Don't scapegoat individuals for racism

A column about the racist frat song at the University of Oklahoma and the Dept. of Justice report on Ferguson:

Race, outrage and white male excuses: It’s much worse than just one frat boy

Let's celebrate bad-ass responses to outrages in Ferguson and Oklahoma. But don't confuse them with real victories

By Arthur ChuParker Rice is a 19-year-old freshman. The fact that he chose to lead the chant speaks volumes to his personal character, yes, but the fact that others joined in speaks to the culture surrounding him. There’s no way he wrote that chant himself and then, spontaneously, a formerly non-racist and accepting frat suddenly decided to take it up en masse just for fun.

Moreover, it seems incredibly unlikely to me that the Greek scene as a whole is totally non-racist and accepting and one single bad apple frat decides, all by itself, to suddenly take up a horrifically racist stance against everything the school stands for, no matter how eloquently President Boren claims it goes against everything the school stands for. Which is why it’s to his credit that Boren isn’t just expelling Rice and his friend Levi Pettit but has formally cut ties with the entire fraternity, and says he’s looking into taking further action to reform the Greek system.

John Shaw is a municipal bureaucrat. He says he’s not some kind of mustache-twirling Grand Wizard of the Klan, and I believe it. I even believe him when he says he and his colleague Judge Bhad no conscious racist intentions–and I certainly don’t believe that the problems in Ferguson suddenly started when he took his position eight years ago.

The overwhelming theme of the DoJ report is that Ferguson’s bureaucracy was hungry for revenue and Shaw and his colleagues were simply trying to meet that need. The logic of capitalism and racism, as always, intertwine–money must be accumulated one way or another, and in a racist society it turns out the easiest people to put the squeeze on is black citizens, nothing personal. And if having to do a job that–for simple economic reasons–is a racist job starts to attract cops and clerks who are overtly, consciously, virulently racist, well, that too is just supply and demand at work.A bunch of fratboys don’t develop an oral tradition of singing racist chants laughing about lynchings without racism being deeply woven into the culture of our fraternities, our schools, our whole society. A single small town doesn’t systematically put its black citizens under apartheid to generate revenue–a town’s officials don’t feel safe joking about its black citizens as subhuman–without racism being deeply woven into our politics, our legal system, our methods of policing.

The urge to find a single scapegoat after a tragedy is overwhelming. And unlike the common use of the term “scapegoat” I’m not saying these people don’t deserve what they get–just as Michael Brown (the other one) deserved to be raked over the coals for the aftermath of Katrina, just as the buck stopped with George W. Bush for the war in Iraq, just as in most complex human tragedies there nonetheless is a specific person who, through negligence or malice, pulled the fatal trigger.

But it’s ridiculous to say that our history would’ve been completely changed if Bush had died or been incapacitated after choking on that pretzel in 2002–a Cheney presidency would’ve been no different. It wasn’t him, it was the apparatus around him, it was the cultural and political and legal mechanisms that got him elected in the first place, and if you replaced him with another guy from the list of Republican candidates he got drawn from it’s hard to see how history would change.

Just as if Parker Rice hadn’t pledged SAE we’d see that same video only with some other fratboy douche leading the chant. Just as if Darren Wilson hadn’t been on patrol that day some other cop would, eventually, have shot some other unarmed teenager (as we can tell by the number of other atrocities that have happened in the past few years across the country). Just as if Capt. Henke and Sgt. Mudd had never been hired there’d be two other civil servants comparing the President to a chimpanzee on government e-mail servers somewhere–and there probably are now, even as I write this.Comment:  For more on the subject, see The Science of Racism and Our Broken Justice System.

The science of racism

The Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men

And how to reform our bigoted brains.

By Chris MooneyI WENT TO NYU to learn what psychologists could tell me about racial prejudice in the wake of the shooting of a black teenager, Michael Brown, by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri. We may never really know the exact sequence of events and assumptions that led to the moment when Brown, unarmed and, according to witnesses, with his hands in the air, was shot multiple times. But the incident is the latest embodiment of America's racial paradox: On the one hand, overt expressions of prejudice have grown markedly less common than they were in the Archie Bunker era. We elected, and reelected, a black president. In many parts of the country, hardly anyone bats an eye at interracial relationships. Most people do not consider racial hostility acceptable. That's why it was so shocking when Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling was caught telling his girlfriend not to bring black people to games—and why those comments led the NBA to ban Sterling for life. And yet, the killings of Michael Brown, Jordan Davis, Renisha McBride, Trayvon Martin, and so many others remind us that we are far from a prejudice-free society.

Science offers an explanation for this paradox—albeit a very uncomfortable one. An impressive body of psychological research suggests that the men who killed Brown and Martin need not have been conscious, overt racists to do what they did (though they may have been). The same goes for the crowds that flock to support the shooter each time these tragedies become public, or the birthers whose racially tinged conspiracy theories paint President Obama as a usurper. These people who voice mind-boggling opinions while swearing they're not racist at all—they make sense to science, because the paradigm for understanding prejudice has evolved. There "doesn't need to be intent, doesn't need to be desire; there could even be desire in the opposite direction," explains University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek, a prominent IAT researcher. "But biased results can still occur."

The IAT is the most famous demonstration of this reality, but it's just one of many similar tools. Through them, psychologists have chased prejudice back to its lair—the human brain.

We're not born with racial prejudices. We may never even have been "taught" them. Rather, explains Nosek, prejudice draws on "many of the same tools that help our minds figure out what's good and what's bad." In evolutionary terms, it's efficient to quickly classify a grizzly bear as "dangerous." The trouble comes when the brain uses similar processes to form negative views about groups of people.Comment:  For more on racism, see A Hunger to Deny Racism, White Privilege = "Willful Blindness," and Why Your Intentions Don't Matter.

"Hands up, don't shoot!"

Some tweets on the connections between the different forms of violence perpetuated in America:

"Hands Up, Don't Shoot" chant of Ferguson protesters was the same message conveyed by "peace chiefs" at Sand Creek. http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_27069460/link-between-sand-creek-ferguson

Blacks say, "Hands up, don't shoot!" Muslims say, "Hands up, don't torture!" Natives say, "Hands up, don't massacre!" #TortureReport #USA

Women to angry spouses, frat boys, athletes, cops, soldiers, etc.: "Hands up, don't rape!" #HandsUpDontRape #rapeculture #waronwomen

The Geneva Conventions on torture are like Indian treaties--i.e., guidelines to be followed except when they're inconvenient. #TortureReport

Comment:  For more on Ferguson, see Our Broken Justice System and Grand Juries Won't Indict Killer Cops.

Our broken justice system

Why Is America's Sense of Black Humanity So Skewed?

There is a real disconnect between what white people know and what black people know in this country.

By Brittney CooperUnfortunately, key players in this case, buttressed by a particularly clueless segment of white America, actually seemed to believe that a grand jury decision in favor of Darren Wilson would simply be accepted by black America. The outrage from the St. Louis Police Officers hearkens back to an era when black people were expected to willingly endure white people’s routine horrific acts and humiliations committed against them. That this decision feels like a travesty worthy of literally stopping traffic in locales all over the country is an affective response that seems to escape white notice, an apparent casualty of the well-documented racial empathy gap, among white Americans. Though many white people do understand the racial magnitude of last week’s devastating decision—the sense it offers that black people, and in particular young black men, are simply sheep for the slaughter—far too many white people do not understand this.

Among those with more insidious and overt racial animus, the belief is that we should simply “lie down and take it.” Among well-meaning, reasonable white people, the view is more anodyne. These people implored us to wait for justice to take its course, for the evidence to be evaluated, the witnesses to testify, a decision to be made.

There is a real disconnect between what white people know and what black people know in this country. Philosophers and political theorists understand these as questions of “epistemology,” wherein they consider how social conditions shape our particular standpoint, and ability to apprehend the things that are supposed to be apparent to us. “How do we know what we know?” is one way we might ask the question.

It is deeply apparent to most black people that the legal proceedings in the grand jury deliberations were a farce. Whether we consider the deliberate incorrect instructions given to jurors by the prosecutor, or the refusal to challenge the incendiary and inhumane characterizations of Michael Brown as “it,” “demon” and “hulk,” black people know that a lie has been perpetrated.

Too many white people lie comfortably in bed each night with the illusion that justice was served, that the system worked, that the evidence vindicated the view they need to believe—that white men do not deliberately murder black boys for sport in this day and time and get away with it. Most well-meaning white people need to believe this. For me as both teacher of different kinds of epistemology and as a black person, I do not have the luxury of believing this. I do not have the luxury of stepping over the bodies of Eric Garner, John Crawford and Tamir Rice, leaving my unasked questions strewn alongside their lifeless bodies.The American Justice System Is Not Broken

By Albert BurnekoThe American justice system is not broken. This is what the American justice system does. This is what America does.

