Bad Influences

From the death of young Michael Brown in Ferguson on Aug. 9, to the grand jury’s decision, announced on Monday, not to lay charges against Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot him down, why did the situation have to be so predictable?

In 1992, the American judicial system cleared the police officers accused of beating Rodney King, arrested for speeding in Los Angeles. This was followed by six days of rioting. Other instances of violence, highly publicized, caused outrage by demoralizing the black community: that in 2009 of a security officer found guilty of involuntary homicide, rather than murder, in the shooting death of a black man in Oakland; or the one in 2012, in Florida, when Trayvon Martin was shot down by a man who was finally acquitted of a murder charge. There is a distressing continuity with the latest events in Ferguson, this is obvious, but a large proportion of white Americans maintain the illusion, worsened by the election of Barack Obama, that the United States surmounted its racial conflicts a long time ago.

There are a flood of studies that have documented the racial bias of the American justice system and police corps against black people. A statistic brought up by the media in recent days indicates that a young black man is 21 times more likely to be shot by the police than a young white man. Even so, a Huffington Post/YouGov poll made public this week shows that only 22 percent of white responders believe that Officer Wilson was wrong to fire at young Brown — compared to 62 percent of African-American responders which, moreover, does not constitute a crushing majority.

The cultural roots of this racism run deep. Another study, conducted by Northwestern University, measures how much slavery and the construction of prejudice have led to a lasting dehumanization of black people in the minds of many white people, feeding reciprocal mistrust. In his testimony before the grand jury, Wilson did not demonstrate otherwise as he depicted Michael Brown with almost bestial qualities. St. Louis is an example among many others of the urban segregation that is rampant in several American cities, but it is true all the same that the social relationships between white and black people are, in daily life, healthier than they were in the 1960s. What remains is the immense challenge of uprooting the bad influences of the past on the institutional plane.

Ferguson has not helped this cause. If part of the solution is improving the faith of the black minority in the country’s institutions, and more specifically in the courts and police, it would be helpful if, in the future, the Robert McCullochs of the world were neutralized. The prosecutor in this case, Mr. McCulloch, was widely perceived by the black community as being in the service of the police, but he refused to step down in favor of a special prosecutor. Moreover, he supervised the grand jury very poorly and let his work drag on for three months, when it needn’t have lasted more than a few days, contributing thus to the climate of suspicion. In short, his presence contributed to a miscarriage of justice, emphasized The New York Times on Wednesday in its editorial.

Unfortunately, since coming to power in 2008 Mr. Obama has allowed the fallacy that his presidency brought the United States into a “post-racial” era to run rampant. Due to extreme caution, the question of race is a subject that he has not broached unless events force him to do so. So I am glad that he recognized on Monday evening, even while calling for calm, that “there are issues in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in a discriminatory fashion.” Other Fergusons will explode, following the same pattern, if nothing changes this time.