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† 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.

#Ferguson, Spectacle and Script
by nancy a heitzeg

“…of what are the police the avant-garde? They prowl, categorizing and profiling, often turning those profiles into murder violence without (serious) fear of being called to account, all the while claiming impunity. What jars the imagination is not the fact of impunity itself, but the realization that they are simply people working a job…This spectacular evil is encased in a more inarticulable evil of banality, namely, that the state assigns certain individuals to (well-paying) jobs as hunters of human beings, a furtive protocol for which this shooting is simply the effect.”

 ~ The Avant-garde of White Supremacy, Martinot and Sexton

Those of us who were there (both literally and virtually ) knew immediately just what it was. We were alerted early on by The Man with Sign, Mike Brown’s family bearing witness on cardboard to the police execution of his son. Were there any doubts, these were to be dispelled soon enough, in the grindingly impossible more than 4 hours that they left, as a strange-fruit warning, The Body in the Street.

There it was at the essence – a Spectacle Lynching by agents of the law, revealing in the excessive response the core of policing, organized state violence in the service of white supremacy, a thin-blue line standing for only the protection of “orderly “whiteness” as property,  both tangible and otherwise. A thin-blue line standing too against Blackness, “the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder,” dangerous and disposable.

This time the curtain was pulled completely away. The Spectacular revealing, this time, the Banality. What it Was.

We saw The Body in the Street. Uncovered.

Exposed.

” It is the job of the spectacular (and sensational reports about the subtle) to draw attention away from the banality of police murder as standard operating procedure. Spectacle is a form of camouflage. It does not conceal anything; it simply renders it unrecognizable. One looks at it and does not see it. It appears in disguise…

Indeed, the state has even invented a structural grammar to organize these transformations. The police become a machine for killing and incarcerating while the personhood of those they stop or notice or profile is conscripted into the role of perpetrator, the finger on the trigger of that machine… When the police break up a peaceful demonstration, those who have been beaten bloody with their nightsticks are arrested and charged with assaulting an officer. In its stridency, the impunity machine claims that those people killed by the cops were only committing suicide. The existence of a victim of police abuse is transformed into the cause for the abuse, a victim of self-abuse through the machinery of the police…. “

 ~ The Avant-garde of White Supremacy, Martinot and Sexton

Perhaps because on some level, the power structure realized what all we had seen, the deployment of the “script” occurred  at  land speed record pace, and the White Fog descended quickly over Ferguson. The script is so predictable, it  was lamented even before it fully emerged, here by Jelani Cobb— “the race-tinged death story has become a genre itself, the details plugged into a grim template of social conflict…defined by its tendency toward an unsatisfactory resolution of the central problems.” Defined too by the sullying of the victim, grimly predicted as well by #IfTheyGunnedMeDown”. And so Mike Brown was assassinated over and over – even unto the very day of his own funeral. And beyond.

So were the witnesses and those who stood against his street execution – physically attacked by police who only escalated their violence, provoking with tanks and tear gas, terrorizing with military grade weaponry. And then assaulted again by mainstream media, old tread CRM “leaders” and political opportunists who sorted the community into law-abiders and looters, defined peaceful protest/civil disobedience as “violent”,  and recast the response to unceasing brutalization as “riot”

The script requires too a swirl of distractions and division, misinformation, and a blurring of lines, for both media and audiences, between journalism/voyeurism, activism/opportunism,  empathy/ego. It requires a misplaced debate over side bar issues – is the issue police militarization? is it class and not race? is it a few “bad apples” amongst police? is it an exceptional issue related to the Ferguson police department? an isolated affair of unusual excess? And oh – but but but, what about respectability politics and “black on black ” crime?

And while the diversions mount, the script flips entirely, as the shooter is sanctified, the actual evidence misrepresented/misreported unto a ball of confusion, any potential jury irreparably tainted, the Bounty collected.  And a still besieged community is called prematurely – sans indictment, sans arrest and decidedly sans conviction – to premature “healing”.

Even before the Body in the Street was laid to rest in an equally premature grave.

” There were local movements in each of these cities to protest acts of police murder and in each case the respective city governments were solicited to take appropriate action. Under conventional definitions of the government, we seem to be restricted to calling upon it for protection from its own agents. But what are we doing when we demonstrate against police brutality, and find ourselves tacitly calling upon the government to help us do so? These notions of the state as the arbiter of justice and the police as the unaccountable arbiters of lethal violence are two sides of the same coin…”

 ~ The Avant-garde of White Supremacy, Martinot and Sexton

In the aftermath, there will be more recycled calls for the usual “reforms” — body cameras for cops, de-militarization of police (whatever that means), more diversity in the ranks, “cultural sensitivity training”.  These are expected, and along with a few more “peaceful” marches, will be tolerated. For they change little. They are merely cosmetic, perhaps denting the surface but eluding the core. Mere tinkering, it will be, with the “machinery of death.”

And police will continue to Choke Eric Garner.  Shoot Kajieme Powell – within 23 seconds. Shoot Ezell Ford. Shoot handcuffed Victor White III in the chest and call it a suicide. Shoot Roshad McIntosh. Shoot John Crawford III on sight for standing near toy guns in an open carry state. Taser to death Gregory Stewart. Kill 1 Black man woman or child every 28 hours. And those who are not killed, are captured and caged, because the avant-garde of white supremacy, is also the mouth of the prison industrial complex.

But maybe this time, it will be different. Maybe, too many saw too much.

Oh the system will continue to pull the curtain down, pressure us to “unsee” it. There will be appeals at all costs to the unremitting  “violence of organized forgetting”.

But this time, we were there. We saw it. Uncovered.

Exposed.

We’ll remember, in fever dreams and night-sweats, in the cold light off day.

And we’ll Stand and we’ll say so.

No matter what comes.

 from the series #LastWords by Shirin-Banou Barghi

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