By Mickey Friedman
September 2, 2014
Kevin Durant, young, gifted, and black is the second-best basketball player in the world.
Michael Brown, eighteen, quite possibly gifted in other ways, was black, now dead. While Kajieme Powell, twenty-three, black, quite possibly mentally ill, was shot dead by two white policemen three miles from Brown.
That Kevin Durant was offered more than two hundred forty-five million dollars to wear Under Armour sneakers while Michael Brown and Kajieme Powell will never see another day in St. Louis County is just one of the complex realities of race in America today.
Kevin Durant is safe for now because we pay serious money to watch him fly from the foul line, soar, then jam the ball home. Then buy sneakers that bear his name. And so most whites would recognize him.
But for every KD there are many thousands of people of color in danger merely because they are darker than most of you reading this. Darker than me.
It’s hard to talk about racism. About the fear, sometimes hatred that lurks below the surface, so easily triggered by anger. We Americans have never been good at taking responsibility for our deepest failings. Of acknowledging that the American experience began with taking the land and lives of those who lived here. Talk about the failure to provide enhanced border security.
Much of our wealth was earned off the labor of the slaves we bought and sold for several centuries.
Is there black on black crime? Is alcoholism a problem amongst Native Americans? Can Sunnis hate Shia? Do Hindus and Muslims slaughter each other? Yes and yes and yes some more. Did you own slaves? No.
But there is no denying it was the many shades of black – the color line – that justified ripping men and women from their African homes. In chains on slave ships. Then finally, in the land of the free, worked like dogs.
While many white people would prefer to forget slavery, to mis-remember segregation – when was that, 1840, maybe? – people of color can’t. Thank God they won’t because we’re offered one more chance to learn from our mistakes, to heal.
Ferguson, Missouri is our fault. Because of our failure to truly take responsibility for our past. To fully acknowledge the biases that dwell deep within. Because only white people can truly address the racism that’s taken root in our unconscious. We fight the cancers that wrack our bodies. What about the cancer that infects the American soul?
White males still own the game. The army, the police, the corporate boardrooms. White males still control women’s bodies.
Watch the video as two white policemen from St. Louis County fire multiple rounds into Kajieme Powell, an agitated black man with his hands at his sides. From sixteen feet away. One could have tazed him, while the other fired had that failed. Even with a steak knife, not really a life and death threat. Why abandon rationality, empathy?
A majority of police work hard to protect public safety. It’s an exhausting, almost impossible job, an often dangerous, even fatal job. A job that only gets harder with grower numbers of the mentally ill, the poor, and the hopeless.
Still there is a deep-seated white American discomfort and suspicion of black people. Perhaps explaining why Ferguson police have killed in two weeks as many people as Japanese police have killed in six years.
Today, a few blacks make manifest the great potential within while most poor blacks are condemned to inferior schools, still-segregated neighborhoods, lower pay, greater unemployment and incarceration. And the chance to be ticketed and/or shot while being black.
Ferguson’s courts mock justice, its 93 percent white police force issuing 24,532 warrants, about three per household, while collecting yearly fines/fees of $2,635,400 from 21,000 people, who are 67 percent black.
Most of us are quite nice. We work hard. Care for our kids. Dump ice water on ourselves to defeat ALS. So it’s not easy to own the deaths of Michael Brown or Kajieme Powell.
But there’s a pretty simple test. Flip Ferguson. Make Michael Brown an unarmed white boy who may or may not have shoplifted, then shot six times by a black cop for jaywalking. Not yet charged? Paid leave?
A member of the Missouri National Guard recently told a white newswoman: “You want to get out of here because you’re white. Because these n*ggers, you know, you never know what they’re going to do.”
Imagine a black Guardsman warning Sarah Palin about unpredictable honkies.
A recent New York Times/CBS News poll revealed: “An overwhelming majority of blacks say they think that, generally, the police are more likely to use deadly force against a black person; a majority of whites say race is not a factor in a police officer’s decision to use force.”
The racial divide.
Flip Ferguson. Flip history. Imagine yourself in chains. The back of the bus. Walk a black mile.
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To learn more:
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 24, 2014, “St. Louis County police forces often don’t reflect communities,” http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/st-louis-county-police-forces-often-don-t-reflect-communities/article_a29dc3e4-91bb-5cf5-9b30-9ebb95c5e1c6.html
The Daily Beast, August 22, 2014 “Ferguson Feeds Off the Poor: Three Warrants a Year Per Household”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/22/ferguson-s-shameful-legal-shakedown-three-warrants-a-year-per-household.html
The ArchCity Defenders study quoted in The Daily Beast:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vwptqn3mhq9xvy7/ArchCity Defenders Municipal Courts Whitepaper.pdf
“Clients reported being jailed for the inability to pay fines, losing jobs and housing as result of the incarceration, being refused access to the Courts if they were with their children or other family members, and being mistreated by the bailiffs, prosecutors, clerks and judges in the courts. (pp 1-2)
Three courts, Bel-Ridge, Florissant, and Ferguson, were chronic offenders and serve as prime examples of how these practices violate fundamental rights of the poor, undermine public confidence in the judicial system, and create inefficiencies.”
The Economist, August 21, 2014, “The Ferguson Riots: Overkill,”
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21613272-police-missouri-suburb-demonstrate-how-not-quell-riot-overkill
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 23, 2014, “Two St. Louis area police shootings are alike, and not”
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/two-st-louis-area-police-shootings-are-alike-and-not/article_558856ed-2e84-53b7-819e-30f0a65ce11c.html
The New York Times, August 22, 2014, “Poll Shows Broad Divisions Amid Missouri Turmoil”: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/22/us/on-ferguson-unrest-poll-shows-sharp-racial-divide.html?
Rawstory, August 20, 2014, “CNN host: Nat. Guard said ‘you never know’ what Ferguson ‘n*ggers’ are going to do”:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/20/cnn-host-nat-guard-said-you-never-know-what-ferguson-nggers-are-going-to-do/
The New York Times, August 24, 2014, “Darren Wilson Was Low-Profile Officer With Unsettled Early Days”, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/us/darren-wilsons-unremarkable-past-offers-few-clues-into-ferguson-shooting.html
UK Guardian, August 25, 2014, “I’m black, my brother’s white … and he’s a cop who shot a black man on duty,” http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/25/white-brother-police-shot-black-man