I wanted to write this sooner, but I couldn’t sit down and do it without descending into a rage. Here it is now.
I should hope that most of you know this already, but this week, the Ferguson grand jury took the decision not to indict Wilson for shooting and killing Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old unarmed black boy. This means that the jury didn’t even find probable cause that Wilson might, maybe, perhaps have murdered Michael, or at least be guilty of culpable homicide. They felt that there wasn’t enough evidence even to put Wilson on trial for emptying his gun into an unarmed teenager. To put this in perspective, out of 162,000 cases prosecuted in 2010, grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11. ELEVEN. Although these are federal figures and not state ones, it gives you some idea of how unusual this is. There’s a truism oft uttered in the States: A prosecutor could convince a jury to indict a ham sandwich. THAT is how easy it is to secure an indictment.
Here’s another fun fact: to come to a majority decision in a grand jury, 9 of the 12 jury members need to agree. In this jury, there were 3 black members. 3 black members. And 9 white.
Apparently it’s 100% believable that Wilson was sufficiently frightened of an unarmed teenager that he felt it was necessary to shoot him repeatedly at close range. Wilson, who was with his partner, and had mace and a baton, went with a gun. Because he was afraid. Because Michael was black.
Ferguson is on fire. Literally. Protestors marched and rioted and burned and looted. And all anyone in government could say was, ‘Please stay peaceful, please don’t resort to violence’… as they sent in the masked, armed National Guard.
All day before the decision was going to be handed down, all any of the news channels could talk about was ‘the violence’ that would ensue if the decision went the wrong way. There was no discussion of the merits of the case, the death of a kid, the subsequent deaths of other black kids at the hands of the police. No. The question on everybody’s mind was, ‘How will They react.’ They. Them. The threatening, unreasonable black Americans who are being shot and killed at the hands of the State while everyone white carries on as if nothing is happening. Nobody does anything. The system doesn’t help them. The cops certainly don’t protect them. The state seems not to care.
I understand the pleas not to resort to violence, I truly do, but when nothing else works, when the cards are so badly stacked against you, and the system fails again and again and again and again, then what do you do? How do you express your fury? How do you not smash and break and burn? There’s an apt W.E.B. Du Bois quotation appearing ubiquitously on the internet: ‘A system cannot fail those it was never intended to protect.’ And another one, which burns, but is so true: ‘White privilege is being outraged by Ferguson, not terrified.’
Because that’s the message here: black lives don’t matter. Black kids can be shot and killed by the State and nobody bats an eyelash. Black mothers have to teach their kids to be subservient, docile, meek, compliant in order to survive. A friend at law school hailing from Louisiana told me that if he gets stopped by the police, he is quiet, looks straight ahead, doesn’t make sudden movements, keeps his hands visible and on the wheel, because if he doesn’t? ‘Well yeah,’ he said in his beautiful, genteel Louisiana drawl, ‘I’ll be shot.’
Hold on.
When did it become acceptable for people to kill other people, and for that not to matter? Actually, wait. A better question is: why has it not yet become unacceptable? How is it that there has been more outrage from the white majority in the U.S. about the damage to property in Ferguson than the killing of a child?
The applicable hashtag is #BlackLivesMatter. But it’s more than a hashtag. It’s a deep and profound truth that seems to have escaped just about everyone. Black. Lives. Matter. They matter in Ferguson. They matter in Ficksburg. They matter in Marikana.
WAKE UP.
BLACK.
LIVES.
MATTER.
We cannot just continue as if nothing’s happening. We cannot willfully close our eyes and pretend that this is an ‘over reaction’. The death of that child is as bad as the death of any white child. That child, like my eighteen-year-old brother, had a family who loved him, and who now aches with grief, as I would, as you would.
What’s sad is that deep down, nobody expected the grand jury to indict Wilson. But we hoped. We hoped so hard. Because that would be a step in the right direction. Alas, not this time. Not yet.
And why? Because Wilson was afraid. He was terrified of Michael Brown. He saw a black youth and he was afraid, so afraid that he felt that he had to use lethal force. Plenty of people scoff at this – how could he have been so afraid? He wasn’t alone, he was just an inch shorter than Michael, he had mace and baton. But fear of black Americans is something that is so deeply embedded in the White psyche. It’s totally constructed, there’s no basis for it, but it’s there. Arguably the same can be said for white South Africans. What do we do about it?
We held a vigil for Michael Brown at the law school, and for every other young black person killed by the State. We stood in silence for 4.5 minutes because Michael Brown’s body was left lying on the street for 4.5 hours. It was beautiful. It was grief-stricken. It was woven with fury.
