Print PDF

† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Kay Whitlock, co-author of Queer (In)Justice, is contributing editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm.

Dispersing the White Fog Enveloping Ferguson

by Kay Whitlock

Starting with the extrajudicial execution of Michael Brown by local police on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, a predictable white fog has settled in. It is a miasma, historically resonant, comprised of structural racism and denial of it, policing practices that are race-based and authoritarian, and political/cultural narratives that obfuscate rather than illuminate.

The properties of the miasma are brutally magical: they produce a triumphant white supremacist sleight of hand in which racist reality is refashioned to frame “civil order” and “law enforcement” as the perpetual victims of purportedly “out-of-control, criminal,” and pathologically violent black people – particularly young black people.

Law enforcement riots and the repressive deployment of armed force against black people are not the causes of “civil disorder;” rather the cause is located in those who have been denied social and economic justice throughout U.S. history, who are now framed as creators of violence and terror.  Violent policing has vanished as the instigating factor.  No one seems to be considering the idea that those who are not violent, but who defy the curfew, are registering a principled and courageous protest against repressive state power.  Instead, the deployment of ever-greater force, including Missouri’s National Guard, initially sent to protect not the community, but the police command center, becomes its own surreal justification.

It has not yet been two weeks since Brown’s streetside execution, but the white fog just gets thicker, nastier, more toxic.

To help cut through the fog, CI urges you to read these pieces:

Jelani Cobb: The Anger in Ferguson

“The hazard of engaging with the history of race in the United States is the difficulty of distinguishing the past from the news of the day.”

Tamara K. Nopper and Miriame Kaba, Itemizing Atrocity

“For blacks, the ‘war on terror’ hasn’t come home. It’s always been here. How then might we consider the emphasis on the militarization of policing as the problem as another example of “the precariousness of empathy”?

The problem with casting militarization as the problem is that the formulation suggests it is the excess against which we must rally. We must accept that the ordinary is fair, for an extreme to be the problem. The policing of black people — carried out through a variety of mechanisms and processes — is purportedly warranted, as long as it doesn’t get too militarized and excessive…

. . .The problem is not just the excess. Yet one gets the sense that the only way to generate a modicum of concern or empathy for black people is to raise the stakes and to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the violations and the suffering. To circulate repeatedly the spectacular in hopes that people consider the everyday. It’s a fool’s errand because it often doesn’t garner the response desired or needed. And it leaves black people in the position of having to ratchet up the excess to get anyone to care or pay attention.

from Itemizing Atrocity, by Nopper and Kaba

Yasmin Nair, Gaza Is Not Ferguson

“As protests over Ferguson continue across the country, I’m both saddened by what sparked them and hopeful because I’m seeing so much righteous rage and a larger sense that things have to change or else.

At the same time, I’m wary and weary of the ‘Gaza = Feruguson’ statements that have been floating around.  In their most banal forms, I find these statements highly problematic and full of easy generalisations.”

 Rejecting Distracting & Distorting Narratives

Here’s why these pieces are important to us, and why CI is choosing to focus on the systemic issues rather than try to prove to people, through our own parsing of details, what the Michael Brown killing represents and reveals.

We think it is critically important to pay attention to the historical particularities embedded in this moment and not try to erase or blur them through lenses, however well-intended, that don’t center structural racism.

We do not believe that presenting more facts and figures about law enforcement violence and other structural forms of racism will matter enough to shift the discourse. If facts and figures could turn the tide, structural racism would have been dismantled long ago. But that violence merely evolves and morphs.  It has since the days of chattel slavery, even in light of abolition of slavery, the very real gains of the African American civil rights movement, and many other reforms.  Structural racism persists despite false storylines about “colorblindness” and the earnest efforts of people who sincerely want to believe that some changes in federal and state criminal law, combined with providing less military equipment to local police forces, will produce the needed change.

