The US Department of Justice released a federal review of Ferguson’s police force on Wednesday revealing the department’s routine practices of racial bias against its black residents — from driving stops and pedestrian searches to numerous arrests and use of force — as well as individual racial bias among officers. [The Justice Department report cleared Ferguson police officer in civil rights probe explaining why it will not pursue federal civil rights charges against Darren Wilson, the white police officer, who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, in Ferguson, last August]
After reviewing nearly 35,000 documents and conducting hundreds of interviews, the DOJ is proving what protesters have been saying all along: St Louis policing is racist. “Indict, convict, send that killer cop to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell!”
This chant, popularised by Ferguson protesters after the horrific shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson, effectively articulated on August 9 what the Department of Justice is finally scheduled to tell the American public nearly seven months later. Due to the resistance of those protesters, there’s been significant media attention centred on the killing of black people by police and vigilantes.
The “post-racial” narrative — proselytised in the aftermath of President Barack Obama’s election by conservatives and liberals alike — is being challenged and countered by the voices of black youth, black women and the black LGBT community. The blood of black children, from Aiyana Stanley-Jones to Tamir Rice, stains dominant notions and narratives of America as a ‘colourblind’ society. Black America is telling a different story about US race relations: one that centralises the horror of police terrorism. As the DOJ report demonstrates, the problem is bigger than Darren Wilson. More than individual bigotry, this movement calls out institutional biases, from broken windows policing in New York to stand your ground laws in Florida.
As important as it is to highlight cop killings, its imperative to know that police brutality does not represent the totality of racialised terror in the US. We must expand the narrative around race in America from one primarily about police brutality to a narrative about anti-black state violence.
We must make connections between schools and prisons, between literacy and criminality, between food deserts and health disparities, and between the bullet that took Mike Brown’s life and the institutional violence that murders the life chances of millions of black girls and boys who, like everyone else, simply want to live. Furthermore, we must recognise that just as this is bigger than Darren Wilson and it is bigger than Ferguson, Missouri. Policing is not a St Louis problem; it’s an American one.
Local and state police departments around the country are violating the civil and human rights of black people and other oppressed communities daily. For example, in Newark, New Jersey, the local police department is currently under investigation by the federal government for systemic misconduct.
In fact, the DOJ conducted an investigation in 2014, which revealed: 75 per cent of stops by the police in the city are unconstitutional; black Newarkers are 2.5 times more likely to be stopped by police; they are 3 times more likely to be stopped and frisked than white residents. Newark may not have a black teenager laid out in the street — left to die by a cop’s bullet — in the last year, but it has laid out plenty of youth on hard prison beds for much longer than four and a half hours, left to die in a system that never intended for them to live in the first place.
We must seek to expand our vision of racial injustice in order sharpen our sight for black freedom. We ought to heed the words of former Attorney General and head of the DOJ, Eric Holder, whose parting advice upon resigning was for Americans to read Malcolm X. If “Mississippi [was] America” for Malcolm’s generation, then Ferguson is Mississippi for Mike Brown’s. More than the sum of its statistics, the DOJ report reveals something else that black people have known and said since the inception of the American project: US policing, like America itself, is fundamentally racist and anti-black.
In this tradition, amid the non-indictment of Darren Wilson, black youth have indicted the system. “The whole damn system is guilty as hell,” protesters continue to cry out from the streets of St Louis to the street corners of Staten Island.
The crisis we face is not a question of good and bad apples, as some suggest. It’s a matter of just and unjust systems. The most insidious forms of racism manifests in institutions, not individuals; in systems, not personal feelings. Institutional racism is the everyday racial violence that kills the majority of the black people whose names we don’t know and stories we don’t tell. Besides, who wants “good apples” anyway, when the whole damn tree is rotten?
We must uproot the tree. We must begin to plant seeds for a new society built on the principles of safety beyond policing, justice beyond prisons, and black life beyond state control.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd, 2015
— Nyle Fort is a Master’s of Divinity candidate at Princeton Theological Seminary.