The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates has written damningly of the American preference for viewing our society's crimes as aberrations—betrayals of some deeper, truer virtue, or departures from some righteous intended path. This is a convenient mythology. If the institutions of white American power taking black lives and then exonerating themselves for it is understood as a failure to live out some more authentic American idea, rather than as the expression of that American idea, then your and my and our lives and lifestyles are distinct from those failures. We can stand over here, and shake our heads at the failures over there, and then return to the familiar business, and everything is OK. Likewise, if the individual police officers who take black lives are just some bad cops doing policework badly, and not good cops doing precisely what America has hired and trained them to do, then white Americans may continue calling the police when black people frighten us, free from moral responsibility for the whole range of possible outcomes.

The murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Sam Shepherd, and countless thousands of others at the hands of American law enforcement are not aberrations, or betrayals, or departures. The acquittals of their killers are not mistakes. There is no virtuous innermost America, sullied or besmirched or shaded by these murders. This is America. It is not broken. It is doing what it does.

America is a serial brutalizer of black and brown people. Brutalizing them is what it does. It does other things, too, yes, but brutalizing black and brown people is what it has done the most, and with the most zeal, and for the longest. The best argument you can make on behalf of the various systems and infrastructures the country uses against its black and brown citizens—the physical design of its cities, the methods it uses to allocate placement in elite institutions, the way it trains its police to treat citizens like enemy soldiers—might actually just be that they're more restrained than those used against black and brown people abroad. America employs the enforcers of its power to beat, kill, and terrorize, deploys its judiciary to say that that's OK, and has done this more times than anyone can hope to count. This is not a flaw in the design; this is the design.

The real problem in Ferguson, New York and all of America is institutional racism

By Vincent WarrenBlack men are not dying at the hands of (mostly) white cops–nor are those cops being excused from legal responsibility–because of mutual distrust between black and brown people and law enforcement agencies. To suggest so simply, and perhaps deliberately, mistakes the symptom for the disease.

Trust, or lack thereof, is based on lived experience, and it is the actions of law enforcement in communities of color that has eroded black and brown Americans’ trust. To present the situation as mutual distrust not only obscures the specific causes of that distrust–it intimates that everyone is equally responsible for the problem. The call for “conversation” as the solution then reinforces this idea that the legitimate problems with law enforcement vocalized by minority communities are really all just one big misunderstanding.

Our political leaders should not begin to offer solutions for a problem if they won’t even name it: systemic, institutional racism exists in police forces throughout our country.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand,” Frederick Douglass famously said. “Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.”

From the prosecutor and the grand juries in Ferguson and Staten Island to the halls of Congress–where reform ideas like the End Racial Profiling Act or the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act have hit a dead end–and a thousand places in between, our government institutions have been largely unresponsive to demands for real structural reform. Much like the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, grassroots protests in Missouri and New York and across the country–including the hundreds of actions of civil disobedience, bridge and highway shutdowns, and walkouts–are the engines of change, and communities and grassroots organizers are the ones providing the concrete solutions to the problem.We Don’t Need Nice, We Need Justice: Racism and the Moral Blindness of White America

By Tim WiseNice is the enemy of justice because to raise one’s voice against oppression is to be instantly pegged as not nice, as disruptive, as unruly, as dangerous. To block traffic, or interfere with the all-important Christmas tree lighting in Rockefeller Center is not nice. To interrupt the symphony orchestra in St. Louis, or the drunken revelry of nice white baseball fans at a Cardinals game is not nice. To signify sympathy for a murdered young man in Ferguson, with even a gesture as simple as raising one’s hands as you come out of the tunnel before the football game is not nice. It is, to some—who would rather just watch black men entertain them with a few nice interceptions—worthy of punishment, or professional discipline. How dare they, say the nice white people who paid good money to see black men play gladiator for the glory of the hometown team.

Nice people change nothing. They never have and they never will. Those who are nice are so invested in their niceness, in their sense of propriety and civility that they rarely raise their voices above a whisper, even in the face of sweltering oppression. Nice white people were the ones who didn’t own black folks during the period of enslavement but also didn’t raise their voices against the ones who did. Nice white people are the ones who didn’t spit on sit-in demonstrators but also had no problem spending money with businesses that had remained segregated all those years.

To be nice is to have an emotional stake in the prevention of one’s own pain. Nice people don’t like to look at the ugly. It’s upsetting, and most of all because it puts us on the hook and calls forth our humanity to actually put an end to that pain. Precisely because most people are good and decent and nice, they turn away from any evidence that the world, and their society is less decent than the sum total of its citizenry. It’s too much to take in. This is the irony of niceness: unlike persons with antisocial personalities or severe sociopathy who quite enjoy pain and suffering and often seek to cause it, those who are nice are so wrapped up in rainbows and lollipops as to make gazing upon the truth a bridge too far.

Nice people do not protest, angry people do; and right now, I’d trade every nice white person about whom Chris Rock was speaking for 100,000 angry ones. But not those who are angry at black folks or brown immigrants or taxes—we have more than enough of them. I mean 100,000 who are angry enough at a system of racial injustice to throw ourselves upon the gears of the machine, as Mario Savio once insisted. A hundred thousand angry enough to join with our brothers and sisters of color and say enough. A hundred thousand who are tired of silence, tired of collaboration, tired of nice, and ready for justice.Comment:  For more on Ferguson, see Grand Juries Won't Indict Killer Cops and Police Prejudiced Against Blacks.

Grand juries won't indict killer cops

Here's what people are saying about the Eric Garner case: in which another grand jury failed to indict another white cop for killing another black man.

Maneater (@kim_tastiic)
"What does that say about black life when we get murdered on camera and still get no justice?" ‪#‎EricGarner‬

jelani cobb (@jelani9)
As a matter of record, is there anything — ANYTHING — that law enforcement can do to a black person that qualifies as a crime? ‪#‎EricGarner‬

Tim Wise (@timjacobwise)
There is no killing of a black man by police that white folks won't rationalize/seek to justify... Somebody show me ONE case where I'm wrong

Systemic bias against blacks

Why It’s Impossible to Indict a Cop

It’s not just Ferguson—here’s how the system protects police.

By Chase MadarChapter 563 of the Missouri Revised Statutes grants a lot of discretion to officers of the law to wield deadly force, to the horror of many observers swooping in to the Ferguson story. The statute authorizes deadly force “in effecting an arrest or in preventing an escape from custody” if the officer “reasonably believes” it is necessary in order to “effect the arrest and also reasonably believes that the person to be arrested has committed or attempted to commit a felony…or may otherwise endanger life or inflict serious physical injury unless arrested without delay.”

But this law is not an outlier, and is fully in sync with Supreme Court jurisprudence. The legal standard authorizing deadly force is something called “objective reasonableness.”

This standard originates in the 1985 case of Tennessee v. Garner, which appeared at first to tighten restrictions on the police use of deadly force. The case involved a Memphis cop, Elton Hymon, who shot dead one Edward Garner: 15 years old, black and unarmed. Garner had just burgled a house, grabbing a ring and ten bucks. The US Supreme Court ruled that a police officer, henceforth, could use deadly force only if he “has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” The ruling required that the use of force be “objectively reasonable.” How this reasonableness should be determined was established in a 1989 case, Graham v. Connor: severity of the crime, whether the suspect is resisting or trying to escape and above all, whether the suspect posed an immediate threat to the safety of officers or others. All this appeared to restrict police violence—even if, in the end, Officer Hymon was never criminally charged for fatally shooting Edward Garner.

“Objectively reasonable”—what could be wrong with that? But in actual courtroom practice, “objective reasonableness” has become nearly impossible to tell apart from the subjective snap judgments of panic-fueled police officers. American courts universally defer to the law enforcement officer’s own personal assessment of the threat at the time.

The Graham analysis essentially prohibits any second-guessing of the officer’s decision to use deadly force: no hindsight is permitted, and wide latitude is granted to the officer’s account of the situation, even if scientific evidence proves it to be mistaken. Such was the case of Berkeley, Missouri, police officers Robert Piekutowski and Keith Kierzkowski, who in 2000 fatally shot Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley out of fear that the victims’ car was rolling towards them. Forensic investigations established that the car had not in fact lurched towards the officers at the time of the shooting—but this was still not enough for the St. Louis County grand jury to indict the two cops of anything.Why wasn't the cop who killed Eric Garner indicted?

By Amanda TaubWhy was there no indictment in the Eric Garner case? Two words: Police credibility. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that we have two different standards for guilt in the American criminal justice system: civilians get "beyond a reasonable doubt." Police get "beyond any possible doubt, no matter how implausible it may seem."

