America’s Unresolved Racial Conflict Explodes

The decision of a jury, three-quarters of whose members were white, to dismiss all charges brought against the white policeman who shot and killed Michael Brown in the town where 70 percent of the population is black was met with retaliatory rioting, which has included arson and shootings. The events in Ferguson were painfully inevitable.

From Washington, minutes after the jury’s verdict, Barack Obama implored the nation to respect the “rule of law.” Mob violence took over, causing this plea to fall on deaf ears. If proof were ever needed that the election of a black man twice to the highest seat of government has not reconciled or even remedied the racial divide, Ferguson’s fiery glow would provide it. However, this disaster will run its course. As always.

Paramilitary Policing

The proof was not necessary. Just like in 1991, when four police officers in Los Angeles beat Rodney King to a pulp and walked away scot-free, the seven fatal shots fired at the unarmed black man in Ferguson will go down in America’s history of racial tensions as predictable and unavoidable. The word “unavoidable” is used cynically here, as the paramilitary police in Ferguson faced the demonstrators in much the same way they would have opposed guerilla fighters.

It is the anticipation of armed attack which causes police forces across America to feel as if they are constantly under threat. And it is this certainty that the criminals are armed which further provokes this propensity for violence. Nothing and nobody has ever been able to put an end to this downward spiral.

“Can we all get along?”

Not Martin Luther King, who paid for his peaceful protests with his life. Not Rodney King, who was only met with sarcastic retorts when he innocently asked “can we all get along?” The pictures from Ferguson are not only damaging for America, but also for the entire world.

Even while this does not shock the rest of us, be it through grief or malicious enjoyment of other people’s misfortunes, many Americans, again, seem to be shocked by the events in Ferguson. How can such things, they ask, keep happening in their country, envied by the rest of the world for its exemplary form of democracy?

How can the country with the fairest system of justice on the planet flout its own rules in this way? Sometimes it seems as if the Americans’ blinkered belief that their country is perfect, which is part of their origin myth, completely prevents them from accepting what is happening right in front of them.

This belief must have led to how grotesquely over-the-top the police officers were armed, as well as to a black precarity which has nothing to lose except the destructive remnants of the Black Power movement. These people have not gained anything from the recovering economy. They have lousy, menial jobs, having fallen off the employment ladder a long time ago. They are filling the prisons to bursting point. There is “no excuse” for the violence in Ferguson, President Obama reminds us. The crucial thing is that, in America’s lingering racial conflict, it takes very little for violence to explode.