The Death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri

i'm not sure if this has turned into a full-blown internet controversy yet, but it's going to be agonizing if it does because of the few things that unites people across the world is the hatred of conceptual art. it's impossible to comment on his performance without at least implicitly making a statement about his work in general. can't WAIT to hear what people think about it!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/missouri-lt-governor-more-racism-in-the-justice-department-t#.frMWVpGMr

The lieutenant governor of Missouri says “there is more racism in the Justice Department” than in the St. Louis area, pointing the finger at President Obama and the Justice Department who, he says, often incited “the mob” in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown back in August of 2014.

challops?

tangential but not:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with

actually made the trouble to listen to that. good story.
those wailing parents at the integration meetings made me sick. yes i'll judge the fuck outta them

the particular way the reporter hooked the story into the Michael Brown story was one of my favorite things about the piece -- incredibly effective

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/the-cop

Is there any good reason for me to read that?

I don't know, there are cartoons interspersed

Like, fuck what he has to say, and I don't mean that just in a light "this guy is an asshole" way but in the sense that it's very unlikely reading the words of this ignorant motherfucker is going to do anything to illuminate structural racism for me better and I don't really have room in my heart for his pity party right now.

the article is a lot wider than just the cop's story, but yeah it's not the ten millionth political piece either, but it adds a lot of detail I hadn't heard before

Why does this profoundly stupid man deserve to have paragraph after paragraph of his inane ramblings see print in a national publication? It's like reading a terrible facebook comment thread.

Oh it's such a fucking awful article, it's like Crash in print nonfiction form. I can't.

Wilson, who is from Texas, is the son of a woman who repeatedly broke the law. His mother, Tonya Dean, stole money, largely by writing hot checks. After completing high school, she married Wilson’s father, John, who had been her English teacher. They soon had two children to support—Darren and his younger sister, Kara—but Dean spent wildly. She left John Wilson for another man, Tyler Harris, who ran a Y.M.C.A. They had a child, Jared, and Darren and Kara lived with them. “Tonya had me in debt—almost twenty thousand dollars—that first year,” Harris told me. Dean, it seems, often repaid debts to one person by stealing money from someone else.

. . . Good values, Wilson insisted, needed to be learned at home. He spoke of a black single mother, in Ferguson, who was physically disabled and blind. She had several teen-age children, who “ran wild,” shooting guns, dealing drugs, and breaking into cars.

Fuck this dude forever and ever, I hope everyone he's related to including his fucking baby die in a fire.

shut the fuck up, both of you

I hope everyone he's related to including his fucking baby die in a fire.

just to be clear, that's not what I was trying to say at all, almost the opposite -- I don't think what happened here is really about what's inside Officer Wilson's head, or rather what's inside Officer Wilson's head is a piece of a much larger system. His comments don't seem to offer much insight into anything imo, and I almost question presenting them in this equal time sort of format, although admittedly I just skimmed the article and maybe I'm being too harsh on it. I mean, this is a long passage of uneditorialized text, and the views expressed therein are not very well-thought-through, and pretty predictable. So why?

“I am really simple in the way that I look at life,” Wilson said. “What happened to my great-grandfather is not happening to me. I can’t base my actions off what happened to him.” Wilson said that police officers didn’t have the luxury of dwelling on the past. “We can’t fix in thirty minutes what happened thirty years ago,” he said. “We have to fix what’s happening now. That’s my job as a police officer. I’m not going to delve into people’s life-long history and figure out why they’re feeling a certain way, in a certain moment.” He added, “I’m not a psychologist.”

Wilson said that, despite what he’d said about experiencing “culture shock,” race hadn’t affected the way he did police work: “I never looked at it like ‘I’m the only white guy here.’ I just looked at it as ‘This isn’t where I grew up.’ ” He said, “When a cop shows up, it’s, like, ‘The cops are here!’ There’s no ‘Oh, shit, the white cops are here!’ ” He added, “If you live in a high-crime area, with a lot of poverty, there’s going to be a large police presence. You’re going to piss people off. If police show up, it’s because it’s something bad, and whoever’s involved can’t figure out the problem for themselves.”

He continued, “Everyone is so quick to jump on race. It’s not a race issue.” There were two opposing views about policing, he said: “There are people who feel that police have too much power, and they don’t like it. There are people who feel police don’t have enough power, and they don’t like it.”

'we have to fix what's happening now'

'this isn't where i grew up'

It's not like the writer is uncritical:

In his telling, there was no reaching the blind woman’s kids: “They ran all over the mom. They didn’t respect her, so why would they respect me?” He added, “They’re so wrapped up in a different culture than—what I’m trying to say is, the right culture, the better one to pick from.”

This sounded like racial code language. I pressed him: what did he mean by “a different culture”? Wilson struggled to respond. He said that he meant “pre-gang culture, where you are just running in the streets—not worried about working in the morning, just worried about your immediate gratification.” He added, “It is the same younger culture that is everywhere in the inner cities.”

There were two opposing views about policing, he said

He's not a psychologist, he's a mind reader, but he can only read two minds at a time.

I mean, this is a long passage of uneditorialized text, and the views expressed therein are not very well-thought-through, and pretty predictable. So why?

The article critiques that passage throughout its entire length, both through the facts of the case and the interviews with other people involved, which you'd pick up on if you read it.

fair enough, I'm in a foul and impatient mood right now, will give it a chance later

The most telling portion is how the defense from Wilson's former mentor crumbles when he tries to assert that the situation would have gone down the same way if HE'D been involved when the article has already gone to great pains to show that the mentor:

- was gay and felt some empathy to the ostracization of the black community he was policing as a result;
- did a lot of community outreach in his capacity as a policeman, changing the dynamic with which he interacted with the members of that community;
- was in a situation where people were shooting at him and had the wherewithal to remove himself from a potentially dangerous chase scenario and circle back to see if his partner, who had been hit by a bullet, needed help

There are some good points in that article, where the writer presses against inconsistencies in the worldview of the cop. Darren Wilson uses all the coded language of a racist asshole, and he has no awareness about his own hypocrisies. Like, Wilson has never read the justice report on racism in Ferguson, because he doesn't want to dwell on the past, but he has no problem discussing everything else about his own past, and the problems he saw while on patrol. Just, racism, that's not to be dwelled on, because that is the past.

And yeah, that passage is really really strong as well, x-post.

Another police shooting tonight, police firing smoke/tear gas at protesters, this is useful:

https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/lists/ferguson

this is awful.

i should know this by now, but where would be the best place to look for updates on this, where the stories don't consist entirely of things asserted by the police?

washington post has been doing some good reporting all year

deray, netta, cornell west arrested

http://gawker.com/state-of-emergency-declared-in-ferguson-as-protestors-a-1723175123

The place to look for news about all this btw is twitter.

Really good essay by Darryl Pickney:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/18/black-lives-and-the-police/

really wish this stuff had come out a couple years ago

http://www.theroot.com/everything-you-think-you-know-about-the-death-of-mike-b-1793261221