There is video of Garner's death. It shows NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo wrapping his arm around Garner's neck, and then throwing his entire body weight against it until Garner fell to the ground, choking and gasping that he could not breathe. The NYPD placed an absolute ban on the use of chokeholds in 1993, on the grounds that the technique was too dangerous to use in any circumstance. A New York medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. But that wasn't enough for the grand jury, because Pantaleo told a different story.

Pantaleo spoke before the grand jury for nearly two hours—itself a privilege that most defendants are not afforded. According to the New York Times, Pantaleo testified that he didn’t use a chokehold, but a "wrestling move." Pantaleo also testified that he got off of Garner "as quick as he could." (The video shows him and other NYPD officers piled on top of Garner even after he had fallen to the ground. One officer knelt on Garner's head as he gasped for breath.)

But when faced with the question "who are you gonna believe—the cop, or your own eyes?" the grand jury decided that the answer was "the cop." To them, his testimony outweighed the videos, as well as the testimony of 22 civilian witnesses.

10 Ways the System Is Rigged to Protect Cops Who Kill

Obstacles to accountability exist at every stage of seeking justice.

By Steven RosenfeldLet’s walk though 10 ways the system is predisposed to let NYPD Officer Daniel Panteleo off the hook, just as Darren Wilson, the white Ferguson police officer who shot and killed another unarmed black man, Michael Brown, last week escaped charges by a local grand jury.

1. There is a double standard for charging citizens and police. Everybody knows that police are authorized to use force in ways civilians are not. But if a civilian shoots a person outside his car window—as was the case in Ferguson—you can bet that shooter would be arrested, charged and have to defend his actions in court, David Rudovsky, a civil rights attorney and author on police misconduct told Vox.com. But that is not the case when cops are the shooters, he said, because “police are investigating their own.”

2. This inherent conflict of interest is all over the Garner case. If you watch the July 20 video by Tiasha Allen posted on the New York Times website, you see Garner after he is placed on the sidewalk, face-down, hands tied behind his back. A dozen NYPD officers mill around and act as if nothing is unusual or wrong. Forget that this video shows a dying man’s final hour, and that the NYC medical examiner concluded the chokehold and leaving him on the sidewalk face-down killed him. Look at the cops: this team of officers would include many likely witnesses called before the Staten Island grand jury. “It’s often the police department that is charged with investigating a particular incident, deciding who’s telling the truth, who used force first, and so on and so forth,” Rudovsky said, explaining the first of many conflicts of interest.

3. Then comes the legal framework that protects cops. This is how the law is layered to protect rogue cops. It starts at the very top, as the Nation pointed out, because the standard in a 1985 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that tried to restrict when cops could use deadly force has been twisted by police to defend each other. The court held that deadly force can be used when a police officer “has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” In 1989, the Court tried to be more specific by saying there had to be an immediate threat to their safety or to others. “But in actual courtroom practice, ‘objective reasonableness’ [standard] has become nearly impossible to tell apart from the subjective snap judgments of panic-fueled police officers,” the Nation said, explaining the loophole. “American courts universally defer to the law enforcement officer’s own personal assessment of the threat at the time.”Legal Experts Say Eric Garner Grand Jury Did Exactly What DA Wanted: Nothing

By Christopher RobbinsWhile most legal experts believed that the grand jury did not have enough evidence to prove a murder charge, the grand jury could have charged Pantaleo with manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide.

"In this case, you had videotape, and the videotape is pretty darn clear," Cohen says. "The video showed that the officer engaged in a long-prohibited conduct, a chokehold, and it doesn't seem to make any difference to the jury. And that's because the prosecutor decided that there should be no indictment for any criminal behavior."

Randolph McLaughlin, a law professor at Pace Law School and civil rights attorney, agreed.

"The grand jury is a tool of the prosecutor. At a minimum, it was negligent, it was reckless, it was some level of homicide. Surely they could have indicted this officer on any number of charges and let the public hear, let a trial happen, expose to the light of day what went on here. This man is a public servant, and he committed these acts as a public servant, wearing the uniform of a public servant, and he should be called to account for it."

In a statement, DA Donovan noted that he is barred from disclosing any details surrounding what took place during the grand jury proceeding, but that he petitioned for the information to be released on a court order.

Jeffrey Fagan, a law professor at Columbia who specializes in police accountability and criminal law, says he was "not surprised" by the grand jury's decision.

"It’s politically costly for Dan Donovan to indict a police officer on Staten Island. He can easily shift the political and legal burden to the Department of Justice to decide whether to pursue criminal charges. He’s washed his hands of it."My tweets on the subject:

Proposed training for the NYPD: When a suspect says "I can't breathe," you stop choking him to death. ‪#‎EricGarner‬ ‪#‎HandsUpDontChoke‬

Coming soon: White cop shoots Obama, explains actions. "He looked so big! I thought he had a gun!" Grand jury declines to indict. #Ferguson

For more on Ferguson, see Police Prejudiced Against Blacks and Indians, Blacks Are America's "Others."

Police prejudiced against blacks

With two more black victims of police--Tamir Rice and Eric Garner--joining Michael Brown in the news, let's delve deeper into what's happening. First, whatever could be causing white police to kill young black men?

‘I hate n*ggers. That is all’: 5 Ohio deputies probed for years of racist text messages

By David EdwardsSheriff Plummer said that the deputies sent racial messages on their personal phones between November 2011 and January 2013. Some messages were sent while the men were on duty, and some messages were directed at African-American deputies, he said.

“The N-word was used several times as well as other racial slurs and jokes,” Plummer noted. “Racism will not be tolerated in this office.”

WKEF reported that it had obtained “hundreds of pages of text messages.” One read: “What do apples and black people have in common? They both hang from trees.”

“I hate N*ggers. That is all,” another text message said.

“Very simply put, they’re N*ggers, son,” one deputy wrote.These Comments By Cops on the Eric Garner Decision Will Turn Your Stomach

By Matt AgoristPerhaps only slightly less disturbing than these officers’ callous, racist, and repugnant remarks, is their grammar.

A recurring theme among these LEOs, is calling anyone who disagrees with a cop, a “thug.” In the comment below buddy245 is likely talking about protesters when he says, “chasing around these thugs.”

In perhaps the most disturbing comment from this policeone.com article, user SAPDMAS refers to a group of humans as “ungrateful, spoiled, hateful animals.” Way to show your true colors SAPDMAS.

With cops dehumanizing people in this manner, is it any wonder that they resort to deadly force so quickly?Being a cop showed me just how racist and violent the police are. There’s only one fix.

By Redditt Hudson[I]n 1994, I joined the St. Louis Police Department. I quickly realized how naive I’d been. I was floored by the dysfunctional culture I encountered.

I won’t say all, but many of my peers were deeply racist.

One example: A couple of officers ran a Web site called St. Louis Coptalk, where officers could post about their experience and opinions. At some point during my career, it became so full of racist rants that the site administrator temporarily shut it down. Cops routinely called anyone of color a “thug,” whether they were the victim or just a bystander.

This attitude corrodes the way policing is done.

As a cop, it shouldn’t surprise you that people will curse at you, or be disappointed by your arrival. That’s part of the job. But too many times, officers saw young black and brown men as targets. They would respond with force to even minor offenses. And because cops are rarely held accountable for their actions, they didn’t think too hard about the consequences.Comment:  For more on Ferguson, see Indians, Blacks Are America's "Others" and Wilson's Testimony in Ferguson Shooting.

Indians, blacks are America's "others"

A blogger makes the case for how Native stereotyping relates to shootings, violence, and terrorism:

Ferguson, #ChangeTheName, and White Supremacy Entangled

By Miguel GarciaBoth the movement to fight against offensive native mascotry and the murder of yet another unarmed young black man are connected through “othering” and the dehumanization of people of color. “Othering” can be defined as the concept of creating and maintaining a difference of division between one group of people and another (Said, 1979). This of course is white society and the other, the non-white society.

This creation and maintaining of difference manifest itself in Native Americans portrayed as mascots on football helmets, and young black men seen as “demons” by White police officers. The “other” is not viewed by white society as a human being. The “other” is viewed as non-living, a caricature, a mythical devil or demon.

This dehumanization is a product of White Supremacy and Colonialism. White Supremacy is the political ideology that believes white people (Europeans) are superior over people of color. White supremacy is upheld and reinforced through political, economic, social, cultural, educational, legal, and military systems of power. Colonialism can be defined as the subjugation or domination of a group of people and/or culture over the other through the establishments of settlements in a distant territory.

