A list of articles and writing inspired by the shooting of Michael Brown
These stories educated me, made me feel something, or were just so, so well written. Or all three, sometimes. They provided historical or cultural or economic context, analysis of reactions and thought about where we are going forward, and just beautiful essays. I am putting them in a list because I was too busy with graduate school applications to thoughtfully post them individually. I also have all the things I did post at the bottom, so I guess this is sort of my annotated bibliography of this moment in history. Enjoy
“But Ferguson isn’t a very large town. All those flash bangs and tear gas canisters were going off just behind people’s homes or in front of their small businesses. It’s your typical American suburb, and in many ways, it still was, even with all the clamor going on. Photographer Eric Kayne and I walked around the neighborhood chatting with people while they worked or relaxed, enjoying the last few weeks of summer, even as Ferguson had become the most recent locus for Our Ongoing National Conversation on Race.”
This is a good article. It centers property damage, but it tells the stories and contexts that are really needed.
“Ross, author of “Everyday Bias,” says being biased doesn’t make people bad, just human… “We need to reduce the level of guilt but increase the level of responsibility we take for it,” he says. “I didn’t choose to internalize these messages, but it’s inside of me and I have to be careful.”
Part of being careful is expanding our definition of racism, says Bonilla-Silva, author of “Racism Without Racists.”
Racism has evolved, but our language for describing it hasn’t, he says. “Colorblind racism is the new racial music most people dance to,” he says. “The ‘new racism’ is subtle, institutionalized and seemingly nonracial.””
This is Race Bias 101; we should all learn this about ourselves.
“No mathematical equation exists to produce the economic model that ends with 18-year-old Michael Brown, shot multiple times with his hands in the air, his lifeless body left in the street for four hours. The numbers will inevitably be run, however, to determine the cumulative cost of damages owed to owners of property looted or destroyed in the riots engulfing Ferguson, Mo., after Brown’s death, thus fulfilling a ritual cycle enacted repeatedly over the last 100 years: injustice, outrage, appeals to peace, reprimands against violence and looting and then insurance claims.
But a path can be traced from slavery to the killing of Michael Brown. The sociologist Loïc Wacquant asserts that racialized slavery was only the first in a series of “peculiar institutions” (as went the 19th-century euphemism gilding the nation’s founding contradiction) to enforce caste and class in the United States. The most recent is the “hyperghetto” and “hyperincarceration” that presides today, wherein there’s little hope of mobility and uniformly dire possibilities. Instead of being at the center of the national economy — as were 20-year-olds in slave traders’ value scale — those who are young and black have become a distortion of the “extra man”: They are now surplus labor, discarded in advance as uneducable, unredeemable criminals or potential criminals.”
The uncomfortable reality that the American economy was established by slavery, that capitalism includes deep in its history the valuing of black bodies because they were not considered to contain human lives. The weird thought that this market and this process eventually created me, and a lot of the people I love.
“The young professionals and college students stepping up today are leading the charge right now. From the Dream Defenders to Million Hoodies, the “youngins” have accepted the call and are on the ground, hard at work in their own communities and nationwide. They are providing educational resources in their neighborhoods, training each other to be leaders in government, non profits and corporations, and they are mobilizing when tragedy slaps us in the face and reminds us that there is much more work to be done…Don’t worry about what activities on that list you do not agree with or think won’t work- figure out how you will respond. Get to work. Make sure this is a movement, not a moment. Don’t wait for another tragedy to cross your newsfeed, because whether you take action or not, the abuse will continue. The only question is what will we do together to prevent it from continuing indefinitely?”
Looking forward (and written by someone I know!)
“There are myriad reasons for this divergence, from political ideologies — which, for example, place different emphases on law and order versus citizens’ rights — to fears based in racist stereotypes of young black men. But the chief obstacle to having an intelligent, or even intelligible, conversation across the racial divide is that on average white Americans live in communities that face far fewer problems and talk mostly to other white people…In fact, fully three-quarters (75 percent) of whites have entirely white social networks without any minority presence…For most white Americans, #hoodies and #handsupdontshoot and the images that have accompanied these hashtags on social media may feel alien and off-putting given their communal contexts and social networks.”
“Most of America (myself included) watched it unfold on a screen — a television, phone, a laptop. And with the ease of a text to vote for our favorite talent-show musician, too many of us judged… the caustic reaction to Ferguson’s mourners was further evidence that a discomfort with black progress is just the beginning. If there is to be racial peace, we are being told to do it only in a way that makes other people feel comfortable. We need to not only die as “angels,” but mourn like them, too. Justice and equality have become conditional upon the behavior of the aggrieved.
What kind of grief do we recognize? When we see Michael Brown’s father wailing over his son’s casket, America gets that. After all, that’s how people do it on television or in the movies, and even on the spectacle of our local newscast. So when Ferguson says goodbye to Michael Brown, mourners are expected to have their makeup done, clothes tailored, and to hit their mark. And, action!”
“You can’t have patience,” Russell said on a recent afternoon. “We been stuck on the same page in history for the last 60 years, patience is gone. Local police came and said y’all need to leave, we stayed. They shot tear gas, we stayed. They shot rubber bullets we stayed and got stronger. They gave us a curfew, we stayed all night…#HealSTL, a play on a hashtag created during the uprising, recognizes “the deep wounds that have been created by two situations, the death of Michael Brown and the justice system,” French said, adding, “This isn’t an effort to get back to normal, this is an effort to create a new normal.”
