Photo: David Robert Bliwas (via Flickr)
by Ernie McCray / The OB Rag
Michael Brown. Another black boy dead, unvalued and unloved by this society, unseen for what he is, a human being, dehumanized before he’s memorialized because we love to show a victim at his worse. They just had to show him strong arming a man for a pack of cigarillos.
So now we get away from his being shot (six times I just read) by someone paid by the citizenry to “serve and protect” and we start thinking, because of his criminal shenanigans, that maybe, just maybe, he isn’t deserving of continuing to live on earth with the rest of us.
Well, I’ve known many kids, a grandson of mine being one of them, who thought, at one time, they were slick and went off and committed some stupid crime and then went on to become outstanding human beings. Why? Because nobody killed them. My grandson spent some time in juvenile hall away from all who loved him and came out declaring “The criminal life is not for me” and went on to graduate from UCSD and learned to speak Chinese and is now embarking on a possible business venture with China. We have to give children a chance.
To borrow words from Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights hero of mine, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired” of this American game where a black boy is killed and then painted in an ugly dismissive light as rationalization for the taking of his life.
I’ve seen it too many times, the first time as a teenager, in the 50’s, when a kid I knew was killed, supposedly, by a ricocheting “warning shot” for “disturbing the peace” (got to have an excuse) on a street in Tucson we called “The Strip” which was known for just about anything you could imagine other than “peace.”
Hanging out with his buds, talking trash animatedly against a background of music blasting from more than one night club was all that he was guilty of. Mr. Do Right often doesn’t like the sight of black boys having a good time so he rolled up on them with a “What’s going on here?” attitude and got a “Go f__k yourself!” in return and an unarmed black boy didn’t make it home that night. The cop remained on the exact same beat. Justice was knocked flat off its feet. Chilled me to the bone to see such a travesty, a murder carried out with absolute impunity. My country as a reality became much clearer to me.
This latest tragedy is just too much deja vu. I’ll never forget, in August of ’55, right before my senior year in high school began, opening up a Jet Magazine, looking for the “Beauty of the Week” page, as any boy would do, and being absolutely startled and frozen in my seat as I looked at a picture of Emmitt Till who had been beaten and shot in the head and disposed of in the Tallahatchie River. His flirting with a white woman was given as the perpetrators’ defense of their brutality towards another human being.
I about lost my mind and it spooks me even today, as I write, to recall the anger I felt back then, fully realizing that people like me were terribly expendable in this country.
When the murderers were set free by a jury of their peers, I had to struggle to keep love in my heart for all of humanity. But hating just isn’t in my genes.
Michael Donald was next, lynched by some good old boys in the KKK looking for revenge when it looked as though a black man who was charged with killing a white policeman was going to beat the rap. Somebody had to pay. Word went around that Michael had been slain in a drug deal gone awry. That lie was debunked by the FBI and I couldn’t help wondering, in my 40’s back then, if such atrocities would ever end. At 76 I wonder the same thing.
I mean Trayvon Martin came upon a man who was scared of black boys in hoodies and ended up lying in a pool of his own blood and we couldn’t even mourn without being abused with news about how bad a thug he was supposed to have been. This lessening of a black boy’s humanity in our country is nothing short of a sin.
It’s so hard correcting such a horrible practice because we have no sense of history in the United States. Like now many of us are letting ourselves be distracted from what happened to Michael by going on and on about the rioters and looters in Ferguson. Now don’t get me wrong, what these folks are doing is wrong, criminally wrong, but I, at the same time, don’t look at it with wonderment. To me their actions are a natural result of how their history has played out over centuries.
Their ancestors arrived on these shores packed into slave ships like sardines and overtime their languages and customs were eradicated and their families were broken up…
And then one day they were told they were free and they found themselves with very few money making opportunities, no matter what their abilities or potentialities happened to be…
And the custom began of no one wanting an African American living next door to them as though they were naturally diseased…
And generations of black people ended up living in ghettos of stifling poverty, too often sans basic amenities and their schools too often are substandard and the idea of going on to a JC or four year university too often is viewed as an impossibility and affirmative action programs for them too often are fought against ferociously…
And profit making jails and prisons welcome them with open arms and women hold their purses tightly when they are near and their vote is slowly being taken away through various means…
So, these hell raising black folks might just feel justified as they look at the social muck in which they’re mired and light a rag in a bottle on fire and throw it through a window and grab a beer or two and an iPad.
It’s a hell of an ugly sight but to me it pales in comparison to black boys being slaughtered on our streets.
There is no justification whatsoever for these murders that should carry weight in a civil society.
Langston Hughes wrote a poem called “What Happens to a Dream Deferred?”
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore –
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over –
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
The dream deferred in Ferguson, Missouri has exploded and the taking of Michael Brown’s life should be a loud call for us, as a society, to end this madness or we can’t refer to ourselves as a civil society.
Ernie McCray
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You are a beautiful writer and the living expression of kindness and wisdom.
Your words may lead us to a better world.
My heart is with the sufferers of injustice…
The insults to decency — to civilization, really — continue in ways that sometimes don’t come to mind during these days of righteous rage at police shootings.
