Watching Ferguson Burn: What Constitutes Appropriate Rebellion?
“This is what it feels like when you feel like you can’t go any lower. I understand the anger, but I’m sad. The way this is going to be told, is these people will seem crazy. That’s the way the narrative will go. But these people are worse than crazy, they’re hopeless at this point. And this is what it looks like when people get to the point of hopelessness.”
— Dr. Stefan Bradley, All In With Chris Hayes, Ferguson, Missouri
Days before the grand jury verdict, the typical Constitution Bozo Outfitter in my mom’s hometown, like so many signs across the south, read, “Pants Up, Don’t Loot.” The admonishment was familiar to anyone following the racial discourse in living memory. Bill “Here, Drink This” Cosby only became more beloved by white America for telling black people their problems began at their belts. The racial equivalent of telling a hippie to get a haircut, it ignores that the rest of the system isn’t rigged against the hippie. It doesn’t matter if a crowd’s pants are down if you pay attention to the man at the dais reading out a miscarriage of justice while the walls go up around them.
Watching the preparations Ferguson, Missouri, made for St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch’s announcement of the grand jury findings in the case of Officer Darren Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown was deeply unsettling. A dismal air of inevitability hung over the event. The Ferguson police had negotiated some terms with protesters, but they still had their police tanks and gas canisters at the ready. Even in Clayton, Missouri, they were putting locks on the fucking mailboxes. That’s how little you could trust these people. You couldn’t trust them with mail. Civic unrest trumps civic failure, and nothing occludes institutional contempt for the citizenry like wanton displays of disrespect for process. This is America: You’re supposed to play by the broken rules until you can fix them, even if they’re fixed beyond correction.
Once McCulloch began speaking, his office and Ferguson’s anodyne preparations took on a note of the sinister. Announcing a “no bill” grand jury vote on an explicit 10-shot killing late at night might been chalked up to the bumbling of an overwhelmed office during the day, but later it seemed almost ideal for the purposes of impeaching protester backlash by having as many pissed off people off from work with nothing to do but be on the street. A target-rich environment of institutional excuses. All those weeks of leaked grand jury details — optimistically written up by the media as tempering details intended to manage expectations — instead seemed like prep. Rather than letting off steam slowly, it felt like stoking the fire.
The gall of McCulloch’s comments only emphasized the notion that the worst was being planned for because the worst was being engendered. He began by condemning social media and 24-hour media for listening to some eyewitnesses and broadcasting incomplete details — as if the outrage here stemmed from citizens drawing attention to their outrage, not a white cop gunning down an unarmed black youth over jaywalking with rolling papers. It was all too redolent of the right-wing playbook that says, “The real racist is someone who sees racism when I don’t,” only tweaked to, “The real outrage was all these expressions of outrage without my consent.”