A Dark Night in America

It’s quiet now in Ferguson, but not for long. Citizens are preparing to go out on the streets again. It’s probably going to be another heated night. How did this happen?

On Aug. 9, a white police officer from Ferguson named Darren Wilson, age 28, shot an 18-year-old black man six times. The circumstances in which he died are disputed. The accounts of witnesses, the boy’s friend and the police officer don’t coincide, so it comes down to one certain thing: An unarmed young man was killed by a police officer; the victim was a person of color; the police officer is white; and this tragedy caused a chain of riots and became a new symbol of the fight against racism in America.

Last night, for example, two protesters were shot and 31 others were arrested. On Monday, the National Guard was sent to Ferguson to help the police, even after a curfew was put in place the previous weekend. For 10 days, this small town in Missouri with a little over 20,000 inhabitants has been the hottest spot in the United States of America.

Why did it go so far? Why is it that we are witnessing an even more violent Trayvon Martin story, about another unarmed black teenager who was killed by a white man and a member of a neighborhood watch patrol? Why is it that every time a white police officer shoots a black civilian in the United States — a country with a population of over 310 million and a black president — it makes international headlines and leads to a race riot? How come there’s no news in the American newspapers about a black police officer shooting a white man or another black person, or about a white police officer unjustifiably shooting a white teenager? Wasn’t America living its post-racial era under the leadership of its first black president?

According to an African-American journalist and friend of mine, who’s lived most of his life in the black South, there are enough cases in the U.S. where people of color are assaulted or shot, sometimes lethally, by police — enough to force many black parents to teach their children how to behave when they’re pulled over by the police. “Keep your hands where they can see them. Don’t answer back. Don’t make sudden moves” — these are just a few lessons to learn in case of an encounter with a white police officer. “Ferguson is part of an America that people thought was long gone,” said my American friend.

Ferguson began from a drama that seems to be based on white people’s old racial stereotypes and prejudice against black people. You’re probably going to argue that this chaos was actually caused by a very poor management of a crisis. According to the latest census, 67 percent of people living in Ferguson are black. The local government has just one black person working there. Imagine that the proportion of Roma people in the Romanian population were 20 times higher, but the number of Romas working in administration and police was just as small — close to none — as it is now. Do you see the problem?

The Ferguson event is about race, even if the mayor keeps stating on TV that there’s no racial tension in his town, and even if some believe the boy was a suspect in a robbery (the police officer admitted it wasn’t the reason the boy was stopped).

Eighty percent of blacks who were questioned by Pew Research Center believe that Brown’s shooting raised important issues about race. Only 37 percent of whites agree with this, with 47 percent saying that race is getting more attention than it deserves. Only 18 percent of the black respondents believe the same. The difference was even greater last year during the case of Trayvon Martin.

Here’s what Barack Obama said in July 2013, after Martin’s killer was acquitted: “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago … There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That’s happened to me — at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.”

Last night, Obama was a lot colder, and as far as I’ve seen on social networks, has let down those who were expecting another emotional and motivating speech. Do you know that only a quarter of Americans see their president as “black”? The other night, Obama seemed rather careful not to look black.