The Demon in Darren Wilson's Head

[Ken Burch]

1. More:

The story of how this demon got into Wilson’s head starts in the 1670 Virginia Assembly, which laid the groundwork for the construction of a legal system in the United States that disempowered most whites and all blacks when declaring it forbidden for “Negroes and Indians” to own Christian (i.e., white) servants. Another key moment in this story is the “Great Compromise” reached during the Philadelphia U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787, which decreed that slaves legally counted as three-fifths of a person for the political purpose of population counts to disenfranchise non-slaveholding white voters. By the nineteenth century, all European immigrants to the United States needed to learn how to become white in order to get and keep their jobs as the North’s new industrial workers—and in succumbing to this process, a bogeyman got into their own heads. It is this same internalized demon that led Darren Wilson to kill Michael Brown.

This master narrative exposes the “surplus powerlessness”—to use Rabbi Michael Lerner’s fine term—that disempowered whites use as an add-on, if you will, to self-destructively increase the social and economic exploitation they fall victim to through the vested financial interests of the white power elite. This is not a conspiracy story but an ongoing American tragedy. The powerless, in short, keep pulling themselves down when others push them down. In this tragic scenario, the use of deadly force against black men, teens, and children by white cops today is the collateral damage to an ongoing attack against whites by their own economic, political, and social systems that render most of them afraid. And for good reason. They live in a country that trashes most whites.