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Below is a diary that I penned on August 15th and somehow forgot to Publish. I discovered it in my Drafts folder tonight and decided that it summarized my emotions from the last few days, represents something far more cogent than I could come up with today, and is worth sharing. Sadly, my prediction of exoneration turned out to be true.
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From Police Name Officer in Michael Brown Shooting, Suggest Unarmed Teen Was Robbery Suspect
Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson named Darren Wilson as the officer who shot and killed unarmed Michael Brown, 18, in the St. Louis suburb on Aug 9.
But the police also suggested on Friday that Brown was the suspect in a convenience store robbery that took place shortly before he was shot. Jackson released a report that named Brown as "the primary suspect" in the incident.
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Brown was shot after the officer encountered him and another man on the street at 12:01 p.m. local time after responding to an armed robbery call, and Brown fit the description of the suspect, Chief Jackson said on Friday.
This diary is not about whether or not Michael Brown robbed a convenience store. We have a fairly reliable, if imperfect and racially skewed, criminal justice system in place in our society to deal with such questions and mete out legally sanctioned, if imperfect and racially skewed, consequences.
This diary is, instead, about what it means to "fit the description of a suspect" and how various assumptions we make about people based on color lead to particular outcomes, often at a great physical and moral cost.
My sense is that we live with what can only be described accurately as a clusterfuck of variables:
1. the value of a black life is perceived by mainstream America to be lower than that of a white life,
2. black persons are generally assumed to be more dangerous, derelict, and deficient than white persons of similar lots,
3. people in positions of executive, legislative, and judicial power in American society are overwhelmingly white,
4. the privileges of power tend to compound over time and be passed along disproportionately to people closest in class and color to those who wield it,
5. American society remains impossibly segregated despite having no geographic or biological impediments to integration.
It is against this backdrop and within this context that reactions to the death of Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin before him, and Amadou Diallo before
him, as well as countless more to follow, must be considered.
Our society has long flirted with killing black men without fear of significant consequences, and there is no reason to expect that this will abate very soon.
Michael Brown is not an exception nor will he be the last to die at the hands of a white killer who will be exonerated. The reality of contemporary America creates a set of associations that are interwoven too deeply into our mental mesh:
* A white man with a beard, a tank top, and a fitted cap might be mistaken for an upwardly mobile graphic designer from Brooklyn, NY. A black man with a beard, a tank top, and a fitted cap might be mistaken for a dangerous, presumably violent criminal from the same place.
* A white woman with dreadlocks, a tank top, and a dress might be mistaken for a free-spirited, affluent Harvard graduate student working on a dissertation. A black woman with dreadlocks, a tank top, and a dress is unlikely to be afforded similar assumptions.
* A young, white person with tattoos sitting on a sidewalk with a bookbag and some luggage might be mistaken for a person waiting for a friend or a bus. A young, black person with tattoos sitting on a sidewalk might be assumed to be homeless or mentally ill.
These are powerful associations, deeply embedded into our collective cultural zeitgeist. These assumptions take hold in our consciousnesses as a designed function of how our society apportions privilege. They are more than just patterns borne of context; they are cultural drawings colored in by prejudice and the vacuum of segregation.
Associations and assumptions aren't just a matter of regrettable reality. They also have tremendous sway over our actions. Associations are the reason why women are less likely to be given raisesthan men; why average-performing white kids are more likely to be advance to honorstracks in grade school than average-performing black kids are; why people with names like John Avery are more likely to be interviewed for jobs than are people with names like Dominique Johnson despite possessing identical resumes; why a group of white teens driving a dilapidated car is less likely to be pulled over by police than a group of Hispanic or Middle Eastern or Black teens driving the same rusted 1995 Corolla; and why you never hear of tall, 18-year old white teens being trailed, arrested, or killedby neighborhood watchmen and police officers like Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown were.
If assumptions have such power over our actions, then it is a small wonder that people with the legal power of life and death are not subjected to the most rigorous possible training in regards to challenging those assumptions and prejudices. I wish Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown had grown up in a world in which the adults had figured out that this needed to be done. Perhaps they'd still be here with us.
Instead, they're gone.