The Demon in Darren Wilson's Head

[Ken Burch]

http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/the-demon-in-darren-wilsons-head

In his testimony before the St. Louis County Grand Jury, Darren Wilson said he felt like a five-year-old peering into the face of someone who “looks like a demon” as he wrestled with Michael Brown, the black teen he later shot to death in Ferguson, Missouri.


In other words, Wilson’s eyes perceived an unarmed teenager, but within his head that image was transfigured into a demonic apparition.

The actions of police officers aren’t supposed to be governed by fear. But Darren Wilson’s were. Wilson’s actions, however, weren’t “his actions,” but rather an outcropping of what theologian Sarah Drummond aptly calls “an epigenetic, cellular memory of loss and its resultant need for a scapegoat.”

Michael Brown became the scapegoat for Wilson’s own internalized feelings of powerlessness. Like so many other white people in this society, Wilson viscerally experienced himself as powerless because of a historical truth: for hundreds of years, most European immigrants and their descendents have been used instrumentally by white elites to cement the interlocking racial and economic hierarchies that subjugate most people in this country. In the process, they have lost their ethnic roots and adopted “white” identities defined by fear. It is this core feeling of fear—a mixture of internalized feelings of powerlessness and loss, paired with the conviction that blackness is to blame for these feelings rather than the actual white attacks against them by the white ruling elite—that make up the demon in Darren Wilson’s head.

[Ken Burch]

1. More:

The story of how this demon got into Wilson’s head starts in the 1670 Virginia Assembly, which laid the groundwork for the construction of a legal system in the United States that disempowered most whites and all blacks when declaring it forbidden for “Negroes and Indians” to own Christian (i.e., white) servants. Another key moment in this story is the “Great Compromise” reached during the Philadelphia U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787, which decreed that slaves legally counted as three-fifths of a person for the political purpose of population counts to disenfranchise non-slaveholding white voters. By the nineteenth century, all European immigrants to the United States needed to learn how to become white in order to get and keep their jobs as the North’s new industrial workers—and in succumbing to this process, a bogeyman got into their own heads. It is this same internalized demon that led Darren Wilson to kill Michael Brown.

This master narrative exposes the “surplus powerlessness”—to use Rabbi Michael Lerner’s fine term—that disempowered whites use as an add-on, if you will, to self-destructively increase the social and economic exploitation they fall victim to through the vested financial interests of the white power elite. This is not a conspiracy story but an ongoing American tragedy. The powerless, in short, keep pulling themselves down when others push them down. In this tragic scenario, the use of deadly force against black men, teens, and children by white cops today is the collateral damage to an ongoing attack against whites by their own economic, political, and social systems that render most of them afraid. And for good reason. They live in a country that trashes most whites.

[Ken Burch]

2. And this:

Let us return to Wilson’s testimony before the St. Louis County Grand Jury—the testimony in which he described his fear in the face of someone who “looks like a demon.” When Wilson finally fired off shots, Brown ran away. Wilson pursued, firing more rounds. Brown stopped and turned around, and, then according to Wilson, began “bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face that he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.”

Wilson thus “had to kill him,” he said, to neutralize that aggressive, demonic force. So he shot Brown six times, twice in the head. And only after a bullet entered Brown’s head did Wilson feel he had regained control. Wilson said, “And then when it went into him, the demeanor on his face went blank, the aggression was gone, it was gone, I mean, I knew he stopped, the threat was stopped.” Wilson’s demon was dead.

Clearly, Wilson didn’t like what he felt as he wrestled with “Hulk Hogan”: powerless and afraid. And clearly his mind turned Brown into a demon. Wilson thus killed a young man he thought of as a demon that could not be wounded, handcuffed, and carted off to jail, but must instead be slayed. This is a self-incriminating statement, evidence that could have been used to indict Wilson for unjustifiable manslaughter. But it wasn’t.

Now consider the public statement of Daniel Pantaleo, the Staten Island Police Officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner, an unarmed black man suspected of peddling cigarettes last summer. Pantaleo, like Wilson, said he was afraid. The New York Times quoted him as saying he feared they would crash through a plate glass storefront as they tumbled to the ground. Although the attack on this black man was recorded on the smartphones of eyewitnesses, as were his asthmatic cries of “I can’t breathe,” the police officer was not indicted. His fear, apparently, was deemed reasonable, along with his killer grip.

[Ken Burch]

3. a bit more:

This problem of surplus powerlessness among most whites is a psychological problem that is rooted in a history of white-on-white racial violence: when the mass of European immigrants to the United States lost their political and economic power and their ethnic identities, the elite whites who took these things away from them taught their white victims to blame their losses on black folk.

The “race problem” between the police force and black Americans won’t go away because it’s a deadly ruse. Race talk about the need for more black police officers in black communities, more body cameras on cops, more civilian review boards for police, and more special prosecutors will never solve the core emotional problem. Neither will Al Sharpton’s pleas for the Justice Department to create national guidelines for investigating officers when they use deadly force nor pleas from people like Democratic committeewoman in Ferguson Patricia Bynes for fuller participation in traditional politics. Such talk hides a pervasive political, economic, and social disorder that compromises the emotional integrity of whites who then blame blacks for terrorizing them. The blacks in this white drama are “simply” the scapegoats. Or more precisely, the collateral damage.

The disempowerment inflicted upon whites by other whites in the process of constructing a collective white identity has been almost impossible to understand politically because it began with the slave count. Few American historians write about this racial ruse.

[Hoyt]

4. I remember Wilson sounded quite disturbed when I first read his "5 year old" and "demon"

comments. Doesn't sound like someone who should be a policeman. It's certainly not a healthy view of a Black man, especially if you are patrolling that neighborhood with a gun.

[1step]

5. People who see demons DO belong in uniform

[libodem]

6. Absolutely Profound

This is speaking truth to power!

Man!