Racism in St. Louis

Michael Brown, The outrage

Racist outrage: Michael Brown's memorial burns

I remember last decade arguing with conservatives that minorities bringing up race were "picking at a scab," according to one of them. We were in a post-racial society, Blacks and other minorities were holding themselves back by not keeping themselves to the discipline and morality (prevalent in so many Whites) and then blaming it all on White racism, which magically disappeared when all those racist laws that, accidentally, crept to our state and city statutes came down.


I begged to differ. In my city, St. Louis, there was huge exodus of people when school bussing was ordered as a solution to the wall-like segregation. The city's population fell by a third within about a decade and St. Charles County, adjoining St. Louis, became the fastest growing county in the US.

As late the mid-90s, I walked into a barbershop in my old neighborhood (that was back when I had hair). The shop had recently changed management, and the barber had about four teeth. (Luckily, barbers don't double as dentists anymore). And I remember the barber shaving a customer, who said the straight-edge blade was really smooth. The barber quipped back, "Yeah, sharp enough to cut a n*gg*r!" Hyay, hyay, hyah!

The customer got a hoot out of that. I walked out. I hadn't heard a joke like that  since the '70s, when I heard them all the time in all-white, massively racist, South St. Louis. It seemed, in absence of having any day-to-day contact with Blacks, school children kept their racism well-honed through jokes. The other, later butt of jokes were gays and women (for the latter, usually prostitutes).

I found it implausible that any this disappeared when laws were changed to make racism more difficult to officially enforce (which is the way I would describe anti-discrimination affirmative action laws). If there's one good Internet has brought it is that you don't have to look very hard to find people writing some very hard-line racist things. (The good of that is a two-edged sword.) In fact, in this political climate with a Black president, many racists aren't even trying to camouflage or rationalize their racism behind something else. Either they've been practicing it without penalty for so long that they think it's a high ideal (see Cliven Bundy's "concern" for Blacks), or they don't care.

Before Michael Brown was killed, I noticed how a dispensing machine for the St. Louis American, the Black newspaper in the two, were dented and beaten to pieces on the corner of Gravois and Chippewa. The Riverfront Times dispenser next to it was left alone. Then, after the Michael Brown shooting, the RFT began doing news reports that some would regard as favorable to Brown and the protesters. The RFT dispenser on that same corner then came up beaten to shit.

Yes, we're really in a post-racial nation. If you define post-racial as racists not even being ashamed of it anymore.    

The Michael Brown affair has brought all of this to a head. It's shocking at how many people will to "be" Darren Wilson, who for reasons so far undetermined (and definitely not determined by the Ferguson PD, who never wrote an incident report) shot Brown to death. Photographic evidence places Brown 108 feet from Wilson's cruiser. So, Brown wasn't going for Wilson's gun, and whatever struggle they had was long over.

Meanwhile, there's no evidence that Wilson is ever going to need the $440,000 legal defense fund that racists and cop kissers have so automatically and generously given him. When there's no incident report, and when police spoiled the crime scene so thoroughly, I would dumbstruck if Wilson were ever even arrested now, much less indicted. Meanwhile, he's on paid administrative leave. He's collecting his full check to do nothing, and he might be doing other work on the side. There's no way Darren Wilson is suffering now.

Meanwhile, the Brown family have lost a son. There is no end to the anguish of that, especially when the world tells you it doesn't care to do justice.

A lot of hecklers have said that Michael Brown doesn't "deserve" this kind of attention, that he's a poor example this "point."

Deserving the attention is irrelevant. Point is, he didn't deserve to be killed. In my White neighborhood growing up, White kids stole all the time. One even boasted to me that you could wheel a bicycle out of a Venture store (now defunct) and not get stopped. None of them were shot. A lot of them were caught for underaged drinking and none were beaten. Definitely none of them were stopped for something petty, like jaywalking, and then ended up being killed.

As for whether he's the best example: the Ferguson police are the ones who made him the example when they shot him under suspicious circumstances, didn't write up an incident report, didn't investigate it, didn't even check his pulse to see if he could be saved, let him lay in the street for at least three or four hours, and heave-hoed his body into the back of an SUV.

Meanwhile, they also let Darren Wilson and his cruiser leave the scene. Then the chief came out and praised Wilson.

If you ask me, that's one of the best examples of what's gone wrong with both race and law enforcement in the US.

Now we have another incident. VonDerrick Myers, Jr. being shot in the city by an off-duty police officer, in uniform, working for Hi Tech Security. So far, nothing is clear about that case. Unlike what most Whites seem to think, not every shooting or beating of a Black results in protests. They really have to look blatantly fishy for there to be a response. It looks like this case might raise a whole hosts of different issues connecting to race.