French said his organization is drafting a set of specific political goals, registering voters and gauging the untapped pool of potential voters in the city. Historically, black voter turnout has been abysmally low in Ferguson despite being the majority population. There have been few viable black candidates as well.”
“John Gaskin III, a spokesman for the St. Louis County NAACP, is no pushover. He calls Missouri “the most racist state in the country.” But he praises the leadership of Emerson, Boeing, and others. Patrick Sly, who heads the Emerson Charitable Trust, “is one of the most genuine men that you could meet in this town,” Gaskin says. And Danny Bradley, who runs Boeing’s diversity program for St. Louis, is “a gentleman.” The problem, rather, is that greater St. Louis is locked into a pattern of inequitable development. Iowa’s Gordon writes that St. Louis is “by any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay.” Fragmentation “is not the principal cause, but it certainly fed into what’s happening in Ferguson,” says Robert Cohn, author of The History and Growth of St. Louis County, Missouri.”
This is really educational about like tax and real estate contexts that are important and businessweek-y and indicate the historical, systemic racism that is the real target here (for everyone who is confused by how #BoycottBlackFriday relates). It also quotes the Executive Director of the International SD organization ☺
I hope that part of what comes out of this is a functional redefinition of racism for the people who still see racism exclusively as an activity of angry white men in KKK hoods in the 1940s in Georgia. Against this understanding of explicit and missioned racism, It is often difficult to grasp the concept of interpersonal, implicit microaggressions or massive system racism. I think there is a lot more education available in very accessible places and increasingly casually. This turns the tide.
“Police and government tactics to intimidate, criminalize, humiliate, and undermine activists started on Day 1 in Ferguson and have only gotten worse, and the tactics used echo those of an earlier era…While rumors of FBI involvement in Ferguson existed for weeks, it wasn’t until this Reuters report was released that the FBI was actively meeting with St. Louis officials “two to three times per week” that it was fully confirmed. Since then, instances of COINTELPRO-like activities by local police and government officials appear to have had a dramatic uptick.”
We never really stopped being in the shitty version of America, did we?
“Didn’t Martin Luther King have a dream, about what’s inside that counts? I don’t see skin color, at all. My policy is that I’m colorblind, I treat everyone the same. That’s why I have you, my African-American friends. You’re good and hardworking, not like mostly all the others, who are lazy and ghetto and don’t speak good English.
Why don’t you be like me, and ignore race? If we all do that, it’ll go away. But if you keep being divisive, you’ll make us not like you anymore, and we might start taking away things we gave you…
But if you were to come in and, just by being present, make us acknowledge that something is really going wrong in America right now, well — that would be really uncomfortable. I don’t want to be uncomfortable.”
(Satire) This is also commentary about this massive Facebook-friend-reconsideration thing that’s apparently happening. I can’t tell if I am lucky to not have super racist friends, or if facebook just isn’t showing them to me, but I haven’t noticed (or I guess tried to notice) anything terrible on my feed. But a lot of other people are, and so I wonder about the long-term impact these massive historical moments have on our social networks — like this “See how red tweeters and blue tweeters ignore each other on Ferguson”
“But it’s important to remember that for members of law enforcement, it’s life or death out there. Without any warning, an officer of the law can find himself in the mayhem of formal and de facto segregationist policies such as mortgage discrimination and redlining that made it impossible for people in the most dangerous neighborhoods to live anywhere else. One minute you’re pulling up beside a couple of teenagers walking down the street, and the next minute you’re face-to-face with racial disparity that dates back to the 17th century and undergirds our culture to this very moment.”
“These adorable bite-sized pops are a fun twist on a recipe as old as blind hatred. It’s best to make the dough the day before and refrigerate overnight, while you sit awake, unsure of what to do, or if there’s anything you can do, really. Eating dessert off a stick will put a smile on your face, which will be immediately be wiped off your face by a racist remark from your libertarian cousin. These seasonal confections, while playful and unique, will have literally no impact on the grave injustice that occurred in Missouri this week.”
#RagingWithDesserts
And all of my old posts on it:
“For the sake of Michael Brown”
The essential reading on Ferguson, from the St. Louis American.
“‘Am I next?’ Ferguson’s Protests Through the Eyes of a Teenager”
A video interview from Time
“Ferguson Shaping Up to Be a Consciousness-Changing Moment for Whites”
“In Defense of the Ferguson Riots”
Discussion of riots as political speech, important rebuke to unexamined criticisms of rioting.
“Ferguson Pastor: This Is Not A Race Issue; This Is A Human Issue”
8-minute NPR interview that clarifies why this is so big, how it isn’t just Michael Brown
“Face it, blacks. Michael Brown let you down.”
This one is phenomenal. Just so, so well written and so poignant about the ideas of purity and saviors.
“Following Ferguson: Asian Americans Can Choose ‘Invisibility, Complicity, or Resistance’”
“Ferguson isn’t about black rage against cops. It’s white rage against progress.”
“Obama to the world: Ferguson shows what makes American leadership so important”
“Why Hillary Clinton can get away with not talking about Ferguson”
“Why isn’t the Tea Party sending a militia to Ferguson?”
There was also something interesting on the big libertarian response to Ferguson, but I can’t find it now…
