This is the year in which the US celebrated the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Bill. Instead of being able to reflect on the distance Americans have travelled since 1964, the horrific events unfolding in Ferguson, Missouri, only served to remind them of how far they still have to go.
It’s not just the thought of Michael Brown lying dead in the street with six bullets in his young body. It’s not just the scene of police in armoured vehicles, dressed in battle fatigues staring down demonstrators through the gun-sights of their high-powered weapons. It is that. But it is so much more.
It’s the pent up frustration of Ferguson’s African-American community. Despite comprising more than two-thirds of their city’s population, this community must deal with hostility from a police presence that is 95 per cent white. They face daily reminders of their subordinate status in the form of harassment and racial profiling. Add to this, the rage of too many African-Americans in Ferguson and the nation who are disproportionately plagued by youth unemployment and inadequate public education opportunities trapping them in the crippling clutches of poverty, violence, despair and anger.
What played out on the streets of Ferguson – the stand-off between demonstrators chanting "black life matters" and "hands up/don't shoot" facing well-armed police – is America's tragic unfinished business in microcosm. It's not just Ferguson, it's all who are on one side or the other of that line that has divided the nation since its beginning. Everywhere you look in today's America, you see signs that in the 150 years since the end of slavery and the 50 years since the Civil Rights Bill, the country still hasn't got it right.
Americans want to ignore it, but it cannot and should not be forgotten that the US was born in sin – slavery was its name. Freedom didn’t come with the stroke of Lincoln’s pen. Releasing slaves without providing the means to right the wrong and alleviate the injustice of that evil institution left generations of African-Americans to be preyed upon in the post-Reconstruction South. Moving north to find work, African-Americans found segregation which locked them into ghettos of poverty, where they were again preyed upon.
Slavery had ended, but racism lived on. Because the country has not confronted its corrosive evil and lasting stain, it continues to infect its political, social and cultural life. One of the most disturbing statistics is the fact that one-third of young African-American males are either in prison, serving terms or awaiting trial, or on parole. Something is terribly wrong.
Some naively believed that the election of Barack Obama would move matters beyond race. Instead, his election only served to aggravate the latent racism that has long defined American politics. Two generations ago, it was "states' rights" and institutionalised segregation as enshrined by the Jim Crow laws. A single generation ago, it was expressed in coded messages like "welfare queens" or "Willie Horton", a convicted criminal who raped a woman while on day release from a Massachusetts prison.
Today the focus is on the president himself. Listening to the Tea Party or the Birther Movement or the Faith and Freedom crowd, we hear subtle and not so subtle racism – “he’s not like us”, “he’s not for us”, “he’s not born here”, “he’s a Muslim”, “he scares me, I worry about what kind of America my children will live in”, or “we want our country back.”
It is as if middle-aged, middle class white Americans, facing the most severe economic crisis since the Depression, woke up one morning to find a young educated black man in the White House and could not contain their confusion and rage at what they believed was their displacement. The persistent physical division of the country into largely segregated neighbourhoods – with those who have, or at least feel that they are entitled to have, facing off against and fearing those who have not – has produced the drama of Ferguson with its defining emotions of resentment and fear and anger, and its over-militarised police force guarding the gates of privilege and “public order”.
Take a step back and think for a moment how the scenes of Ferguson look to the rest of the world and the shame of it all sinks in. America likes to think of itself as setting a standard for the world, while in reality the bar it has set for itself is so awfully low.
It can and must do better. In the 1990s, President Clinton invited us to engage in a national dialogue on race. I had hoped, back then, that a real national conversation would take place in our schools, places of worship, community centres and living rooms. And that out of that sustained encounter the US would be better able to become the “One America” Mr Clinton had envisioned. The project never got off the ground. But that should not discourage anyone from trying it again. Healing the racial divide should be the nation’s priority.
Only if it makes a determined effort, as a society, to move beyond division and inequality, will the US be able to bring to life Dr King’s dream and ensure that there are no more Fergusons and no more Michael Browns anywhere.
James Zogby is the president of the Arab American Institute
On Twitter: @aaiusa
