History only arcs towards justice if people force it

Tony Karon looks at what the protests in Ferguson say about attitudes towards race in America.

A police officer in San Francisco faces protesters angry about the grand jury's decision on the shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri. Photo: Elijah Nouvelage / Reuters

‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” runs a famous line from Dr Martin Luther King Jr that is often quoted by Barack Obama. But faith that history is somehow marching itself to a better place is in short supply among African Americans who face an epidemic of police violence against unarmed young black men of which the case of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, has simply been a punctuation point.

“Black Lives Matter!” is the slogan of the day as outraged young Americans of all hues take to the nation’s streets to protest against the exoneration by a local grand jury of Darren Wilson, the white policeman who killed Brown. But “Black Lives Matter!” does not appear to be a self-evident truth to many of the white men tasked with policing America’s streets.

“This decision seems to underscore an unwritten rule that black lives hold no value, that you may kill black men in this country without consequences or repercussions,” said Marcia Fudge, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, following the verdict.

Pity Mr Obama then, the first black president of a country that, at some visceral level, has yet to shake off the racist pathologies of slavery, as he sought a meaningful response.

“The frustrations that we’ve seen are not about a particular incident,” Mr Obama acknowledged. “They have deep roots in many communities of colour who have a sense that our laws are not always being enforced uniformly or fairly.”

That much was obvious: Brown was hardly the first unarmed young black man to be killed by white cops on Obama’s watch, nor will he be the last. The weekend before the verdict, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by Cleveland policemen after the boy brandished a BB gun in a park. Two days later, Akai Gurley was shot dead in the stairwell of his Brooklyn apartment building by a policeman patrolling with his gun drawn. And those were just the two most high-profile incidents of the week that preceded the grand jury’s decision.

The federal authorities do a poor job of keeping track of police homicides, but an investigation released in October by the non-profit Pro-Publica found that young black males are 21 times more likely to be killed by policemen than their white peers.

And here was Obama responding to a predominantly white jury acquitting a white policeman who in his testimony invoked tropes dating back to slavery – Mike Brown as “a demon” who was “bulking himself up” to run through bullets, incarnating the superhuman black male spectre that has haunted centuries of white American nightmares.

But whereas Obama had responded in an instinctively personal fashion to the murder of teenager Trayvon Martin by a white vigilante in Florida in 2012 – “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago” – he’s also the leader of the country that is systematically failing the Martins and the Browns. His message to them: “Burning buildings, torching cars, destroying property, putting people at risk [is] destructive and there’s no excuse for it.” Instead, he urged them to “take the long-term, hard but lasting route of working with me and governors and state officials to bring about some real change.” Obama also hailed America’s “enormous progress in race relations over the course of the last several decades,” adding, “I have witnessed this in my own life, and to deny this progress is to deny America’s capacity for change”.

But history’s arc has only bent towards justice when ordinary people have taken to the streets to bend it that way. There’s plenty of rioting in the story of social progress in America, whether the issue is labour rights, women’s rights or black civil rights. Legislation enabling these changes followed protest that made those demands impossible for those in power to ignore. Mr Obama may be sidestepping the fact that America’s capacity for change was demonstrated in response to often turbulent mass protest.

Capturing the mood on the streets of Ferguson on Tuesday night, The New Yorker contributor Jelani Cobb noted that the Obama presidency demonstrated “the symbolic empowerment of individuals, while the great many remain citizen-outsiders”. Atlantic Monthly commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates was even more blunt: “As it happens, there is nothing about a congenitally racist country that necessarily prevents an individual leader hailing from the pariah class. The office does not care where the leader originates, so long as the leader ultimately speaks for the state.”

But for Emory University historian Carol Anderson, the killing of young black men by police in such large numbers reflects another chapter in the ongoing story of white rage at America’s racial progress.

“The election of Obama gave hope to the country and the world that a new racial climate had emerged in America, or that it would,” Anderson wrote. “But such audacious hopes would be short-lived. A rash of voter-suppression legislation, a series of unfathomable Supreme Court decisions, the rise of stand-your-ground laws and continuing police brutality make clear that Obama’s election and reelection have unleashed yet another wave of fear and anger.” (Indeed, Mr Obama’s election and reelection sparked record sales of guns and ammunition.)

Bluntly put, the kids on the streets in Ferguson and all over America this week are less inclined, now, to see their own experience reflected in the man in the White House, or to share his faith in America’s institutions of government. And President Obama’s call for them to work with him and governors and state officials to make some “real change” are unlikely to resonate. Their very presence on the streets is a sign that they’ve decided that black lives matter too much to simply be left to the workings of a political and legal system that has failed so many until now.

Tony Karon teaches in the graduate programme at the New School in New York