[News] Farewell to America

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  Gary Younge: Farewell to America

@garyyounge
<http://twitter.com/garyyounge>
Wednesday 1 July 2015 01.00 EDT
*http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/01/gary-younge-farewell-to-america*

For the past couple of years the summers, like hurricanes, have had 
names. Not single names like Katrina or Floyd – but full names like 
Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown. Like hurricanes, their arrival was both 
predictable and predicted, and yet somehow, when they landed, the effect 
was still shocking.

We do not yet know the name that will be attached to this particular 
season. He is still out there, playing Call of Duty, finding a way to 
feed his family or working to pay off his student loans. He (and it 
probably will be a he) has no idea that his days are numbered; and we 
have no idea what the number of those days will be.


  The Counted: people killed by police in the United States in 2015 –
  interactive

The Guardian is counting the people killed by US law enforcement 
agencies this year. Read their stories and contribute to our ongoing, 
crowdsourced project
Read more

The precise alchemy that makes one particular death politically totemic 
while others go unmourned beyond their families and communities is not 
quite clear. Video helps, but is not essential. Some footage of cops 
rolling up like death squads and effectively executing people who posed 
no real threat has barely pricked the popular imagination. When the 
authorities fail to heed community outrage, or substantively 
investigate, let alone discipline, the police, the situation can become 
explosive. An underlying, ongoing tension between authorities and those 
being policed has been a factor in some cases. So, we do not know quite 
why his death will capture the political imagination in a way that 
others will not.

But we do know, with gruesome certainty, that his number will come up – 
that one day he will be slain in cold blood by a policeman (once again 
it probably will be a man) who is supposed to protect him and his 
community. We know this because it is statistically inevitable and has 
historical precedent. We know this because we have seen it happen again 
and again. We know this because this is not just how America works; it 
is how America was built. Like a hurricane, we know it is coming – we 
just do not yet know where or when or how much damage it will do.

Summer is riot season. It’s when Watts, Newark and Detroit erupted in 
violence in the 1960s, sparked by callous policing. It’s when school is 
out, pool parties are on and domestic life, particularly in urban 
centres, is turned inside-out: from the living room to the stoop, from 
the couch to the street. It’s when tempers get short and resentments 
bubble up like molten asphalt. It’s when, to paraphrase Langston Hughes, 
deferred dreams explode.

This is not my desire; it is my prediction. You can feel it building 
with every new Facebook post, viral video and Twitter storm. You can 
hear it from conversations with strangers at post offices, liquor stores 
and coffee shops. It is an unpleasant prediction to make because, 
ultimately, these riots highlight a problem they cannot, in themselves, 
solve; and it is an easy one to make because, as one bystander in 
Baltimore put it when disturbances flared there earlier this year: “You 
can only put so much into a pressure cooker before it pop.”

This is the summer I will leave America, after 12 years as a foreign 
correspondent, and return to London. My decision to come back to Britain 
was prompted by banal, personal factors that have nothing to do with 
current events; if my aim was to escape aggressive policing and racial 
disadvantage, I would not be heading to Hackney.

But while the events of the last few years did not prompt the decision 
to come back, they do make me relieved that the decision had already 
been made. It is why I have not once had second thoughts.**If I had to 
pick a summer to leave, this would be the one. Another season of black 
parents grieving, police chiefs explaining and clueless anchors opining. 
Another season when America has to be reminded that black lives matter 
because black deaths at the hands of the state have been accepted as 
routine for so long. A summer ripe for rage.


    * * *

*I arrived in New York just a few months* before the Iraq war. Americans 
seemed either angry at the rest of the world, angry at each other, or 
both. The top five books on the New York Times bestseller list the month 
I started were: Bush at War (Bob Woodward’s hagiographic account of the 
post-9/11 White House); The Right Man (Bush’s former speechwriter 
relives his first year in the White House); Portrait of a Killer 
(Patricia Cornwell on Jack the Ripper); The Savage Nation (a rightwing 
radio talkshow host saves America from “the liberal assault on our 
borders, language and culture”); and Leadership (Republican former New 
York mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s post 9/11 victory lap).

There has barely been a quiet moment since. First there was the jingoism 
of the Iraq war, then the re-election of George W Bush in 2004, 
Hurricane Katrina, disillusionment with the Iraq war, the “Minutemen” 
anti-immigration vigilantes, the huge pro-immigrant “¡Sí se puede!” 
protests, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, the economic crash, Occupy Wall 
Street, the Tea Party, Obama’s reelection and the current rise in 
anti-racist activism. Being a foreigner made all these phenomena 
intriguing. Politically and morally, I picked sides. But, when 
reporting, it was more like anthropology. I saw it as my mission to try 
and understand the US: why did poor white people vote against their 
economic interests? How did the descendants of immigrants become 
xenophobic? Why were people disappointed in Obama when he had promised 
so little? The search for the answer was illuminating, even when I never 
found it or didn’t like it.

But the cultural distance I enjoyed as a Briton in a foreign country 
felt like a blended veneer of invincibility and invisibility. I thought 
of myself less as a participant than an onlooker. While reporting from 
rural Mississippi in 2003, I stopped to ask directions at the house of 
an old white couple, and they threatened to shoot me. I thought this was 
funny. I got back into my car sharpish and drove off – but I never once 
thought they would actually shoot me. How crazy would that be? When I 
got home, I told my wife and brother-in-law, who are African American. 
Their parents grew up in the South under segregation; even today, my 
mother-in-law wouldn’t stop her car in Mississippi for anything but 
petrol. They didn’t think it was funny at all: what on earth did I think 
I was doing, stopping to ask old white folk in rural Mississippi for 
directions?

