Ferguson aftermath more media event than anything
Even as the president, live from the White House, said “there is inevitably going to some negative reaction and it will make for good TV,” the news channels split their screens to show police shooting tear gas canisters at protesters in Ferguson, Mo. - a presidential appeal for calm competing against frightening scenes of angry confrontation.
Monday night’s reaction to a grand jury’s decision not to indict the Ferguson police officer who killed an unarmed young black man in August consisted of peaceful protest in some places and vandalism and looting in others - a burst of violence so widely and persistently predicted that it seemed as much self-fulfilling prophecy as organic expression of rage.
Spontaneous or organized, riots have sporadically pierced the social compact through two and a half centuries of this country’s struggles over equality and opportunity. But August’s violence in Ferguson broke the mold in three important ways - one of which is just unfolding now. These were rare suburban riots, racial violence coming to the very place many Americans - both white and black - had fled to after the urban unrest of the 1960s. These were the most significant explosions of racial frustration since the election of the nation’s first black president, and so Ferguson forced the country out of the fantasy that America had entered a “post-racial” era.
Finally, what distinguishes Ferguson from the crowded historical catalogue of racially motivated street violence is what has happened in recent weeks: The unseemly build-up to the announcement of the grand jury’s conclusion that no crime was committed in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown has produced an expectation of ugliness. What occurred this week - and may continue in the days ahead - is rioting as planned event, so pervasively predicted, so extensively prepared for as to obscure the power and meaning of the protests.
A news media obsessed with predicting the next step, a security apparatus equipped to put down almost any uprising, and a political power structure apparently seeking to head off violence by predicting it have combined to produce an unprecedented sense of inevitability, reducing what has historically been an explosion of frustration to a kind of staged performance.
From Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon’s declaration of a state of emergency to reports of soaring gun sales in the St. Louis area, from nonstop coverage on the cable news channels to new expenditures by St. Louis County police on riot gear, the assumption (fed by copious news leaks) that Darren Wilson, the white officer, would not be prosecuted led to an hourly drumbeat of preparations for mayhem.
Police officers’ vacations were canceled and schoolchildren were sent home with packets of homework designed to last them through several days of civil unrest.
The result was a pivot from the questions of justice and race relations that drove August’s protests to a more tactical debate over how to contain popular rage.
Thanks to a relentlessly forward-skewed news media - “What will happen next?” was the topic of nearly every cable news discussion - Monday night’s violence became on-demand programming for a nation that flits from one blockbuster event to the next.
The days of anticipation diminished the debate over solutions that the Brown shooting had initially revived. The Justice Department is still investigating police practices in Ferguson, the ACLU is still probing the Ferguson police department’s treatment of journalists who covered the August protests, and state officials are still looking at ways to reform law enforcement in the area.
But the complaints among black residents in Ferguson and beyond about police misconduct and courts that don’t seem to administer justice equally have not abated.
Communities across the nation regularly take to the streets to protest police shootings of unarmed black men; in Ferguson’s case, the anger and frustration that turned protests violent was born of a larger sense of disenfranchisement, a pervasive belief that some people - blacks, low-end workers, the unemployed - can’t get a break, can’t wedge a foot in the door.
“We are a nation of two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal,” the Kerner Commission famously concluded after the urban riots of the late 1960s. Since then, a large and successful black middle class has emerged, and many legal and cultural barriers to inclusion in the nation’s business and social endeavors have fallen away.
But the races remain sharply divided in important ways in both perception and reality. In a survey of St. Louis County residents a month after the initial violence, blacks and whites split over whether the shooting was justified (62 percent of whites said it was; 65 percent of black said it was not) and over whether Brown was targeted because of his race (77 percent of whites said no, 64 percent of blacks said yes.) The only thing a majority of both races agreed on was that the news media have made the situation in Ferguson worse, not better.
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