Today, the Dallas News is reporting that Fred Crouch has been charged with impersonating a police officer, almost a month after he showed police during a stop in his superrich suburb what has just proved to be a phony police badge. He was let go. He’s the father of the white 16-year-old who was never charged in the deaths of four passengers in the SUV he was driving while drunk. The kid got off with a rehab here in California after a Texas court accepted his plea that he suffered from “affluenza” and wasn’t capable of seeing laws applied to him.
This time, justice might be served. Next time?
Huffington Post is carrying the story
No one has stated it better or clearer Ernie.
You seem pretty certain of exactly how the events all unfolded and that this 18 year old was a totally innocent victim sharing no responsibiltiy in how things unfolded.
I think we would all be well served to wait until we know the facts before we make our conclusions. As illustrated by some of the points you make in your article when we begin to make assumptions and decide things without all of the facts terrible tragic things happen.
I am in absoltuely no way defending the police but you seem very certain that this 18 year old was totally innocent. I am not sure how one can come to that conclusion given the fact that we are sure of so far.
I also struggle greatly with your assertation that there could possibly be justification for the further the further violence, theft and looting that has occurred in MO. One wrong certainly does not justify another. Does it? You certainly seem to imply that it might.
Destroying ones community in a fit of rage does not improve said communtiy. Mobs raiding stores and emptying their shelves does not lead to further understanding.
What is happening in MO no and further more what has happened historically in this country in terms of race is a sad and tragic history we must all come to terms with and grow from but there is little justification for more crime in response to crime.
Hey, Jake, you sound like a reasonable man. You believe in community, and that defying the police won’t preserve that community. You say you wish everybody could just wait until the facts come out before forming attitudes. See how easy it is to say all that?
Very easy.
Now as to facts. Do you know that the Ferguson PD has still not released its incident report explaining what happened to Michael Brown? Do you know that the latest count of journalists arrested for covering the demonstrations has reached 10, including those belonging to the Washington Post, Al Jazheera, the Financial Times of London, and another Brit paper, The Telegraph? Does these latter facts disturb your sense of justice or your righteous desire to know the facts?
In the end you have recognize that most people following this story want to know. Want to know why a town that is 2/3 African American is policed by a force that includes just three black officers, and that 86% of drivers pulled over and frisked are black, and why the majority are released and a greater percentage of the whites are arrested and jailed because they committed the crime for which they were stopped.
Jake, you’re just going to have to try harder to understand what is happening in Ferguson. Let your understanding grow.
I haven’t made any conclusions about anyone’s guilt or innocence and I totally agree with you, two wrongs don’t make a right. We get so “fact” minded in these things. And the “fact” is Michael Brown is dead and “fact” finding in these matters, with a black kid being killed, tends to be pretty much about looking for reasons why it’s okay to do that. The police tend to, too often, get the ball rolling in these matters. They make you feel aggressive. I don’t know how many times when I was a young black man and some cop would come sidling up to me in their cruiser asking me something that is absolutely none of their business like “Where are you going there, boy?” then get pissed when you don’t tell him. And get really pissed when you curse them out and ask for their badge number so you can take it up with your friend, the chief of police. You look a little less Negro to them at that point as they don’t know whether you’re lying or not.
And then you come up with the “fairness” issue. I’m crying out loud in print and try to share some history about how people can react when their lives feel hopeless to them and you want me to check my conclusions. And I only have one conclusion and that is Michael Brown, no matter if he bum-rushed the cop (as I’ve heard he did) or not, he could and should be alive. The kid, I’ve been told was 295 pounds. He could have been shot in his ample thighs by a cop backing up in retreat and I won’t share why I think the cop didn’t choose that over where he chose to shoot the young man – because that would kind of be in the “reverse racism” category with you, I’m “assuming.” Anyway, Jake, you’ve just come up with another problem in these things, people get mad at people like me for being mad at our second and third-class citizenship, like we’re supposed to just take it and let justice run its course, and that hasn’t worked out for us very well. Writing about these things is my substitute for looting and rioting; I’ve learned how to deal with my emotions over the years. But the screw ups in Ferguson, in large part, I’m sure, don’t have a lot of avenues for their rage. But, you know, what you and I both think, won’t affect, in any way, how all this plays out. Another one of those “facts.” I’m already involved in trying to lessen these kinds of tragedies. I hope you are doing the same.
Everyone by now has heard about this: http://tinyurl.com/mh5rck3
Turns out this cop wasn’t even part of the Ferguson PD.
Ferguson has fueled the flame of Racism resurfacing since Obama became President. What is to be done?
Good question.
Thank you for sharing this heartfelt piece, Mr. McCray, for us all to absorb and contemplate. As a 42 year old white woman living in the NW, I struggle to understand the fear that our law enforcement officers and privileged citizens hold deep in their psyche that allows continual racial bias and contempt to be justified. I am a big fan of Fannie Lou Hamer, too, and just shared her quote today on Facebook, “Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free.” In my own life, I’ve found that it is up me to educate myself and go beyond what has been shown and taught to me in our biased school system and society – to reach beyond the fabricated racial stereotypes that permeate so much of our media. We need to keep the conversations alive and the dialogues going about our experiences – white and black – to increase understanding and awareness of our individual experiences with racial, economic, and social injustice. My heart iOS wounded, as is yours, as long as injustice continues.
Much love to you and all our dear brothers and sisters. We need to fight to keep our young black men alive so that they can change the world.