Ferguson: Why Racism Has Not Disappeared with the Election of Obama

FigaroVox: The famous grand jury decision to not indict the white police officer who killed a young black man this summer caused riots in the city of Ferguson. The election of Obama in 2008, the first black president in the history of the U.S., left us thinking that we had moved beyond the race issue in the country. Was that an optical illusion?

François Durpaire: It would be excessive to believe that the election of Barack Obama has changed everything, and that the issue of race has since been definitively solved. It would also be excessive to think that nothing has changed, and that the racial problems of 2014 are of the same nature as those of the 1960s. America has certainly not fully entered a post-racial era, but it also has not remained the divided black and white country it was until the 1990s, when the Los Angeles riots exploded.

Can we speak of persisting racism in the United States? Is this racism only confined to certain states of the South?

Racial prejudices remain in most human societies, and the United States is no exception. However, the impact of those prejudices on social relations is less than what it was in the 1960s, when America was segregated on the legal front. Today, this issue interweaves racial and social themes. The population of Ferguson, for instance, is predominantly black, but is also predominantly poor.

A survey from the Pew Research Center seems to be revealing to me. Conducted between Aug. 14 and 17, it polled black, white and other non-Hispanic people. Three major numbers, representative of the differences between these populations, were released. First, 65 percent of blacks think that the reaction of the Ferguson police officer was excessive, versus only 33 percent of whites. Then, 80 percent of blacks say that the root of the problem is racial, whereas 37 percent of whites think that race is the cause. Finally, only 18 percent of blacks polled say they trust the justice system, versus 52 percent of whites.

In addition, the survey is treated differently depending on where we are: the U.S. is a big country, and race relations in Ferguson are the same from Hawaii to New York. The situation of the Missouri city with a predominantly black population and where 56 of 57 police officers are white, is not the same in the rest of the country. American society is not uniform. Barack Obama thus wished to expand the policies and actions that have worked in one area to the rest of the country.

The events that we have been able to see these last years, in the Midwest or Florida, have not touched the Deep South, such as Louisiana or Mississippi. These states, because of their particular history, have grabbed the bull by its horns and taken appropriate measures. For example, they have put together an interracial police force to solve the issue of racism. However, the situation is not perfect in those states either; they too are far from being flawless.

Do multiracial societies produce more tensions and violence than “homogenous” societies?

We can no longer today talk about homogenous societies. They do not exist anymore. Societies are multicultural, and are diversified from an ethnic, cultural and religious point of view. All societies, in addition, can produce tensions, whatever their model is. After the 2005 urban revolts, some have underlined the failure of the assimilationist model. The British press was thus titled “liberty, equality, reality,” to mock this failure, and to highlight the success of the British multiculturalist model. However, a few years later, events have proven that they themselves were wrong. We would also be wrong to think that a society, whatever its model might be, could be foreign to this type of tension. What counts is practice.

Can we speak of a cultural war between “white trash,” ethnic minorities and the American “upper class?” In what do social and ethnic divides interweave themselves?”

On this matter, a survey published this week offers us some interesting results. Fifty-four percent of ethnic minorities polled thought that the Ferguson police officer should be prosecuted for murder, while only 23 percent of white people polled thought so. This study could be read two ways. On one hand we can see an opposition, a clear breakdown that shows that ethnic minorities do not trust either the justice system or the police. On the other hand, we can put these numbers back in historical context, and remember that 10 years ago, we would, without a doubt, have 90 percent of non-whites declaring the police officer guilty against 90 percent of whites thinking he is innocent. In other words, the opposition between the communities seems to go back a couple of years. Some black Americans find the jury’s decision fair. And some whites are present in the protests in New York to support Michael Brown’s family.

If there are still racial prejudices, the issue should be considered from the angle of social divides. We cannot understand one without studying the other. The Ferguson situation is more than one of poor blacks. The words of a paper like The Washington Post, which sees the violence as an illustration of the persisting racial divide, do not seem valid to me.

From Barack Obama: “There has been plenty of progress in race relations in America, but there are still problems to solve.” What are these problems? How do we improve the situation?

American institutions have made progress in the integration of minorities. Several indicators show this progress: high school graduation rates, entry to higher education, the median wages of blacks and non-blacks getting closer (although some differences still remain). Race relations are better, and urban diversity is increasing in all of the big cities of the country, with the exception of New York.

These improvements might, however, be nuanced. First, the changes impact communities differently: black people benefit less than the Asian and Hispanic communities. Then, a certain number of problems specifically touch the African-American community: its incarceration rates remain higher, its families are more broken and it has a greater number of single mothers, an issue raised by Obama during Father’s Day. This community of 30,000 people still suffers from certain social handicaps, but its importance makes it impossible to generalize: it remains heterogeneous, and its fate changes with time and location.

The fate of the prosecutor of Saint-Louis County, Robert McCulloch, seems representative to me of the tensions between the communities; some say that he’s both judge and partisan, given that his own father, a police officer, was killed by an African-American. These criticisms clearly show distrust by a portion of Americans for their judicial system.

The federal government plays an essential role in improving the situation of ethnic minorities. Remember that it abolished slavery in 1865 and was the engine for desegregation in 1964, and then 1965. Its role remains central today. Alongside the local Ferguson police investigation, a federal investigation is actually being conducted, as underlined by Eric Holder, the attorney general of the United States. The federal government seeks to determine whether or not the civil rights of the young black man killed were violated.