The Demon in Darren Wilson's Head [View all]

[Ken Burch]

http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/the-demon-in-darren-wilsons-head

In his testimony before the St. Louis County Grand Jury, Darren Wilson said he felt like a five-year-old peering into the face of someone who “looks like a demon” as he wrestled with Michael Brown, the black teen he later shot to death in Ferguson, Missouri.


In other words, Wilson’s eyes perceived an unarmed teenager, but within his head that image was transfigured into a demonic apparition.

The actions of police officers aren’t supposed to be governed by fear. But Darren Wilson’s were. Wilson’s actions, however, weren’t “his actions,” but rather an outcropping of what theologian Sarah Drummond aptly calls “an epigenetic, cellular memory of loss and its resultant need for a scapegoat.”

Michael Brown became the scapegoat for Wilson’s own internalized feelings of powerlessness. Like so many other white people in this society, Wilson viscerally experienced himself as powerless because of a historical truth: for hundreds of years, most European immigrants and their descendents have been used instrumentally by white elites to cement the interlocking racial and economic hierarchies that subjugate most people in this country. In the process, they have lost their ethnic roots and adopted “white” identities defined by fear. It is this core feeling of fear—a mixture of internalized feelings of powerlessness and loss, paired with the conviction that blackness is to blame for these feelings rather than the actual white attacks against them by the white ruling elite—that make up the demon in Darren Wilson’s head.