What Ferguson triggered [View all]

[sheshe2]

One of the things social media has highlighted lately is the fact that words/events can "trigger" the emotional reliving of trauma from a person's past. Without naming this phenomenon, Jelani Cobb suggested that Ferguson was a trigger for African Americans.

In the days after 9/11, it was common to hear people say that it was the first time Americans had really experienced terrorism on their own soil. Those sentiments were historically wrong, and willfully put aside acts that were organized on a large scale, had a political goal, and were committed with the specific intention of being nightmarishly memorable. The death cult that was lynching furnished this country with such spectacles for a half century. (The tallies vary, but, by some estimates, there were thirty-three hundred lynchings in the decades between the end of Reconstruction and the civil-rights era.) We know intuitively, not abstractly, about terrorism’s theatrical intent. The sight of Michael Brown, sprawled on Canfield Drive for four hours in the August sun, dead at the hands of an officer who was unnamed for a week, recalled that memory. It had the effect of reminding that crowd of spontaneous mourners of their own refuted humanity. A single death can be understood as a collective threat. The media didn’t whip up these concerns among the black population; history did that.

I suspect that this pretty much nails what it is that white people have a hard time understanding about the reaction of African Americans to the death of Michael Brown. We've allowed ourselves to be oblivious to the terror we never experienced and how events today trigger all that for those who did.

Perhaps we can fire up our mirror neurons of empathy if we image that, for a moment on 9/11/01, we felt the terror that African Americans felt for decades of slavery and lynchings. Many of us feel that terror triggered when we see video of that awful day in September. And we've done some pretty dumb things as a result...everything from invading the wrong country to freaking out over the building of a mosque in New York City.

Read More: http://immasmartypants.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-ferguson-triggered.html