In the white imagination, Native Americans don’t exist anymore but only as artifacts of the past, in the form of mascots. Not only did European settlers commit the biggest genocide in human history when Columbus landed in 1492, Native Americans never existed in the white psyche to begin with. This Thanksgiving let’s not forget that fairy tale of manifest destiny. European colonial settlers as the great discovery states, discovered a land unoccupied by no one. God had made them the chosen people, who had the right to this uninhibited land. So how would white society even treat Native Americans as humans, when they didn’t exist in the first place?His conclusion:Like the Hottentot Venus human zoos (Blanchard, et. al., 2009) and Buffalo Bills Wild West shows (Maddra, 2006) of the past, Black and Indigenous people are only here for white society’s entertainment. What’s the difference of displaying Black people in cages and Native Americans portrayed as uncivilized savages who had to be tamed by the Cowboy hero Buffalo Bill? There is no difference. They were both seen as not humans. They were “othered.”Comment:  For more on Ferguson, see Black and White Rage in Ferguson and Prosecutor's Bias in Ferguson Shooting.

Black and white rage in Ferguson

Repetitive Motion Disorder: Black Reality and White Denial in America

By Tim WiseI suppose there is no longer much point in debating the facts surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown. First, because Officer Darren Wilson has been cleared by a grand jury, and even the collective brilliance of a thousand bloggers pointing out the glaring inconsistencies in his version of events that August day won’t result in a different outcome. And second, because Wilson's guilt or innocence was always somewhat secondary to the larger issue: namely, the issue of this gigantic national inkblot staring us in the face, and what we see when we look at it--and more to the point, why?

Because it is a kind of racial Rorschach (is it not?) into which each of these cases--not just Brown but all the others, from Trayvon Martin to Sean Bell to Patrick Dorismond to Aswan Watson and beyond--inevitably and without fail morph. That we see such different things when we look upon them must mean something. That so much of white America cannot see the shapes made out so clearly by most of black America cannot be a mere coincidence, nor is it likely an inherent defect in our vision. Rather, it is a socially-constructed astigmatism that blinds so many to the way in which black folks often experience law enforcement.

Not to overdo the medical metaphors, but as with those other cases noted above, so too in this one did a disturbing number of whites manifest something of a repetitive motion disorder--a reflex nearly as automatic as the one that leads so many police (or wanna-be police) to fire their weapons at black men in the first place. It is a reflex to rationalize the event, defend the shooter, trash the dead with blatantly racist rhetoric and imagery, and then deny that the incident or one's own response to it had anything to do with race.And:Reflex: To deny that there's anything at all racial about the way that even black victims of violence--like Brown, like Trayvon Martin, and dozens of others--are often spoken of more judgmentally than even the most horrific of white perpetrators, the latter of whom are regularly referred to as having been nice, and quiet, and smart, and hardly the type to kill a dozen people, or cut them into little pieces, or eat their flesh after storing it in the freezer for several weeks.

And most of all, the reflex to deny that there is anything racial about the lens through which we typically view law enforcement; to deny that being white has shaped our understanding of policing and their actions in places like Ferguson, even as being white has had everything to do with those matters. Racial identity shapes the way we are treated by cops, and as such, shapes the way we are likely to view them. As a general rule, nothing we do will get us shot by law enforcement: not walking around in a big box store with semi-automatic weapons (though standing in one with an air rifle gets you killed if you're black); not assaulting two officers, even in the St. Louis area, a mere five days after Mike Brown was killed; not pointing a loaded weapon at three officers and demanding that they--the police--"drop their fucking guns;" not committing mass murder in a movie theatre before finally being taken alive; not proceeding in the wake of that event to walk around the same town in which it happened carrying a shotgun; and not killing a cop so as to spark a "revolution," and then leading others on a two month chase through the woods before being arrested with only a few scratches.

To white America, in the main, police are the folks who help get our cats out of the tree, or who take us on ride-arounds to show us how gosh-darned exciting it is to be a cop. We experience police most often as helpful, as protectors of our lives and property. But that is not the black experience by and large; and black people know this, however much we don't. The history of law enforcement in America, with regard to black folks, has been one of unremitting oppression. That is neither hyperbole nor opinion, but incontrovertible fact. From slave patrols to overseers to the Black Codes to lynching, it is a fact. From dozens of white-on-black riots that marked the first half of the twentieth century (in which cops participated actively) to Watts to Rodney King to Abner Louima to Amadou Diallo to the railroading of the Central Park 5, it is a fact. From the New Orleans Police Department's killings of Adolph Archie to Henry Glover to the Danziger Bridge shootings there in the wake of Katrina to stop-and-frisk in places like New York, it's a fact. And the fact that white people don't know this history, have never been required to learn it, and can be considered even remotely informed citizens without knowing it, explains a lot about what's wrong with America. Black people have to learn everything about white people just to stay alive. They especially and quite obviously have to know what scares us, what triggers the reptilian part of our brains and convinces us that they intend to do us harm. Meanwhile, we need know nothing whatsoever about them. We don't have to know their history, their experiences, their hopes and dreams, or their fears. And we can go right on being oblivious to all that without consequence. It won't be on the test, so to speak.
Being Black: The Real Indictment in Ferguson and the USA

By William C. AndersonNow that the grand jury has returned with their decision on the extrajudicial killing of Michael Brown, we should be reminded that even though Darren Wilson was not indicted, Blackness was certainly indicted by the grand jury.

Darren Wilson is free and the police continue to be empowered to kill with impunity. Blackness was found guilty yet again, as witnessed by the many Black slain and their stories. The color some of us carry around can exact a death sentence at a moment's notice. Ever since the formation of the world's greatest empire, Black people have been the eternal scapegoat for all that's been wrong. Our blood waters the roots of war.

There is nothing that can be expressed but grief, anger and frustration at the depraved patterns of this consistently immoral farce that calls itself the "criminal justice system." Kill the Black body and then blame the corpse. This happens repeatedly. Anything is a good excuse to kill a Black person. In Michael Brown's case, stolen cigarillos were worth his death. In 12-year-old Tamir Rice's death this week, it was his unmarked toy gun. And recently, Tanesha Anderson's mental illness made her death worth a violent killing in front of her own family. No matter what, the dead Black body is at fault.

The United States was born out of an incident where a Black man was victim blamed for his murder. It was the Black blood and "mad behavior" of Crispus Attucks that led founding father John Adams to defend the beguiled crown when Attucks was the first American shot down leading up to our nation's birthing revolution. What was his defense of the British patrols overzealous policing? Adams uttered words that would cement our ever-present pattern, stating it was the fault of Attucks "whose very looks was enough to terrify any person." Two hundred and forty-four years after the moment that sparked the fight for independence, we are still dealing with this type of thinking.

Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid

Violence works. Nonviolence does too.

By Ta-Nehisi CoatesIn 2008, Barack Obama's task was to capture the presidency of a country which historically has despised the community from which he hails. This was no mean feat. But more importantly, it was not unprecedented. And just as Léon Blum's prime ministership did not lead to a post-anti-Semitic France, Barack Obama's presidency should never have been expected to lead to a post-racist America. As it happens, there is nothing about a congenitally racist country that necessarily prevents an individual leader hailing from the pariah class. The office does not care where the leader originates, so long as the leader ultimately speaks for the state. On Monday night, watching Obama both be black and speak for the state was torturous. One got the sense of a man fatigued by people demanding he say something both eminently profound and only partially true. This must be tiring.

Black people know what cannot be said. What clearly cannot be said is that the events of Ferguson do not begin with Michael Brown lying dead in the street, but with policies set forth by government at every level. What clearly cannot be said is that the people of Ferguson are regularly plundered, as their grandparents were plundered, and generally regarded as a slush-fund for the government that has pledged to protect them. What clearly cannot be said is the idea of superhuman black men who "bulk up" to run through bullets is not an invention of Darren Wilson, but a staple of American racism.

What clearly cannot be said is that American society's affection for nonviolence is notional. What cannot be said is that American society's admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. increases with distance, that the movement he led was bugged, smeared, harassed, and attacked by the same country that now celebrates him. King had the courage to condemn not merely the violence of blacks, nor the violence of the Klan, but the violence of the American state itself.

What clearly cannot be said is that violence and nonviolence are tools, and that violence—like nonviolence—sometimes works. "Property damage and looting impede social progress," Jonathan Chait wrote Tuesday. He delivered this sentence with unearned authority. Taken together, property damage and looting have been the most effective tools of social progress for white people in America. They describe everything from enslavement to Jim Crow laws to lynching to red-lining.

Ferguson isn’t about black rage against cops. It’s white rage against progress.

