Darren Wilson Interview
Scenes From Ferguson—and Beyond
1. Eric Garner video
2. The Eric Garner "aftermath"
3. Why cops are almost never indicted for shooting someone in the line of duty.
Tim Wise
"To white America, in the main, police are the folks who help get our
cats out of the tree, or who take us on ride-arounds to show us how
gosh-darned exciting it is to be a cop. We experience police most often
as helpful, as protectors of our lives and property. But that is not the
black experience by and large; and black people know this, however much
we don’t. The history of law enforcement in America, with regard to
black folks, has been one of unremitting oppression. That is neither
hyperbole nor opinion, but incontrovertible fact. From slave patrols to
overseers to the Black Codes to lynching, it is a fact. From dozens of
white-on-black riots that marked the first half of the 20th century (in
which cops participated actively) to Watts to Rodney King to Abner
Louima to Amadou Diallo to the railroading of the Central Park 5, it is a
fact. From the New Orleans Police Department’s killings of Adolph
Archie to Henry Glover to the Danziger Bridge shootings there in the
wake of Katrina to stop-and-frisk in places like New York, it’s a fact.
And the fact that white people don’t know this history, have never been
required to learn it, and can be considered even remotely informed
citizens without knowing it, explains a lot about what’s wrong with
America. Black people have to learn everything about white people just
to stay alive. They especially and quite obviously have to know what
scares us, what triggers the reptilian part of our brains and convinces
us that they intend to do us harm. Meanwhile, we need know nothing
whatsoever about them. We don’t have to know their history, their
experiences, their hopes and dreams, or their fears. And we can go right
on being oblivious to all that without consequence. It won’t be on the
test, so to speak.
In his contribution to Jill Nelson’s 2000 anthology on police
brutality, scholar Robin D.G Kelley reminds us of the bill of
particulars.* As Kelley notes, in colonial Virginia, slave owners were
allowed to beat, burn, and even mutilate slaves without fear of
punishment; and throughout the colonial period, police not only looked
the other way at the commission of brutality against black folks, but
were actively engaged in the forcible suppression of slave uprisings and
insurrections. Later, after abolition, law enforcement regularly and
repeatedly released black prisoners into the hands of lynch mobs and
stood by as their bodies were hanged from trees, burned with
blowtorches, body parts amputated and given out as souvenirs. In city
after city, north and south, police either stood by or actively
participated in pogroms against African American communities: in
Wilmington, North Carolina, Atlanta, New Orleans, New York City, Akron
and Birmingham, just to name a few. In one particularly egregious
anti-black rampage in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, police shot
blacks dead in the street as part of an orgy of violence aimed at
African Americans who had moved from the Deep South in search of jobs.
One hundred and fifty were killed, including thirty-nine children whose
skulls were crushed and whose bodies were thrown into bonfires set by
white mobs. In the 1920s, it is estimated that half of all black people
who were killed by whites, were killed by white police officers.
But Kelley continues: In 1943 white police in Detroit joined with
others of their racial compatriots, attacking blacks who had dared to
move into previously all-white public housing, killing seventeen. In the
1960s and early ’70s police killed over two dozen members of the Black
Panther Party, including those like Mark Clark and Fred Hampton in
Chicago, asleep in their beds at the time their apartment was raided. In
1985, Philadelphia law enforcement perpetrated an all-out assault on
members of the MOVE organization, bombing their row houses from state
police helicopters, killing eleven, including five children, destroying
sixty-one homes and leaving hundreds homeless.
These are but a few of the stories one could tell, and which Kelley
does in his extraordinary recitation of the history—and for most whites,
we are without real knowledge of any of them. But they and others like
them are incidents burned into the cell memory of black America. They
haven’t the luxury of forgetting, even as we apparently cannot be
bothered to remember, or to learn of these things in the first place.
Bull Connor, Sheriff Jim Clark, Deputy Cecil Price: these are not
far-away characters for most black folks. How could they be? After all,
more than a few still carry the scars inflicted by men such as they. And
while few of us would think to ridicule Jews for still harboring less
than warm feelings for Germans some seventy years later—we would
understand the lack of trust, the wariness, even the anger—we apparently
find it hard to understand the same historically-embedded logic of
black trepidation and contempt for law enforcement in this country. And
this is so, even as black folks’ negative experiences with police have
extended well beyond the time frame of Hitler’s twelve year Reich, and
even as those experiences did not stop seventy years ago, or even
seventy days ago, or seventy minutes.
Can we just put aside all we think we know about black communities
(most of which could fit in a thimble, truth be told) and imagine what
it must feel like to walk through life as the embodiment of other
people’s fear, as a monster that haunts their dreams the way Freddie
Kreuger does in the movies? To be the physical representation of what
marks a neighborhood as bad, a school as bad, not because of
anything you have actually done, but simply because of the color of your
skin? Surely that is not an inconsequential weight to bear. To go
through life, every day, having to think about how to behave so as not
to scare white people, or so as not to trigger our contempt—thinking
about how to dress, and how to walk and how to talk and how to respond
to a cop (not because you’re wanting to be polite, but because you’d
like to see your mother again)—is work; and it’s harder than any job
that any white person has ever had in this country. To be seen as a font
of cultural contagion is tantamount to being a modern day leper.
And then perhaps we might spend a few minutes considering what this
does to the young black child, and how it differs from the way that
white children grow up. Think about how you would respond to the world
if that world told you every day how awful you were, how horrible your
community was, and how pathological your family. That’s what we’re
telling black people daily. Every time police call the people they are
sworn to protect animals, as at least one Ferguson officer was willing
to do on camera, we tell them this. Every time we shrug at the way
police routinely stop and frisk young black men, we tell them this.
Every time we turn away from the clear disparities in our nation’s
schools, which relegate the black and brown to classrooms led by the
least experienced teachers, we tell them this. Every time Bill O’Reilly
pontificates about “black culture” and every time Barack Obama tells
black men to be better fathers, we tell them this: that they are
uniquely flawed, uniquely pathological, a cancerous mass of moral
decrepitude to be feared, scorned, surveilled, incarcerated and
discarded. The constant drumbeat of negativity is so normalized by now
that it forms the backdrop of every conversation about black people held
in white spaces when black folks themselves are not around. It is like
the way your knee jumps when the doctor taps it with that little hammer
thing during a check-up: a reflex by now instinctual, automatic,
unthinking.
And still we pretend that one can think these things—that vast
numbers of us can—and yet be capable of treating black folks fairly in
the workforce, housing market, schools or in the streets; that we can,
on the one hand, view the larger black community as a chaotic maelstrom
of iniquity, while still managing, on the other, to treat black loan
applicants, job applicants, students or random strangers as mere
individuals. That we can somehow thread the needle between our grand
aspirations to equanimity as Americans and our deeply internalized
biases regarding broad swaths of our nation’s people.
But we can’t; and it is in these moments—moments like those provided
by events in Ferguson—that the limits of our commitment to that
aspirational America are laid bare. It is in moments like these when the
chasm between our respective understandings of the world—itself opened
up by the equally cavernous differences in the way we’ve experienced
it—seems almost impossible to bridge. But bridge them we must, before
the strain of our repetitive motion disorder does permanent and
untreatable damage to our collective national body."
4. Finish "The House I Live In"
HW - Complete viewing questions (Assignment #15)
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