The word “Ferguson” has become synonymous with racism and police brutality in the U.S. today, in the same way that the name “Rodney King” did in 1992. And yet there remains a persistent and reactionary response from some white Americans who vehemently view themselves as the victims and black Americans as “violent thugs” who deserve the treatment they receive from police and the criminal justice system. The doublethink of domination and victimhood is central to the pathology of white supremacy in the U.S. It is used to dupe and confuse us into believing that there is nuance in brutality and justice in murder.
Late Saturday, hours into a protest march over police brutality in Berkeley, Calif., police were looking to make arrests and spotted Kyle McCoy. The young black man, a well-known racial justice activist and University of California-Berkeley alum was arrested on suspicion for felony assault with a deadly weapon. He was taken away and booked, but by Sunday morning he was free on bail. On Monday afternoon, when he was scheduled to be arraigned in court, a bailiff announced the criminal charge had been dropped.
Cuba is pledging its continued cooperation with its neighbours in the Caribbean Community, according to Cuba President Raul Castro.
A few weeks ago, one of America’s leading voices on black respectability, Lawrence Otis Graham, wrote in the Washington Post about the realization that respectability had failed to protect his son from the barbs of racial bias.
After a grand jury decision not to indict a police officer in the shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo.
The highly publicised killing of Michael Brown, a young black man, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last August was a dreadful event that led to violent local protests and expressions of outrage across the US.
This will long be remembered as the week when another grand jury declined to prosecute another white police officer in the death of another unarmed African-American man, this time in the nation’s largest and most diverse city, a supposed bastion of liberalism.
After a grand jury in Staten Island decided not to indict the NYPD cop who choked Eric Garner to death this week, thousands of people across the nation took to the streets in protest. Many of those angry people were white and I am willing to bet most were genuinely outraged. But when it comes to the issue of “feeling our pain,” white people just can’t go there with us.
Jess Zimmerman: Hi, Rebecca! First of all, thanks for talking this out with me, and I hope I don’t come off like a jackass. The internet exerts a powerful jackass ray, and lord knows so does talking about race, and we are essentially crossing the streams here. Anyway, after the Ferguson grand jury verdict came down, I tried to spend the night just RTing black folks on Twitter.
Suddenly, it feels like the 1960s again, with swirling movements for social justice finding inspiration and a powerful common denominator in the struggle for black equality.
Back in August, some observers drew comparisons between the shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri…
Coming just two weeks after the non-indictment of Officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown, the non-indictment of Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner has the feel of a grim serial filled with redundant plot lines—a production that few of us wish to watch but none of us can avoid, and that a great many are complicit in creating. This is not imaginary.