By Carol AndersonNow, under the guise of protecting the sanctity of the ballot box, conservatives have devised measures—such as photo ID requirements—to block African Americans’ access to the polls. A joint report by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the NAACP emphasized that the ID requirements would adversely affect more than 6 million African American voters. (Twenty-five percent of black Americans lack a government-issued photo ID, the report noted, compared with only 8 percent of white Americans.) The Supreme Court sanctioned this discrimination in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act and opened the door to 21st-century versions of 19th-century literacy tests and poll taxes.

The economic devastation of the Great Recession also shows African Americans under siege. The foreclosure crisis hit black Americans harder than any other group in the United States. A 2013 report by researchers at Brandeis University calculated that “half the collective wealth of African-American families was stripped away during the Great Recession,” in large part because of the impact on home equity. In the process, the wealth gap between blacks and whites grew: Right before the recession, white Americans had four times more wealth than black Americans, on average; by 2010, the gap had increased to six times. This was a targeted hit. Communities of color were far more likely to have riskier, higher-interest-rate loans than white communities, with good credit scores often making no difference.

Add to this the tea party movement’s assault on so-called Big Government, which despite the sanitized language of fiscal responsibility constitutes an attack on African American jobs. Public-sector employment, where there is less discrimination in hiring and pay, has traditionally been an important venue for creating a black middle class.

So when you think of Ferguson, don’t just think of black resentment at a criminal justice system that allows a white police officer to put six bullets into an unarmed black teen. Consider the economic dislocation of black America. Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin interacted, thus transforming a 17-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun becomes a victim. Remember the assault on the Voting Rights Act. Look at Connick v. Thompson, a partisan 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2011 that ruled it was legal for a city prosecutor’s staff to hide evidence that exonerated a black man who was rotting on death row for 14years. And think of a recent study by Stanford University psychology researchers concluding that, when white people were told that black Americans are incarcerated in numbers far beyond their proportion of the population, “they reported being more afraid of crime and more likely to support the kinds of punitive policies that exacerbate the racial disparities,” such as three-strikes or stop-and-frisk laws.

Only then does Ferguson make sense. It’s about white rage.

The Right’s Vile Ferguson Ploy: Why They Really Want to Focus on the Riots

Supporters of Darren Wilson and apologists for Ferguson officials are desperate to change the subject.

By Elias Isquith[W]hile some of the biggest names out there fell for the trick, focusing on the small number of rioters instead of Wilson’s verdict, most editors understood that the controversy in Ferguson remains what it’s always been: A jarring reminder that the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of universal human equality (the “promissory note,” as Martin Luther King Jr. once called it) remains, for millions of Americans, a debt unpaid.

There’s a lesson here, one that those outraged by what’s happened this year in Ferguson—and happens countless times throughout America, each and every day—should keep in mind as they contribute to our amorphous yet powerful national conversation. We must not allow supporters of the Wilson verdict to distract us by making this a conversation about rioting or poverty or race. That’s not to say we should condone the riots; and it’s not to say we should avoid subjects that involve issues of race and poverty. What it means instead is keeping in mind that riots are nothing new, that the unique struggles of the African-American community can’t be simply attributed to poverty, and that discussions of “race” that aren’t linked with specific policy changes often result in little more than frivolous declarations of privilege.

If we can combat the dual influences of a Ferguson elite that wants national attention to drift elsewhere; and a national media that dislikes policy and favors more watchable, clickable, shareable and fundamentally empty manifestations of the culture war—if we can do that, there’s hope that even though the killing of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson will always be an obscenity, it won’t have been entirely in vain. Let’s ignore those in American society who would rather debate the merits of trashing a bodega than the killing of an unarmed man, and let’s not listen to those who would use this opportunity to relitigate the civil rights movement, the Rodney King riots or the Trayvon Martin case. Let’s honor the wishes of Michael Brown’s parents and decline to “just make noise” in favor of making “a difference.”

How to define that difference—whether through body cameras on police, constraining the power of prosecutors, mandating that police departments reflect the communities they serve, etc.—is the debate we need to have right now. The culture war can wait.Also:

America’s toxic race rule: Why Ferguson protests revive the ugly “twice as good” myth

Comment:  For more on Ferguson, see Prosecutor's Bias in Ferguson Shooting and Wilson's Testimony in Ferguson Shooting.

Prosecutor's bias in Ferguson shooting

The Day After the Verdict: Is This a Joke?

By LizLike many others, I have been asking this question for months.

First, back in August, when news outlets reported that Bob McCulloch, the prosecutor for St. Louis County, had a long history of siding with the police; that his father, a St. Louis cop, was killed on the job by a black man; that his brother, uncle, and cousin were cops as well; that his mother had worked as a clerk in police headquarters; that he himself had wanted to be a cop until one of his legs was amputated in high school. His office would be responsible for presenting the case of Darren Wilson, a Ferguson cop who shot and killed Michael Brown, before a grand jury.

Is this a joke?

And then when McCulloch said he would let the jury of 12 civilians figure out what charge to bring, if any, instead of making a case for a specific charge, as prosecutors usually do. And instead of selecting a few key witnesses and experts to testify, he would give them “every last scrap of evidence”—essentially drowning them information that they did not have the skills to parse. As former federal prosecutor Alex Little told Vox, “So when a District Attorney says, in effect, ‘we’ll present the evidence and let the grand jury decide,’ that’s malarkey. If he takes that approach, then he’s already decided to abdicate his role in the process as an advocate for justice. At that point, there’s no longer a prosecutor in the room guiding the grand jurors, and—more importantly—no state official acting on behalf of the victim, Michael Brown.”

Is this a joke?

Everything the Darren Wilson grand jury got wrong: The lies, errors and mistruths that let Michael Brown’s killer off the hook

The prosecutor's document dump was designed for transparency. It shows how transparently flawed the process was

By Paul Rosenberg[A]uthor, attorney and NBC analyst Lisa Bloom did the best job of zeroing in on precisely how the grand jury process had failed in a number of appearances on MSNBC the day after McCulloch’s announcement. In a virtual replay of the Trayvon Martin case, subject of her book Suspicion Nation, the prosecutors simply dropped the ball and did not do their jobs.

“The biggest thing that jumps out is prosecutors who aren’t prosecuting,” Bloom said, “prosecutors who let the target of the investigation come in, in a very friendly, relaxed way, and simply tell the story. There is absolutely zero cross-examination. Cross-examination is the hallmark of our system, it’s the crucible of truth. And I don’t say that to use flowery language. That’s how we get at the truth.”

Before she read the transcripts, Bloom noted, “I suspected that he wasn’t cross-examined, instead he was just allowed to talk in a narrative and tell a story and in fact, that’s exactly what happened,” which is a lawyer’s way of saying what the woman in Starbucks told Zach Roth—the prosecutors were treating Wilson like he was their witness, helping them make their case against the accused—Michael Brown. They were not treating him like a suspect or defendant, or even a witness for the other side. They were treating him like one of their own—which, of course, is exactly what he was. And that’s the basic problem, in a nutshell.

While McCulloch had gone out of his way to paint all the witnesses against Wilson as unreliable, offering confused and contradictory testimony, Bloom zeroed in on the most obvious contradiction provided by Wilson himself. “Darren Wilson, as you can see in these pictures, doesn’t have any obvious injuries, maybe, if you look really closely, a tiny bit of pinkness on his face,” Bloom said. “That is completely inconsistent with his story that Mike Brown, with full force, he says, punched him twice, solidly in the face—big, strong Mike Brown. Inconsistent with his injuries, he’s not cross-examined about that, or about anything else.”

That was hardly the only example Bloom cited on air that day. “There are so many parts of that transcript that jumped out at me as a trial lawyer that I would want to cross examine him about if I were the prosecutor,” Bloom said.
Justice Scalia Explains What Was Wrong With The Ferguson Grand Jury

By Judd LegumJustice Antonin Scalia, in the 1992 Supreme Court case of United States v. Williams, explained what the role of a grand jury has been for hundreds of years.It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. Respublica v. Shaffer, 1 Dall. 236 (O. T. Phila. 1788); see also F. Wharton, Criminal Pleading and Practice § 360, pp. 248-249 (8th ed. 1880). As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.This passage was first highlighted by attorney Ian Samuel, a former clerk to Justice Scalia.

