Whenever major events such as Ferguson happen i'm immediately reminded of how craven and damaging the mainstream media's role, the vast majority of the time, truly is. It's their insistence on treating adults as if they were still children looking for entertainment not above watching cartoons that riles any rational and critical thinker. The disgraceful overuse of sensational images, playground style reporting of he said/she said, the gravitas given to starched, out-of-touch political pawns and the cowardly avoidance of any subtext to the real storyline is so obvious. If I was given one wish I'd wish that all commercial tv, newspapers and radio would suddenly vanish, so that we could start talking to one another like empathetic human beings without the influence of manufactured controversy and sensationalism.
Last night's Ustream broadcast called "Reflections on Ferguson" from Georgetown University struck me as such a monumental event, for these reasons.
It was the kind of rigorous intellectual, philosophical and sociological analysis one pines for from but is left cold by the traditional "news" outlets. It also showed how progressive academic institutions could take a proactive role by not shying away from "controversial" events, and instead embrace it as precisely what schools should be doing. The university's decision to parse in its totality a major event like Ferguson was pretty courageous and so important. This, I thought, is real, living, tangible education and something so desperately needed in a national dialogue ever sinking to the lowest common denominator. *(Another noteworthy journalistic contribution has been Color of Change's "#FergusonLive series of interviews of local folks speaking candidly about their personal experiences dealing with the prison industrial complex, police harassment and socioeconomic strife.)
Some highlights of the discussion:
Law professor Paul Butler: "When I think about being here at Georgetown and our strong commitment to social justice and our Jesuit values [and] when we get outraged at all of the ways that black life is devalued, I think that’s when we take Ferguson from a moment to a movement."
Assistant professor of history Marcia Chatelain:"You had folks from Occupy [Wall Street]. You had Sandy Hook families. You had Dream Defenders. You had the heads of major LGBT organizations making very clear statements about the intersectional nature of what was happening in Ferguson.”
University professor and author Michael Eric Dyson: “If you have the privilege that when you interact with a policeman that they assume you’re human and that they do not presume to detain you because of contaminated stereotypes about your being, the greatest privilege is not wealth … the greatest privilege is to be presumed as a human being … to be treated with dignity.”
Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream
As an aside, for two and a half weeks I've been compiling notes and links about Ferguson because it's been on my mind day in and day out. Also gestating have been two other diaries, on the brutality of the NYPD and the amazing Twitter #myNYPD campaign exposing them, and the awful Eric Garner murder. There's so much there, and the material just keeps mounting (not even taking into account the militarization of the police).
indeed it's a strange confluence to be swirling in a dizzying amount of sudden reportage on so many things progressives and Occupy Wall St have been screaming about for so long (institutional racism, police brutality, economic inequality, school-to-prison pipeline, the economic terrorism of Wall St, austerity measures, government corruption, etc). And then to see the outpouring and deep engagement here on the Kos, where finally the long-deserved traction of these issues received in these past 3 weeks actually trumped the ad nauseam Dems are great/Repugs suck myopia, was so refreshing that perhaps in a larger sense it bespeaks a very possible transformational moment. (I fervently hope this continues here for as long as it takes, and not be relegated to the controversy of the moment). We'll see.
A couple of days after Michael Brown's execution by Darren Wilson I managed to get an email together and sent it to 40 friends. In a reflection of how America has been grappling with the underlying premise of White Privilege I received not one answer, save for a friend in Switzerland.
Here is that email:
This. Has. Got. To. Stop!
I'm so fucking sick of this.
Another week and another black man killed in cold blood by the police. And it's not going to end, ever. Not in this alleged "post-racial" society, not 150 years after the Civil War, not 50 years after Civil Rights legislation and the coordinated murders of MLK and Malcom X, not with the election of a half black president with a strange name and not on account of the various commercial inroads made by black folk in entertainment, sports and the arts. Doesn't mean a thing...
Not unless we, as the privileged (yes, Privileged!) white race, find the proper empathy necessary to stand with stiff backbone in impregnable solidarity with our voiceless and marginalized black brothers and sisters, whose plight continues to go unrecognized, disrespected, undignified in every phase of life, from trouble renting apartments from white owners to being followed by security guards in stores to having to accept lower pay at jobs to attend underfunded schools to being incarcerated at wildly disproportionate rates to being constantly harassed and intimated by police to being gunned down in cold blood for walking while black - the problem will never go away. It will take the unaffected standing up and being counted for it to ever change.
Cold hard fact here: institutionalized racism is a major component in the veins of the American bloodstream.
Every time we look to excuse the police or attempt to exonerate the guilty oppressors, we are defending a systemic problem that is rotten to the core. And by not being honest we further cement the wall of institutional racism. The marginalized and dispossessed need advocates who have no perceivable stake in the game. Until then they will continue to remain in the cold and voiceless, left to agonize on their own - and nothing will change. One of my favorite quotes is attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who said "Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are."
(If you're deficient in American history and/or not finding stories in the mainstream news about what I'm talking about then I submit these two highly recommended pieces for your consideration: Michelle Alexander "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, PBS film "Slavery By Another Name" (which for some reason is now unavailable - it is a must-see)
In the ensuing days it was gratifying to hear some speak thusly. It will be interesting to see how this conversation manifests going forward. To me it has the potential to be that flicker of spark that could turn the whole rancid Profit over People unspoken mantra on its head.
I believe this problem will just continue to fester, eat away at us and control our perceptions, unless we are truly ready to stand up boldly. Literally standing with our black brother and sister to loudly condemn and demand accountability for the twin evils of institutional racism and police brutality is a very good start.
However, when we take it a few steps further, as this panel at Georgetown did, to include socioeconomic disparity between the races and the vast dragnet of economic terrorism being perpetrated on the 99% by Wall St and their minions in Washington, then maybe we'll see the coalescing of a movement represented by a global majority intolerant of racism, classism, profit over people and environmental plunder.
Sun Aug 31, 2014 at 8:59 AM PT: Another must-hear discussion on #Ferguson is Michel Martin of NPR's "Ferguson and Beyond: A Community Conversation," held at Wellspring Church in Ferguson.
http://news.stlpublicradio.org/...