Ferguson, the Gloomy Mirror of Fractured America

Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, has for the last 10 days seemed like a cruel metaphor of modern America — its tensions, its divides and its old demons.

Ferguson: 22,000 inhabitants; three-quarters white 20 years ago, two-thirds black today; middle class yesterday, poor today. But the mayor of the town is white, there is only one African-American on the town council, and only 6 percent of the police force is black. Ferguson, where on August 9 in the middle of the day, and witnessed by one of his friends, a young 18-year-old African-American named Michael Brown was shot dead by six bullets from [the gun of] one of the town’s white police officers, in circumstances that still remain unclear.

Tensions have remained high in Ferguson for 10 days now. Every night, scenes of rioting and looting oppose an increasingly militarized police force against several hundred angry protesters. The escalation of law enforcement — the use of armored vehicles, imposition of a state of emergency and, henceforth, intervention of the National Guard — has until now done nothing to calm things down. On the contrary — like the murder of another young African-American, Trayvon Martin, in February 2012, and like many other similar cases that received less media coverage, the Ferguson drama can only bring up the persistence of the American racial divide, increased by social disparity. It maintains and reinforces the strong and unbearable belief of many young black Americans that they remain the preferred target of daily police violence, comprised of endless checks, if not deadly gunfire.

Obama’s Caution

Just over 10 years ago, a young black senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, succeeded in introducing major changes to the state’s legislation in order to limit abuses of police power and to better train them. Mr. Obama has been in the White House for six years now. Both his 2008 election and his re-election in 2012 have shown the remarkable evolution of mentalities in a country long undermined by racial segregation.

But the Michael Brown affair shows how far there still is to go to abolish this “color line” that still divides America. The American president recognized this when he spoke again on August 18. Calling on police forces to show “restraint” and the demonstrators to protest “peacefully,” he underlined the fact that young men of color “are more likely to end up in jail or in the criminal justice system than they are in a good job or in college … That’s a big project. It’s one that we’ve been trying to carry out now for a couple of centuries,” concluded Mr. Obama.

This prudence in the face of the reactions and conservatism of the community, this refusal to dramatize and to start a major national debate on the nagging racial question comes from a rational and conscious choice by the American president. But it is a choice that is not easily heard by the young people of Ferguson — and beyond that, by progressive America.