In contrast, McCulloch allowed Wilson to testify for hours before the grand jury and presented them with every scrap of exculpatory evidence available. In his press conference, McCulloch said that the grand jury did not indict because eyewitness testimony that established Wilson was acting in self-defense was contradicted by other exculpatory evidence. What McCulloch didn’t say is that he was under no obligation to present such evidence to the grand jury. The only reason one would present such evidence is to reduce the chances that the grand jury would indict Darren Wilson.Experts Blast Ferguson Prosecutor’s Press Conference, Legal Strategy



More evidence of mistakes

Failing to indict someone is incredibly rare:

It’s Incredibly Rare For A Grand Jury To Do What Ferguson’s Just Did

The police as well as the prosecutor handled the Brown case badly:

Ferguson Grand Jury Evidence Reveals Mistakes, Holes In Investigation

More thoughts on what the outcome says about our flawed and biased justice system:

“Something is very, very wrong”: Why Ferguson exposes our system of justice

White supremacy lives on: Ferguson decision confirms absence of legal and moral justice

Comment:  For more on Ferguson, see Wilson's Testimony in Ferguson Shooting and Killing Blacks = "Perfect Crime."

Wilson's testimony in Ferguson shooting

Today we learned the grand jury decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown in the Ferguson case. This outcome raises many questions about racism and bias in our legal system. These questions apply to Indians and other minorities as well as blacks, so they're worth examining at length.

First, some postings on Wilson's testimony to the grand jury.

What do the newly released witness statements tell us about the Michael Brown shooting?

By Laura Santhanam and Vanessa DennisHere’s a breakdown of the data we found:

More than 50 percent of the witness statements said that Michael Brown held his hands up when Darren Wilson shot him. (16 out of 29 such statements)

Only five witness statements said that Brown reached toward his waist during the confrontation leading up to Wilson shooting him to death.

More than half of the witness statements said that Brown was running away from Wilson when the police officer opened fire on the 18-year-old, while fewer than one-fifth of such statements indicated that was not the case.

Making Sense of Darren Wilson's Story

By Josh MarshallI went into Monday uncertain whether Michael Brown's killing was murder or a legally (if not morally) justified shooting into which the rage and righteous indignation over generations of police killings of black men--continuing right up to today--was being poured. After reading Wilson's testimony, I felt pretty confident that Wilson was a liar--at least about critical elements of his story.

That was my first reaction. The second was tied to the imagery Wilson used to describe Brown and the intense fear he recalled feeling during the minute or two when he and Brown's life intersected.

First, not believing Wilson.

I'm going to set aside all the questions about just how far apart Wilson and Brown were when the fatal shooting occurred, the angle of Brown's body, whether his hands were up. Lots of people have parsed the evidence on that a lot more closely. Those points are technical and accounts are conflicting.

It's Wilson's description of how the incident began that just does not ring true. To believe Wilson, you have to believe that Brown, an 18 year old, is stopped by a police officer on a street in broad daylight. The police officer is armed. He's in an SUV. And Brown's immediate reaction is to begun screaming and cursing him, physically attacking him and before long literally daring him to shoot him.Wilson's version of events simply doesn't sound credible. It's too over-the-top. It sounds like it's out of a movie. It sounds like the far-fetched version of events you'd tell to explain or justify what was at best a terribly handled situation.

Put it another way, I can see a lot of ways that this could have started. And it could have been driven by Brown's actions. I just don't buy this maximal account. It's not credible. At best it's gilding the lily and more. The fatal shooting that happened a few moments later could have been justified or not justified depending on what happened after this confrontation in the car. But Wilson's claims about how the confrontation began strike me as so unbelievable that it gives me little reason to believe anything else he said about what happened later.‘Fanciful and not credible’: CNN legal analyst destroys Darren Wilson’s testimony

By David Edwards“It appeared to be … very fanciful,” Hostin said. “When a prosecutor has a prospective target, a suspect, a defendant—a prospective defendant—inside of the grand jury, that’s the prosecutor’s chance to cross-examine that person. These prosecutors treated Darren Wilson with such kid gloves.”

“Their questions were all softballs, he wasn’t challenged, he wasn’t pressed,” she continued. “It was just unbelievable to me the way they treated him in front of that grand jury.”

Hostin pointed out that Wilson was never required to provide a statement to the police, meaning he had a month to think about his testimony, and prosecutors had nothing to compare it to.

“He talks about Michael Brown reaching into his waistband,” the CNN analyst noted. “Yet when one of the grand jurors asked him whether or not Michael Brown had a gun, he says, ‘I didn’t really think about that.’”

“He talks about this aggression from the very beginning, which seems odd,” Hostin pointed out. “He talks about being hit so forcefully two time he thought the next hit would be fatal. Yet you look at his injuries, they don’t seem to be consistent with someone 6-foot-6, 300 pounds punching you with full force.”

“There are just so many discrepancies with his testimony.”

The "giant Negro" stereotype

One aspect of Darren Wilson's testimony against Michael Brown was especially telling:

The terrifying racial stereotypes laced through Darren Wilson's testimony

By Lauren Williams[N]ow that a grand jury has declined to indict Wilson in Brown's death, and St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch has made publicly available all of the evidence presented to jurors, the picture has become clear. We have Wilson's version of the truth, and it's the version that will doubtless be codified as the account of record: Brown was no gentle giant. He was a "giant negro."

The Ferguson story is entirely about race

It's imprecise to call race the subtext of this story or an underlying complication. It defines it. Race has woven its way through every aspect of the drama, from the shooting of a black teen by a white officer, to the glaring racial disparities in the St. Louis suburb at the center of the incident, to the protesters' demands that the criminal justice system recognize that "black lives matter."

Although the demonstrators have been explicit, this theme of racism doesn't have to be spelled out to be understood clearly and painfully. Reading Wilson's characterization of Brown in transcripts from his interview with detectives and his grand jury testimony is like taking a master class in the gross racial fear-mongering that has pervaded our country for centuries.

Darren Wilson's Michael Brown

Throughout his testimony and post-shooting interview with detectives, Wilson emphasized the size disparity between him and Brown. He tells detectives, "never at any point did I have control of him. I mean … he manipulated me, while I was in the vehicle, completely."

Wilson, who testified that he is 6'4 and around 210 lbs, told the grand jury that when he tried to grab Brown, "the only way to describe it is that I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan." At one point, he said Brown looked like a "demon." He also expressed concern that Brown could have possibly killed him with a punch to the face.Darren Wilson’s testimony: Michael Brown looked ‘like a demon,’ was as big as Hulk Hogan

Comment:  For more on Ferguson, see Killing Blacks = "Perfect Crime" and White Privilege = "Willful Blindness."

Below:  More of the racist attitudes that led Wilson to confront and shoot Brown.

Killing blacks = "perfect crime"

In defense of black rage: Michael Brown, police and the American dream

I don't support the looting in Ferguson, Missouri. But I'm also tired of "turning the other cheek" and forgiving

By Brittney CooperI believe that racism exists in the inexplicable sense of fear, unsafety and gnawing anxiety that white people, be they officers with guns or just general folks moving about their lives, have when they encounter black people. I believe racism exists in that sense of mistrust, the extra precautions white people take when they encounter black people. I believe all these emotions have emerged from a lifetime of media consumption subtly communicating that black people are criminal, a lifetime of seeing most people in power look just like you, a lifetime of being the majority population. And I believe this subconscious sense of having lost control (of the universe) exists for white people, at a heightened level since the election of Barack Obama and the continued explosion of the non-white population.

The irony is that black people understand this heightened anxiety. We feel it, too. We study white people. We are taught this as a tool of survival. We know when there is unrest in the souls of white folks. We know that unrest, if not assuaged quickly, will lead to black death. Our suspicions, unlike those of white people, are proven right time and time again.

I speak to this deep psychology of race, not because I am trying to engage in pop psychology but because we live in a country that is so deeply emotionally dishonest about both race and racism. When will we be honest enough to acknowledge that the police have more power than the ordinary citizen? They are supposed to. And with more power comes more responsibility.

Why are police calling the people of Ferguson animals and yelling at them to “bring it”? Because those officers in their riot gear, with their tear gas and dogs, want a justification for slaughter. But inexplicably in that moment we turn our attention to the rioters, the people with less power, but justifiable anger, and say, “You are the problem.” No. A cop killing an unarmed teenager who had his hands in the air is the problem. Anger is a perfectly reasonable response. So is rage.Ferguson Just the Latest in Long Line Of Racist Fueled Tragedies

We are moving backwards because of the persistence of racism and a relaxation of the fight against it.

By Bob HerbertPoverty in America, said Bush, “has roots in a history of racial discrimination which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.” He added, “We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action.”

Anyone who took Bush’s pledge seriously would have ended up disappointed because nothing of the sort happened. The poor black people of New Orleans faded back into the invisibility from which they had come.

It was ever thus: Some tragic development occurs; the media spotlight homes in on black people who had previously been invisible; instant experts weigh in with their pompous, uninformed analyses; and commitments as empty as deflated balloons are made. This time it’s Ferguson, Missouri, in the spotlight. And you can bet the mortgage that this time will be no different.

