local city hall and state capitol. They are engaging in “die-ins” at popular, large local malls frequented more by whites than people of color (there are pretty much no malls remaining in Ferguson itself). And they are pushing out on social media the “Black Lives Matter” campaign.