I Killed Michael Brown
Over the past two months, the town of Ferguson, Missouri, has been a battlefield. Images circulate featuring camouflaged military units armed to the teeth with riot gear, gas masks and armored trucks. Tear gas canisters and racial slurs bleach the air with discrimination. Policemen wearing Stormtrooper costumes fire rubber pellets into a crowd of mostly Afro-American protestors wielding pots, pans, proverbs, and endless reinforcements. The madness began in early August of this year after an officer Darren Wilson slew a teenager named Michael Brown, Jr., and shows no signs of slowing down. Despite the police’s attempts at suppression and the city government’s attempts at appeasement, the demonstrations continue months later. TV voices across the country ceaselessly debate on what the moral of the story should be. Witness reports differ as to the details of what happened, but we know what didn’t happen: We know that Brown was not being arrested, and we know that Wilson was not acting in self defense. We also know that Brown couldn’t have been running away when he was shot, because all six bullets hit him in the front. An 18-year-old boy dies in Missouri, and the question of the day is “Who do we blame?” To the protestors, the answer is obvious: A white police officer named Darren Wilson pulled the trigger. So even if the witness details vary, it doesn’t matter which one you believe. Even if Brown did provoke Wilson, and even if Brown did allegedly rob a C store a few minutes prior (which Wilson couldn’t have known about), neither one of those things is the reason that teen Michael Brown, Jr., is dead. No: To those protesting on the streets, the reason is that men like Darren Wilson are incapable of hiding their contempt for the other race, yet are given badges, handguns and free reign over when to use them. To Professor Sunil Dutta, a veteran police officer, there is a more personal lesson to be learned from this event. His Washington Post article, called “I’m a Cop: If You Don’t Want to Get Hurt, Don’t Challenge Me” is one of those that you feel like you’ve already read just from hearing the title. He even offers this convenient summary a few paragraphs in:
“Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you.”
The rest of the article says much of the same thing: He uses examples from his own experience as a cop to push the point that we cannot always rely on the officer to do the morally right thing. According to Dutta, you, the American citizen, can only guarantee your safety if you play your cards right. The real tragedy is that he’s right. We can talk about our rights and freedoms all day long in any courtroom in America. But in those few minutes when it’s just you and a police officer, he or she is the only one who gets to decide how guilty you are and what your punishment will be. So if you happen to be black, and the cop happens to be racist, Dutta would say the only person who can help you is you, as he will “guarantee that the situation will not become easier if you show your anger and resentment.” He then encourages his readers to take legal action if they believe they were bullied. Voices like Dutta are unpleasant, but necessary for building an accurate picture of what America looks like today. Americans tend to hold our country to a high moral standard. It’s not natural for us to expect our police officers to trample over us at their discretion. And certainly no one wants to suggest that Michael Brown’s death was his own fault; he wasn’t the one holding the gun. When someone with as much power as Wilson had in that situation has a natural distrust of black people, there’s not much that could have been done to prevent what happened. Most of us would like to see a body of law enforcement that can rise above such petty prejudices, and deal with things like provocation in an objective manner. So what can we do to fix this? For starters, it would certainly help to create an environment for police which doesn’t foster racist attitudes. One idea: bring more diversity to the force. Ferguson, MO, is 70% African American, while their police department is 94% white. How is this even possible? Ferguson Mayor James Knowles says it’s because:
“a lot of young African-American people don't want to go into law enforcement. They already have this disconnect with law enforcement, so if we find people who want to go into law enforcement who are African-American we're all over it because we want them to help us bridge the gap."