The precipitating events that cause these periodic national spasms can vary widely—the flooding of New Orleans, the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the beating of Rodney King. But these tragedies all emerge from the same fetid source—the racism embedded in the very foundation of America.

And it’s that racism—stark, in-your-face, never-ending, frequently murderous—that has so many African-Americans so angry and frustrated, so furious, so enraged. Black people all across America, not just in Ferguson, are angry about the killing of Michael Brown. And they remain angry over the killing of Trayvon Martin. And many are seething over the fatal chokehold clamped on the throat of Eric Garner by a cop on Staten Island in New York—a cop who refused to relent even as Garner gasped, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.”

They are angry about all those things, but they are also angry and frustrated about so much more.The 'Perfect Crime' in America Is Killing an Unarmed Black Man and Claiming Self-Defense

By H. A. GoodmanTens of thousands of police officers throughout the nation interact with people on a daily basis and everyone survives these interactions without a ruling of homicide, as in the case of Eric Garner.

That being said, there have been at least five unarmed black men killed in the past month according to The Huffington Post, and when you combine these deaths with the manner in which they've elicited a public divide in perception, one can only come to this conclusion: Killing unarmed black men and claiming self-defense is the perfect crime in today's America.

Why?

The crime of killing someone is now turned into a battle of narratives where the only other person who could challenge the narrative is dead, and millions of people simply believe that the unarmed black man deserved his fate.

The reason for this sad and un-American reality is that once an unarmed black teenager like Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin is no longer breathing, the shooter can simply claim self-defense or get close to a million dollars in support like Darren Wilson. After all, the fact that being unarmed and walking toward a destination doesn't matter in the minds of many people. If he's a "thug" or a black male who allegedly robbed a convenience store (which the Ferguson officer had no way of knowing at the time), then their fate lies in the fact that they possibly used profanity, presented some sort of threat, or gave their shooters a reason to shoot and kill. Even the testimony of witnesses like Rachel Jeantel or Dorian Johnson, refuting self-defense narratives, are meaningless in the minds of many people.Afrophobia, and Proper Negro Stress

By Johnny SilvercloudIt is immensely frustrating living in a false reality that claims everyone is considered equal.

The reason why this is a frustrating existence, is because we have a sizable majority who actually believe that as a reality, and in turn will not listen to your concerns. It’s the allegory if Plato’s Cave. The problem lies in the fact that the majority of the 77.9% are chained in the cave living an illusion while only the majority of the 13.1% are free to understand reality as it exists. In life, the 13.1% suffer a level of undue stress that the 77.9% does not. The majority does not listen to the minority. And the majority who are chained in the cave are the ones who makes all the rules.

I learned to read at an absurdly young age. I also learned how to speak more so from television than my own environment. In turn, I spoke proper beyond those of who made my surroundings. I always been the “smart guy.” I’m not sure how old I was, but I do remember I was in elementary school as a fourth grader when I was fully cognizant of the stereotype of the dangerous black male. Of course, what I did from there was simple; from then on I put forth a consistent effort to NOT fit the bill. I was the bookworm, the smart guy, the brains, the analytical, the inventor, the cerebral, the engineer, the maker, the black and nerdy. Kinda.

What I realized as an adult reflecting on the path I took explicitly, is that at a young age I was fully cognizant of white fear of my skin tone. It’s not a matter of knowing right from wrong, it’s a matter what white America thought of me. From then I knew what Afrophobia was. I was around nine or ten as a fourth grader, and that’s a young age to be thinking of socio-psychological matters if you ask me. In being socially aware since ten years of age, I now realize that I put forth conscious effort to be the “proper negro.”Comment:  For more on the subject, see A Hunger to Deny Racism and White Privilege = "Willful Blindness.

White privilege = "willful blindness"

White privilege: An insidious virus that’s eating America from within

Ferguson offers white people a chance to understand the price of our privilege

By Andrew O'Hehir[T]he most insidious power of white privilege, the albatross effect that makes it so oppressive to white people themselves, is the way it renders itself invisible and clouds the collective mind. It’s like a virus that adapts in order to ensure its own survival and perpetuation, in this case by convincing its host it isn’t there. So we see polls suggesting that large percentages of white Americans believe that racism is not a significant factor in Ferguson or law enforcement in general, that cops are just doing their jobs, and that whatever bad things may have happened once upon a time in our beloved country, they’ve been locked away in the dusty cabinet of history and don’t matter anymore. We passed the Voting Rights Act and exiled the Ku Klux Klan to the margins of society (or at least to websites with really bad graphics). Ergo, white privilege obviously doesn’t exist anymore.

Among the “childish things” we need to put aside, white people, is the idea that America’s tormented racial legacy belongs to the past. You know exactly the attitude I mean: We have twice elected a biracial president and LeBron James and Jay Z are zillionaires, so no more talk of racism, please. In the more paranoid formulation prevalent in the Fox News demographic (but not limited to it), this becomes the idea that the federal government has spent the last 50 years giving away money, housing, education and other “free stuff” to black people who don’t work or pay taxes, while vigorously grinding down the white man. So either the vision of healing and reconciliation conjured up so eloquently by Martin Luther King, Jr. more than 50 years ago has now been fulfilled (and black people need to stop complaining), or America is being not so slowly turned into a gay-Muslim-socialist totalitarian state where every day is Kwanzaa. Both scenarios come up against the nettlesome fact that African-Americans stubbornly persist in being poor, living in disadvantaged circumstances, getting shot by the police for no particular reason and going to prison in large numbers.

This kind of white privilege is a willful blindness, along with a passionate embrace of exactly the kind of aggrievement and victimhood that white people often claim to resent in others. It’s found in Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity, of course, but also among people like hipster über-troll Gavin McInnes, the co-founder of Vice, who wrote a piece not long ago explaining that racism, sexism and homophobia do not actually exist. But I’m not principally talking about Republican ideologues and their hardcore supporters, who have built their power and influence on thinly veiled racism over the past 40 years and barely even bother denying it. There is a much larger population of white Americans, I believe, who feel troubled by what they saw in Ferguson but are unable or unwilling to face the fact that it reflects a recurring historical pattern that has obviously not been exorcised, a pattern of power, privilege and domination in which they are complicit.

Any white person who is being honest can understand this reluctance, and probably any other kind of person too. It’s a lot more comfortable to believe that equal opportunity has been pretty much afforded to all, allowing for some bumps in the road–or to believe that you yourself belong to the unfairly downtrodden and stigmatized group–than to consider the alternatives. It is not comfortable at all for any white American to read the case assembled by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his magisterial reported essay “The Case for Reparations” that American society has not done nearly enough to erase the cultural and historical debt left behind by 250 years of slavery followed by another century-plus of economic discrimination, political suppression, institutionalized theft and straight-up terrorism. “It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear,” Coates writes. “The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.”Why acknowledging white privilege is not surrendering to “white guilt”

Recognizing the historic burden of whiteness is not self-abasement or lame apology. It's the pathway to freedom

By Andrew O'Hehir[I]t’s difficult to summarize the range of counterattacks my article and numerous others provoked over the past couple of weeks. One popular response is to say that white privilege is just a fancy term for conforming to social norms, obeying the law and working hard, and that black people should try it sometime. There is certainly a conservative quadrant of the African-American community that agrees with this, but the whole idea rests on the argument that we live in a fundamentally race-neutral and equal-opportunity society in which everyone makes his own fate. But African-Americans have conspicuously failed to take advantage of this post-racial paradise, a fact that poses an interpretive challenge. This slides, with uncomfortable ease, to the proposition that something must be wrong with “black culture,” or that there’s something innate about people of African ancestry that tends to make them less successful than others in society and vastly more likely to go to prison.

If you believe that no one utters those kinds of overtly racist statements in public anymore, I can show you some things in my inbox and my Twitter feed that will convince you otherwise. But for those who want to resist the white privilege conversation but also want to avoid coming off like Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, who pronounced that “subordination to the superior race” was the “natural and normal condition” of black people, there is another path. Dysfunction in the black community is understood as the inevitable result of five decades of failed liberal social engineering, and white privilege as an ass-covering term of art cooked up for political advantage by race-baiters and libtard journalists. (Like me, I suppose, although I strenuously object to the “lib” part.)

That commenter I mentioned at the outset agreed that the Michael Brown shooting appeared to reflect a historical pattern of police violence against African-Americans, but rejected the term “white privilege” as unhelpful. If the problem is that cops treat whites fairly and blacks unfairly, shouldn’t we be talking about “black disprivilege” and how to amend it, instead of implying that white people should be subjected to police brutality too? Discussions of white privilege, this person went on, never pointed toward practical solutions and only served “to make white people feel weird.”

