I wrote this in 2014. It’s worth a re-post. Here we are 6 years later. Still.
I was in Atlanta last weekend for the annual Southern Historical Association meetings, a city brimming with a rich historical past, from events of the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement, and, notably, the home of Martin Luther King, Jr. On Saturday afternoon, as I was heading to lunch with a high school friend I had not seen in years, I witnessed a scene that happens daily in every major metropolitan area of the country. Two young black men were walking down the street talking when a police car drove by, then circled back, stopped, and apparently asked them for identification.
As we drove away, not knowing the circumstances surrounding this particular police stop, my thoughts went to Ferguson, where the grand jury was still deliberating the fate of Officer Darren Wilson. In what was surely a poorly timed announcement late last night the country learned that Officer Wilson would not be indicted on any of the five accounts for the murder of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown. The city of Ferguson quickly erupted into chaos as peaceful demonstrators took years of anger and frustration to the streets.
Incidents like this do not happen in a vacuum nor are they spontaneous acts of “thuggary” as the media would like us to think. As we learned from the McCone Commission in 1965 charged with looking into the Watts Riot and, perhaps more importantly, the Kerner Commission in 1968, there are systemic causes behind the riots that still exist today – residential segregation, substandard housing, high unemployment, and distrust of police in predominantly black neighborhoods. In 1965, when Marquette Frye was arrested during a “routine” traffic stop, more than 200 onlookers watched as a scuffle broke out between Frye and a white police officer leading to one of the most explosive and expensive riots in American history. In 1965 Watts, where the population density of blacks relative to the rest of Los Angeles was incredibly high, unemployment for black men stood at 34%. Most notably, in an area of the city that was 98% black only five of the 205 police patrolling the neighborhood were black.
Similarly, in 1967, in Newark, New Jersey, routine police harassment and a lack of political power led to yet another costly riot. As the Kerner Commission noted after the riots in Detroit and Newark, America was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.”
According to Michelle Alexander’s New York Times bestselling book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, we are still a racially divided nation, even more than four decades after the civil rights movement proper. As recent studies have shown, blacks are more likely to be arrested in almost every city in America for every type of crime. And as noted in last weeks USA Today investigative report, “Racial Gap in Arrest Rates: ‘Staggering disparity’,” in Clayton, Missouri, a town that is only 8% black, African Americans constitute 52% of those arrested.
As a political activist and a pacifist, I do not condone any type of violence, yet I understand that when marginalized groups of individuals feel dispossessed and without a voice, they have, historically, taken to the streets to bring attention to the problems that they face everyday; problems that most of America are either not aware of or turn a blind eye to. As was apparent in President Obama’s prosaic address to the nation last night after the verdict was read, we do not, as a country like to talk about race. But it is a conversation that needs to be had, despite the fact that we elected an African American man as our Commander in Chief. What happened in Ferguson is an example of “the straw that broke the camels back.” It is not indicative of the trope propagated by the media of a black community that is persistently violent in the wake of not getting their way.
As was the case in 1960s America, police-community conflict continues to be the underlying cause of much of the racial unrest in our urban communities. Problems of inner city black America are real, economic dislocation among other problems are in dire need of immediate policy attention. If we really want to address the issues that created Ferguson, we need to be honest with ourselves about the racial disparities that continue to exist in the United States. Only then can we move towards a post-racial society.
Confessions of an Academic Bartender 