Some news, updates, and links on the events in Ferguson and around the country.
- In Ferguson, yesterday evening was "a much better night." Better is a relative term.
Missouri law enforcement officials noted that the second night of Ferguson protests resulted in less violence, arson, looting and just 44 arrests – that's compared to nearly 80 Monday night, when demonstrators set parts of the city ablaze.
- Today saw more arrests as protesters stormed into St. Louis City Hall.
- "Hands up. Don't shop" has become a rallying cry for protesters asking consumers nationwide to boycott Black Friday sales as means of further pressuring for action against police brutality.
- What is a grand jury? Where did the notion come from, and why was this one so unusual?
- Because the grand jury amounted to a trial in secret, we may never know why certain witnesses were deemed more credible than others. MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell is one of many that finds the prosecutor's reliance on particular witnesses baffling.
- From PBS, an important chart of what various grand jury witnesses say they saw.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates:
The genre of Obama race speeches has always been bounded by the job he was hired to do. Specifically, Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America. More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people. But black people, the community to which both Michael Brown and Barack Obama belong, have the distinct fortune of having survived in significant numbers. For a creedal country like America, this poses a problem—in nearly every major American city one can find a population of people whose very existence, whose very history, whose very traditions, are an assault upon this country's nationalist instincts. Black people are the chastener of their own country. Their experience says to America, "You wear the mask."