You get an A for effort, my friend, but I have some news for you: White people already feel weird. There could be no better word for the bitter, angry and divisive internal politics of America’s white majority. Isn’t it weird for a group that has long been the wealthiest sector of society and its dominant cultural force to embrace the status of victimhood it claims to find so offensive in others? Isn’t it weird for white people, despite all their economic, social, cultural and educational advantages, to increasingly see themselves as persecuted and oppressed? The intense and exaggerated response from many whites to my article and others like it was weird too, and perhaps revealing; it went way beyond disagreement into what therapists call abreaction, a release of repressed emotion. Discussions of white privilege have touched an exceptionally sensitive nerve.It’s Not Just the South and Fox News: Liberals Have a White Privilege Problem, Too

By Joseph Heathcott[W]hat dumbfounded me was the outpouring of white anger and resentment. As police, pundits, politicians and their supporters sought control over the narrative of events in Ferguson, they drew from the deep well of moral panic and race hatred that in many ways define our contemporary political landscape. I am not talking about the moronic counter-protests by the Klan, or the impending race war hallucinated by capital-R Racists. I am talking about the insidious language of white privilege—the civil, polite, unconscious adoption by white people of racially normative viewpoints that give us comfort and help explain the world on our terms.

For those of us born with white skin, white privilege is the air we breathe; we don’t even have to think about it. It is a glorious gift we have given to ourselves through the social order we have constructed, from top to bottom and bottom to top. It is the pillage of continents, the enslavement of people, the hatred of dark-skinned “others,” all somehow magically laundered by our commitments to democracy, self-reliance, individualism and the “post-racial, colorblind society.” It is our abject unwillingness to confront our history, to correct the deficits of our memory, to lean against the amnesia of a white story told.

Meanwhile, white privilege is a grand protection racket. It has always paid substantial dividends, both in the short term and over generations, by restricting access to a valuable commodity: white skin. The wage we extract from racial difference keeps us committed to its perpetuation, even if we don’t know (or refuse to believe) that we are so committed. White privilege is a legacy, an inheritance, an account on which we can draw over and over and over again for any advantage, however small. It is the accumulation of racially protected, white-defended land, property, education, goods, institutions, mobility, rights and freedom. It is the ultimate headstart. Rarely do we even know we are drawing on these protected accounts, so ubiquitous and profound is the fund. Wave after wave of immigrants has had to learn this lesson, adopting white privilege and anti-black racism to fit properly into their new country.

But take away the air, and we gasp—we don’t know how to breathe in any other medium. In a paroxysm of fear and pain, we hyperventilate, clutching for a lifeline. Put millions of white people into the same scenario, and you get a great moral panic. In earlier times, the moral panic over race flowed from the raiments of a slave-based republic: the Democratic Party, the Confederacy, the Klan, sundown towns, lynchings and chain gangs. Today this moral panic is exemplified by the Tea Party, the GOP, right-wing media, gun toters at Walmart and “patriots” like Cliven Bundy. And chain gangs. Race itself may have no basis in science, no purchase in differentiating humans genetically, but it is nevertheless a powerful cultural force. Race is the house of many rooms, built by white people for “the world and all those who dwell therein” (Psalms 24:1).

White privilege requires constant vigilance at the borders of identity, constant policing of difference. The frantic call among right-wing pundits to “secure the borders” by erecting walls has its psychic corollary in the maintenance of white supremacy. How could we possibly have a black president? Who are these strange people crossing our borders? How could anyone profess any other belief besides Christianity? Why do my tax dollars go to support those people (meaning dark-skinned residents of inner cities, not corporations and lobbyists and the military)? Meanwhile, we cling to the myth of the post-racial society, where suddenly, somehow we will be judged solely on the content of our character rather than the color of our skin. In this way, “not seeing race” becomes the peculiar privilege of white people who, perhaps unknown to them, see race everywhere always.

Fox News's white privilege problem

Privileged White Guys On Fox News Agree: There's No Such Thing As White Privilege

By Nick WingBill O'Reilly

In his segment, O'Reilly "white-splained" how it was that "African-Americans have a much harder time succeeding in our society than whites do," even when, according to him, engrained racial privilege doesn't exist. It's the fault of black America and its leaders, O'Reilly said.

“Instead of preaching a cultural revolution, the leadership provides excuses for failure. The race hustlers blame white privilege, an unfair society, a terrible country," he said. "So the message is, it’s not your fault if you abandon your children, if you become a substance abuser, if you are a criminal. No, it’s not your fault; it’s society’s fault. That is the big lie that is keeping some African-Americans from reaching their full potential. Until personal responsibility and a cultural change takes place, millions of African-Americans will struggle.”

New York Times columnist Charles Blow responded to this and O'Reilly's other claims in an article on Thursday, charging that the Fox News host's "underlying logic is that blacks are possessed of some form of racial pathology or self-destructive racial impulses, that personal responsibility and systemic inequity are separate issues and not intersecting ones."

Tucker Carlson

In May, Carlson brought on a guest to back up his contention that it's "racist" to claim that white people experience a distinct privilege. His guest was Kurt Schlichter, who at the time had recently written a column boiling down the concept of white privilege to “me being better than you.”

“All of us have worked, all of us have achieved something,” Schlichter claimed, arguing that he had become a partner at a law firm due to his hard work, not his skin color. “That is how we measure character, that’s how we measure what the value of a person is, not some arbitrary category imposed by some ponytailed grad students who have taken too many gender study seminars.”

In their interview, Carlson and Schlichter both appear to misunderstand the concept of white privilege. White people are not expected to feel guilty about their privilege or apologize for it, nor are they expected to credit it as the sole or even most important factor in one's personal successes. But it's outrageous to pretend that race (or class, gender, sexual orientation, etc., for that matter) doesn't play a factor in every person's experience, and that society doesn't offer particular privilege to those who more closely resemble the nation's mostly white power-brokers. Apparently, these Fox News anchors have no problem playing make believe.Bill O’Reilly and White Privilege

By Charles M. BlowNo, Mr. O’Reilly, it is statements like this one that make you the race hustler. The underlying logic is that blacks are possessed of some form of racial pathology or self-destructive racial impulses, that personal responsibility and systemic inequity are separate issues and not intersecting ones.

This is the false dichotomy that chokes to death any real accountability and honesty. Systemic anti-black bias doesn’t dictate personal behavior, but it can certainly influence and inform it. And personal behavior can reinforce people’s belief that their biases are justified. So goes the cycle.

But at the root of it, we can’t expect equality of outcome while acknowledging inequality of environments.

Only a man bathing in privilege would be blind to that.Conservatives demonize minorities

The demonization of Michael Brown is the latest in a long line of attacks against black victims of violence. The most famous case in recent times is, of course, that of Trayvon Martin.

In other words, the responses of O'Reilly et al. to Ferguson are the tip of the iceberg. They're part of the ideological drive to maintain white power and privilege.

Here's a deeper look at what conservatives are "thinking":

Fox News is tearing us apart: Race baiting and divisiveness hits disgusting new low

Night after night, Fox News doubles down on hate. Whether George Zimmerman, Bundy or Ferguson, it just gets worse

By Paul RosenbergTheir only recourse is to insist that it’s not really racism, because folks like Al Sharpton and Barack Obama are the “real racists”—you know, folks who notice race and say something about it.

This was a point made by Kevin Drum the next day (“The Conservative Agenda in the Trayvon Martin Case”). Drum first noted that “A week ago, the worst I could say about right-wing reaction to the Martin case was that conservatives were studiously ignoring it,” but that things had suddenly changed. It wasn’t surprising that conservatives had been silent, he noted, as there was no obvious conservative principle at stake in the shooting of Trayvon Martin:

There’s no special conservative principle at stake that says neighborhood watch captains should be able to shoot anyone who looks suspicious. There’s no special conservative principle at stake that says local police forces should barely even pretend to investigate the circumstances of a shooting. There’s no special conservative principle at stake that says young black men shouldn’t wear hoodies.

And yet, he noted “as Dave Weigel points out today, the conservative media is now defending the shooter, George Zimmerman, with an almost messianic zeal,” most notably working itself up into a frenzy over a faked—even debunked—photograph of Trayvon as gangsta. So, clearly there must be some principle at stake, but what is it? Drum then quotes from an L.A. Times Op-Ed by Jonah Goldberg, explaining that we shouldn’t care about Martin’s death because it was “a statistical outlier”—more blacks are killed by blacks than by any other race. And this brings Drum an epiphany:

Quite so. And that, it turns out, is the conservative principle that’s actually at stake here: convincing us all that traditional racism no longer really exists (just in “pockets,” says Goldberg) and that it’s whites who are the real racial victims in today’s America.