We are all wrong on Ferguson [View all]

[Atman]

>Written by my ol' copywriting compadre at the ad agency. Good stuff. <


We are all wrong on Ferguson
December 4, 2014 at 1:21pm

The shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer makes quite a first impression, and people all over the country reacted to the story emotionally at first. I did, too.

For members and neighbors of African-American communities all over this country who have been given generations of justifiable reasons not to trust the powers policing them, the death of another unarmed teenager at the hands of a policeman triggers real questions of justice, and they understandably empathized with Brown and his family. For police officers across the country and their families it triggers the very real fair that on any given day they could be pressed into a situation where taking a life or losing one’s own are the only options. I imagine no cop wants that, and those who understand the fine line an officer must walk and the tragic consequence of even the right choice undoubtedly felt for Wilson’s predicament.

Both reactions are fair and based on a substantial bit of truth. In an ideal world we would seek to have our collective response informed by both of them, but very quickly it became clear that our world is still far from ideal.

The 24-hour news cycle and the cable networks that traffic in it have taken a good deal of the blame for keeping the coverage superficial and sensationalistic, and for good reason, but blaming them for feeding us news in Vine-sized bites is kind of like dragging your kids to Black Friday and then blaming Walmart and television ads for obscuring the true meaning of Christmas.They’re just giving us what we are asking for, with our dollars and viewing hours, if not with our hearts. The real failure that these outlets committed happened long before the unrest in Ferguson, when they abandoned journalistic integrity and began pandering to their own respective bases. And both bases ateit up. You can argue amongst yourselves who started it; that doesn’t really interest me anymore.

Everyone can now retreat to like-minded cable networks and news feeds, and the producers and memes strive to reassure all of us that we were right all along. Each truth became proprietary, and admitting the other one could be true an act of surrender.

Progressive websites and media outlets are hungry for stories that highlight what they—and I—see as real systemic problems that are often ignored in the national dialogue. They hoped this was it, and they worked to present the victim in the best light possible while willingly conflating Officer Wilson with racial inequality in law enforcement as a whole. On the other side, cable news, web sites and talk radio countered by framing Brown as a monstrous thug and immediate danger to anyone who might break down in front of him. Both sides were exploiting real fears, and in so doing both were perpetuating those fears while making it harder for two people with opposite emotional responses initially to ever find common ground.

And both sides are wrong; both are hyperbolic caricatures of themselves by now. Michael Brown was not Rosa Parks, nor was he a boogeyman just waiting for a chance to lash out at white suburbanites. And Darren Wilson was not a monster, suiting up for work, hoping each day is the day he gets to shoot an unarmed black teen.

It’s impossible to imagine that both parties didn’t fear for their lives during that confrontation. Michael Brown’s fear of Darren Wilson ran deeper than not wanting to be caught breaking the law. As stated at the outset, the belief that young black men are not going to be treated the same by police as their white counterparts is firmly grounded in reality. They aren’t.The statistics are overwhelmingly clear, and I’d wager that most of us have experiences that support those statistics—certainly those of us who have lived in cities have seen it firsthand.

When I was a college student the Boston PD went out of their way to keep peace with the neighbors while not getting any of us into serious trouble, even ignoring some things in plain sight; teenagers in Roxbury got so such leniency. A few years earlier, in a mostly white small town, one of the police officers was the offensive coordinator on our high school football team. When he caught us trespassing,drinking underage and causing other various kinds of trouble he simply followed us all home to make sure we were safe and then ran us until we threw up at practice the next Monday.

In short, I’ve broken the law, and I never had to fear getting shot for it. And I’m about the size Michael Brown was.