So we’re not going to pick over more details of this obscenely inhumane travesty of justice ourselves, one in which liberals and conservatives – and  Republicans, libertarians, independents, and Democrats – are implicated. A violent and ongoing structural travesty that enforces white supremacy.  White supremacy is not and never was the product of “extremists.”  It has always enjoyed the support, active or tacit, of the vast majority of white people who, while benefiting from it, have refused responsibility for even recognizing – much less dismantling – it.

CI looks to the people lifting their voices in protest in Ferguson with equal mixtures of sorrow, trepidation, respect, and hope.  We are grateful that – for the first time – an Amnesty International team is on the ground in the United States, in Ferguson, to bear witness, monitor protests, and support accountability for Brown’s killing. But even as the protests grow, so do the distractions and distortions.

Frankly, here at CI, we don’t give a damn about celebrities and pundits traipsing to Ferguson to run their personal or political agendas. We are not distracted by – and urge you not to get caught up in – stories now that suggest the central locus of violence is black “lowlifes, lawbreakers, and looters” or “outside agitators,” and not police.

We don’t have time for demonizing photographs of black youth resisting curfew orders (without violence) and other protest restrictions juxtaposed against those of black people sweeping the streets of Ferguson. We reject this false “good black people/bad black people” storylines and hope you do, as well. That’s a shell game that shifts the narrative away from the terrible persistence of structural racism and police violence to “respectability politics” that blame those bearing the greatest brunt of that violence for the injustice directed against them. Recognize the shell game for what it is.

While we are well aware of the currents of political opportunism by various players, major and minor, swirling around Ferguson, we refuse to focus our attention on them. Yes, it is outrageous that in a nation in which freedom of the press is purportedly guaranteed, media access is contained, controlled, and effectively censored. But where were the voices of MSM over the past few decades as the freedom of speech of those who protest and resist injustice has been denied? Where were the members of mainstream media when the Ferguson police began to demonize Michael Brown as their primary response to the uproar over his death?  Most were helping to circulate those demonizing accounts.

It is ironic, indeed, to hear journalists (rightly) protest their mistreatment when people of color have been on the receiving end of much worse police brutality for centuries.  Most MSM have paid little or no attention to the systemic nature of law enforcement violence; too many have actively promoted false storylines that excuse it.

The white fog also encompasses such generic frames as “militarization of police” and “War on Terror” linkages that interpret events without central reference to structural racism. While we are well aware of and denounce the militarism of domestic policing, CI rejects framing that suggests this is the root of wrong in Ferguson, and not structural racism.

Nor are we going to pretend that even the arrest, trial, and (unlikely) conviction of the police officer who executed Michael Brown, however significant in some respects, would deliver up anything remotely resembling justice – no matter how harsh sentencing might be. That wouldn’t produce lasting structural change. While Officer Darren Wilson must be held personally accountable, there is no guarantee that this will happen in any meaningful way; there are also good reasons to believe it won’t.

And in the meantime, what happened and continues to happen in Ferguson is both specific and historically resonant.  Responsibility and accountability for the systemic dehumanization of black people extend much more broadly and deeply, over a long period of time.  At the center of all of this is the question:  what would, what could, constitute authentic justice for Michael Brown and all other black people, many of them young men and women, who have experienced, and too often died at the hands of, ordinary structural forms of violence and dehumanization?

For years, Criminal Injustice has documented structural racism, in its limitless manifestations. Since our inception, we have sought and continue to strive to be one small part of a much larger collective effort to expose the structural violence of law enforcement and the criminal legal system, to illuminate its relationship to other forms of structural racism, to provide readers with access to informational links and tools, and encourage readers who have not yet become involved in grassroots movements to dismantle structural racism to do so.

We seek to help encourage, envision, and implement new visions of justice and accountability that do not rely on brutal policies of containment, control, eradication, retribution, and incarceration. That focus, rather, on the positive creation of community well-being, safety, and accountability rooted in just social and economic relationships.

The current paradigm for identifying and addressing violence doesn’t work. The criminal legal system does not and cannot produce justice because violence permeates and is foundational to that very system.

Let’s unleash new imagination and refuse to settle for the current terms of debate.

(52)