The blacks who lived through slavery and Jim Crow would beg to differ.
The shooting of Michael Brown is not a sudden, excessive, abusive, or random imposition of state power. It is rather a reminder of a certain state of the world that has been in existence for centuries—from slavery, to Black Codes and Jim Crow, both designed to maintain the indentured servitude of Blacks, to “stop and frisk” policing. The above picture pulls back the curtain on the sheer, profound, constant presence of police power, protected by the law, in the service of elites. Philosopher Charles Mills gives it the technical term of “white supremacy,” and points to the racial contract–promising equality to all persons while withholding it from all sub-persons—Black slaves, their descendants, and other vulnerable minorities–as its evidence.
The news that a police officer shot an African American teen several times in the chest was shocking, horrifying, gut-wrenching. But it was not surprising. As even a weekly perusal of newspapers tells us, the murders of Black teens and men by private white citizens or police officers are common, ordinary, every day events. Two days after the shooting of Michael Brown, another young unarmed Black man, this time in Los Angeles, was shot by a police officer. […]
Yet, in the initial twenty-four hours after Michael Brown’s shooting, I saw flashes of the same questions in the comments to news articles and on Twitter: “What did he do?” “Why?” “Wtf?” Certainly, some of these were plaintive questions asked by grieving persons. But others reflected an earnest, though frustrating, innocence—one that found a shooting of a Black teen by a policeman to be unusual, accidental, coincidental, extraordinary. Their questions echoed as I flipped through the fleeting images that followed the news of the shooting—rows of police officers with shields and batons and terrifying looking dogs, pumped up and ready to attack–accompanied by articles about “looting and riots,” tear gas, sniper guns, and bullets.