Guest Author
The story in Ferguson, Missouri, is all too familiar, even callously so. A young, unarmed black man is shot by a white police officer. A frustrated community erupts in anger.
While the details involving the shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown are still being investigated, one fact is troubling and clear: Another casual encounter between a police officer and a young black man turns deadly. This is a storyline more apt for the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, not a suburb of St. Louis, in America’s heartland.
It happens with so much regularity that you wish some of those Facebook posts would be hoaxes. But for some parent, some young man, some community, the story is all too real. One woman summed it up for me when she spoke at a community forum about her 12-year-old son being stopped and questioned by police. Her son had one question for his mother. How long?
America needs to ask itself the same question. But based on the trend of our national discussion, this is a question we keep avoiding, at the peril of our endangered species – young black men. They’re not perfect, but their margin for error is so much thinner, their space for grace so much tighter.
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., saw in Ferguson, as in America, the problem as big government and the militarization of local police departments. For too many inner-city communities and neighborhoods of color, police departments resemble occupying armies, who invade, punish and withdraw but rarely serve and protect. While Paul’s focus on the militarization is appreciated, he pays far too little attention to the issue of race, of the police and the policed.
Ferguson seems a case study of race and power gone wrong. According to the Missouri attorney general’s annual report, Ferguson police officers were twice as likely to arrest African Americans as whites during traffic stops, The Washington Post reported.
Ferguson in 2014 resembles many Southern towns during the era of Jim Crow, before passage of the Voting Rights Act. Although more than 60 percent of the town’s population is African American, and whites make up less than 30 percent, Ferguson’s mayor, police chief and a majority of its city council members are white. Of the Ferguson police department’s 53 members, only three are African American, The Washington Post also reported.
It seems as if the Civil Rights movement, the freedom train, bypassed Ferguson altogether. If there was ever a place that needed a protest march, it was Ferguson. But judging by the overreaction of law enforcement officers, their Constitution begins at the Second Amendment. They have shown little or no respect for the First (Amendment). And that disrespect, unfortunately, seems to spill over when viewing the lives of young black men.
We Floridians, relieved that the Show-Me State has briefly supplanted us on the stage of the bizarre, should pay close attention.
Andrew J. Skerritt is author of Ashamed to Die: Silence, Denial and the AIDS Epidemic in the South. He lives in Tallahassee. Follow him on Twitter @andrewjskerritt. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