When we read from Missouri’s own annual “Vehicle Stops Report” that 93% of arrests after car stops were black people, Knowles’ point becomes clear. African-Americans just don’t want to join the police force, because they don’t feel they can trust the police to treat them fairly. The next question, then, is how a majority African American city comes to be policed by a force of fifty white men in the first place. What prevented any of the 14,000 African Americans from becoming police officers a long time ago? As it turns out, Ferguson has historically been a very white city. Between its founding in the 1890’s to as recently as 1990 (according to the 1990 Missouri Census), the majority of the Ferguson population was white by a large margin: In 1990, out of 22,000 residents, 16,000 were white (that’s about 75%). Then, in 2000, the census reported for the first time that a majority of citizens--58%, to be exact--were black. That number has since grown to 70% in 2010. So what happened? Any response would be purely speculative, but it probably has something to do with the fact that next door St. Louis is one of the top 20 fastest gentrifying areas in the U. S. Gentrification is what happens when privileged families start to move into low-cost neighborhoods. They tend to do so in such large volume that the neighborhood’s value goes up. As real estate value goes up, so does the rent, and so do the prices of everything sold in the area. Suddenly, the disenfranchised residents of the area (some of whose families may have been living there for generations), find themselves unable to afford the cost of living there anymore and must find the next cheapest alternative. The trick is that “privileged” usually equates to “white,” while “disenfranchised” is code for “black.” So the theory goes: as large numbers of privileged Caucasians moved into inner-city St. Louis and spent more money, the local mostly-black residents, uprooted by their own poverty, were forced to move to neighboring areas such as Ferguson. Experts on the subject continue to debate the various causes for this phenomenon, which seems to happen all over the country. One of the most popular explanations so far is that when you grow up in a nice neighborhood, living in a not-so-nice neighborhood has some appeal to it; such places become edgy. It’s what happened to Brooklyn: While the rest of the U.S. outside of N.Y.C. had our backs turned, the projects where Jay-Z earned his rep have been replaced with Fedora shops and vegan cafes. It’s where my own cousins -- two young, middle-class German-Americans -- have elected to live and work. Asked what they do for a living, one describes himself as a “freelance film director,” and the other a highly paid computer programmer. But I would never accuse my cousins, or anyone like them, of intentionally disenfranchising African-Americans. They’re both sensible people with a deep love of life. I could even imagine them saying the same things I’m saying now--and that’s the problem. Gentrification is so widespread specifically because nobody who does it realizes when they’re doing it. It may as well be you or me. My mom and I moved houses a lot when I was young, and many times we lived in neighborhoods that used to be poor. That makes me a gentrifier. Because of people like me and my mother and cousins, what we end up with are cities like Ferguson, MO: A mass exodus of over ten thousand people attempting to escape poverty only to find themselves in a neighborhood where racism wears a badge, and all they can do about it is “Just do what I tell you to.” Whether or not there will be riots here is inarguable: Ferguson is a political cartoon brought to life. If anybody had been paying close attention, none of this -- Not Michael Brown’s death, not the riots, and not the authoritarian-regime-like response of the police--would have come as a surprise to anyone. So in response to the killing of Michael Brown, perhaps “Who can we blame?” isn’t the right question to ask. The answer, after all, may as well be anyone who buys a house in St. Louis or Brooklyn, for uprooting people like Brown’s family. Some would perhaps say it’s Brown himself, for not just “going along with it.” It’s Darren Wilson for pulling the trigger; it’s also you, me, and every other more fortunate American for continuing to pretend as if the fact that people of color still can’t find equal footing in our country has nothing to do with us. I killed Michael Brown. In the end, it doesn’t matter who was at fault for Michael Brown’s death. As far as Michael Brown cares, he’s dead. But as far as we should care, he was alive. He was born May 20, 1996, to loving parents Lesley McSpadden and Michael Brown, Sr. He attended Normandy High School, where he was loved by his teachers and his classmates, who called him a “gentle giant.” Michael Brown Jr. liked to rap, and his rapper name was “Big Mike.” Big Mike was six feet four inches tall, and weighed two hundred ninety two pounds. He had dreams of someday running a business, and would have started this past semester at a local technical school, on his way to becoming an engineer. He died two days before his first semester of college, at the hands of several unseen forces, each one indistinguishable from the other and each one less significant and less powerful than Michael Brown, Jr., himself. The week before his death, Michael Brown, Jr., wrote these prophetic words to a friend of his on Facebook: “if i leave this earth today, atleast youll know i care more about others than i do about my damn self”
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification
https://www.census.gov/prod/cen1990/cp1/cp-1-27.pdf
This article was written by Michael Margaritoff. Send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Megan Graham