That’s how we hope police interact with their communities, but it’s an experience that must seem so foreign to a young black man in St. Louis. How can that disparity of experience not engender distrust? Even if Michael Brown had been an angelic citizen, he had no reason to believe the police would have treated him as anything other than a criminal.He had no reason to believe Darren Wilson would ever react as if he wasn’t afraid for his life. The unacceptable truth we’ve come to accept is that Wilson was afraid because Brown was a large black man, or at least looked like one,and I don’t believe we can personally indict Wilson for this. He, too, is a victim of the systemic racism that perpetuates that fear. Fox News and it’s aligned outlets are trying to reassure their customers that this fear is reasonable—that Michel Brown is, in fact, more proof of it.

I have no interest in calling Fox News or its viewers racist, any more than the rest of us. Racism is the United States of America’s original sin—manifest most starkly in our participation in the African Slave Trade but present from the first moment the pilgrims met the Wampanoag. As Americans we are all racists (in the manner that all Christians are sinners—Adam and Eve’s disobedience doesn’t diminish the beauty of the Christian faith any more than acknowledging our country’s imperfections detracts from its greatness) and that shouldn’t be heard as an insult but as a call to action. We all have the civic duty to fight racism, and when it is suggested that something we’ve done might be racist we shouldn’t view it as an accusation but as a reminder that we might not have been consciously fighting it at that moment. And we all need those reminders sometimes.

The police do, too, but we also need to do better by our police. We need to make sure they have the tools to be better police (more body cameras and fewer tanks is a good start) but we also need to work so that our officers (as well as our neighbors, families and colleagues) don’t fear black men simply because they are black. Firstly, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (if we’re treating people like criminals whether they commit a crime or not we are removing a big disincentive to crime). Secondly, it foments more distrust, and that makes the job of the police—and the lives of the policed—more difficult. Thirdly, kids wind up dead when there’s no reason for it.

Sadly, with Ferguson we took a step back, not a step forward. The news mongers ran to their reactionary bunkers instead of analyzing and discussing the issues. The prosecutor, though I allege no malice, did a grave disservice to the citizens of St. Louis and to race relations across the country, and should surely step down so the community can heal. He opted for a secret forum and acted as arbitrator rather than prosecutor,meaning that the case was never truly subjected to an adversarial system. There were so many questions to which he simply denied the community answers, and it makes the recent rants by Charles Barkley and Joe Scarborough (relying on the evidence he presented as if it had been vetted by an open court, when in fact nothing could be farther from the truth) look silly. The police’s initial response,leaving the body in the street for hours, was shameful and certainly stoked the backlash.

The riots, too, were shameful, of course, and I am glad they have been nearly universally condemned. It does,however, seem odd that some news outlets have covered them more than the shooting or the evidence. It’s difficult to watch without suspecting that the yare being used as a distraction, to prove once again that fear is justified.Let’s remember that it doesn’t take a large percentage of a community to cause that kind of trouble, that we’ve seen crowds of all races riot and loot for far less cause (a team winning or losing a big game is a perennial favorite), and that waiting to release the decision until 8’oclock at night, which this prosecutor did and which gave everyone plenty of time to get downtown and riled up, surely helped create the combustible situation. Again, I don’t allege malice, but in its absence the judgment he showed was almost unfathomably poor.

I do believe that given the evidence, and the deference we rightly show police officers given the danger into which they routinely place themselves, Officer Wilson would have been acquitted at trial. But it should have gone to trial. An unarmed teenager was killed and shouldn’t have been, and the community was denied a fair airing of the facts. I don’t expect Ferguson to heal any time soon. For the rest of us,though, healing requires abandoning the knee jerk reactions that see any acknowledgement of fault as an indictment against an entire community or an entire profession.

Every time we retreat to our separate corners we fight to a draw. Nothing changes and the next time a similar tragedy occurs we fight about the particulars of that incident again.Let’s see the forest through trees, and when five athletes raise their hands (a protest which damaged no property and caused no injury or inconvenience) let’s not get indignant because we think it is only about Ferguson. It’s not; it’s about all of us, and it’s about fulfilling the promise that, in America, we are all equal under the law. It’s a call to action, and allowing ourselves to be distracted from it endangers both our cops and our kids.