For the sake of Michael Brown

[KamaAina]

The St. Louis American, STL's African American weekly, weighs in.

http://www.stlamerican.com/news/editorials/article_aead72b4-2350-11e4-83a0-001a4bcf887a.html

Most obviously, a police officer killed Michael Brown – in cold blood, according to eyewitnesses. But our sons’ and daughters’ rage at the police started long before Michael Brown and his friend were told to get out of the street on Saturday afternoon by a foul-mouthed Ferguson cop.

In many North County municipalities, it seems police run contests to see how many young black men you can pull over, flaunting the officers’ power and the motorists’ powerlessness. Our young men especially are regularly inconvenienced and humiliated while simply trying to get where they are going. The Missouri Attorney General annually releases a report, which no black person needs to read, that documents appalling disparities in how often black drivers are pulled over and searched, compared to white people, all over the state and the region.

But Michael Brown was not pulled over while driving. He was told to get out of the street while walking. For offering what was initially, according to an eyewitness, the mildest of resistance to a rude and unnecessary police order, this unarmed teen was shot in the middle of the day, and his bullet-riddled body left by police to lay in the street for hours, as if to provide a grisly example.

That did it. That’s what drove people (not just young people) to act out their pent-up rage. That’s what drove people to demonstrate (which is within their rights). That’s what drove people to the candlelight vigil on Sunday. And that’s what drove a few who disregarded the greater good to lash out at what was in front of them. The resulting chaos created an opportunity for looters – many of them, according to reported arrests, not from the immediate area – to smash and grab from what businesses remain.

[frazzled]

1. Amen

Well written editorial.

I try to imagine each day what it would be like to be subject to suspicion, avoidance, and harrassment day in and day out for years, just because of my gender, age, and skin color. And more often than we would like to admit, to die because of it. This is bound to erupt eventually.

I keep thinking back to Henry Louis Gates--probably the most notable African American scholar and intellectual in the US, and quite an upper-crust fellow himself--being arrested for supposedly breaking into his own house. If even someone as tony as that can be suspected of being a miscreant in this country, imagine what a poor, 18-year-old kid in a St. Louis suburb must have to endure.