The Unheard

It happened again. An unarmed black teenager was shot to death by a white policeman, and neither the shooter nor any of the other uniformed police officers who left the body lying in the street for over four hours were called to account. Many people on the streets of Ferguson and elsewhere on Monday came to the conclusion that for blacks in America, human dignity and even life itself isn’t worth much. That makes many people very angry.

While it was expected that the randomly selected grand jury of 12 would decide not to bring charges against police officer Darren Wilson, it was precisely the fulfillment of that expectation that was so frustrating.

Whatever each individual juror may or may not have considered and why they reached the conclusion to which they came is of little interest to the black man on the street. His conclusion is: The system doesn’t work for us, and maybe that’s because it wasn’t meant to.

Ferguson is no isolated case. Racial profiling is still an ongoing issue whether or not it ends in death, like the case of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, killed by an apartment complex security guard in Florida in 2012. Blacks are also disproportionately sentenced to death by courts and make up the largest number of those in prison. Generally speaking, blacks don’t enjoy the same quality of legal representation whites do, they are disproportionately likely to be unemployed, and black families tend to earn less than whites. Black mothers consider themselves lucky if their sons reach the age of 25 without being imprisoned or killed.

Americans are, on the one hand, more sensitive to everyday racism than Germans, and yet it still results in more fatalities in the U.S. than it does in Germany. Barack Obama, America’s first black president, has not been able to change that. What happened in Ferguson — indeed, in all the cases of better-documented police mistreatment of blacks — has snapped the black population back from the euphoria of election night 2008 to the reality of everyday life characterized by white privilege.

Racism — also in the United States — is not necessarily the racism of the Ku Klux Klan or discriminatory laws. It also exists in the minds of people who don’t consider themselves racist. Combined with an insane passion for guns, it becomes deadly. The riots in Ferguson won’t change things very much. And many of those who have been demonstrating for months in Ferguson and elsewhere are now also angry and disappointed about the destruction of little mom-and-pop businesses.

Martin Luther King, who always preached non-violence, once said, “Riot is the language of the unheard.” Unless things change soon, that language is likely to spread.