Yet, somewhere along the way, I became invested. That was partly about 
time: as I came to know people – rather than just interviewing them – I 
came to relate to the issues more intimately. When someone close to you 
struggles with chronic pain because they have no healthcare, has their 
kitchen window pierced by gunfire or cannot pay a visit to their home 
country because they are undocumented, your relationship to issues like 
health reform, gun control or immigration is transformed. Not because 
your views change but because knowing and understanding something simply 
does not provide the same intensity as having it in your life.

But my investment was primarily about circumstances. On the weekend in 
2007 that Barack Obama declared his presidential candidacy, our son was 
born. Six years later, we had a daughter. For the most part I have kept 
my English accent. But my language relating to children is reflexively 
American: diapers, strollers, pacifiers, recess, candy and long pants. I 
have only ever been a parent here – a role for which my own upbringing 
in England provides no real reference point. One summer evening, a 
couple years after we moved to Chicago, our daughter was struggling to 
settle down and so my wife decided to take a short walk to the local 
supermarket to bob her to sleep in the carrier. On the way back there 
was shooting in the street and she had to seek shelter in a local 
barbershop. When the snow finally melted this year one discarded gun was 
found in the alley behind our local park and another showed up in the 
alley behind my son’s school. My days of being an onlooker were over. I 
was dealing with daycare, summer camps, schools, doctor’s visits, parks 
and other parents. The day we brought my son home, an article in the New 
York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/opinion/05herbert.html> 
pointed out that in America “a black male who drops out of high school 
is 60 times more likely to find himself in prison than one with a 
bachelor’s degree”. Previously, I’d have found that interesting and 
troubling. Now it was personal. I had skin in the game. Black skin in a 
game where the odds are stacked against it.


    * * *

*Obama’s ascent, I was told by many* and frequently during his campaign, 
would change these odds. Whenever I asked “How?” no one could say 
exactly. But his very presence, they insisted, would provide a marker 
for my son and all who look like him. I never believed that. First of 
all, one person cannot undo centuries of discrimination, no matter how 
much nominal power they have. Second, given the institutions into which 
Obama would be embedded – namely the Democratic party and the presidency 
– there would only ever be so much he could or would do. He was aspiring 
to sit atop a system awash with corporate donations in which 
congressional seats are openly gerrymandered and 41% of the upper 
chamber can block almost anything. He was the most progressive candidate 
viable for the presidency, which says a great deal, given the 
alternatives, but means very little, given what would be needed to 
significantly shift the dial on such issues as race and inequality.

Pointing this out amid the hoopla of his candidacy made you sound like 
Eeyore. I was delighted when he won. But somehow I could never be quite 
as delighted as some people felt I should have been. When Obama beat 
Hillary Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic primary – in the first 
southern state to secede from the union, which sparked the civil war, 
where the Confederate flag still flies above the state capitol and a 
white supremacist recently gunned down nine parishioners at a black 
church – the crowds chanted “Race Doesn’t Matter”. (An odd rallying cry, 
since it was precisely because he was a black candidate that they were 
shouting it; it’s not like Hillary’s crowd would have shouted the same 
thing if she had won.)

The symbolic advantages of Obama’s election were clear. For two years I 
pushed my son around in his stroller surrounded by a picture of a black 
man framed by the words “Hope” and “Change”. A year or so after Obama 
came to office, my son had a playdate with a four-year-old white friend 
who looked up from his Thomas the Tank Engine and told my son: “You’re 
black.” It was a reasonable thing for a child of that age to point out – 
he was noticing difference, not race. But when my son looked at me for a 
cue, I now had a new arrow in my quiver to deflect any potential 
awkwardness. “That’s right,” I said. “Just like the president.”

But the substantial benefits were elusive. Obama inherited an economic 
crisis that hurt African Americans more than any other community. The 
discrepancy between black and white employment and wealth grew during 
his first few years and has barely narrowed since. In 2010, I used this 
anecdote in a column by way of pointing out the limited symbolic value 
of having a black president. “True, it is something,”I wrote 
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/14/america-race-gender-obama-diversity>. 
“But when Thomas is safely back in the station and the moment is over, 
it is not very much. Because for all the white noise emanating from the 
Tea Party movement, it has been black Americans who have suffered most 
since Obama took office. Over the last 14 months the gap between my 
son’s life chances and his friend’s have been widening.”

This last statement was as undeniably true as it was apparently 
controversial. I had not claimed that my son was likely to do badly, 
simply that his odds for success were far worse than the kid he was 
playing with, and that they were further deteriorating. A study in 2014 
<http://www.studentimpactproject.org/reports> found that a black college 
student has the same chances of getting a job as a white high-school 
dropout. “As the recession has dragged on,” the New York Times pointed 
out <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/us/01race.html?_r=0> just a 
couple months before my son’s playdate, the disparity between black and 
white unemployment “has been even more pronounced for those with college 
degrees, compared with those without. Education, it seems, does not 
level the playing field – in fact, it appears to have made it more 
uneven.” But insisting that racism would have a material effect on my 
son’s life ruffled some readers’ feathers.

“Nonsense,” wrote one commenter. “Your middle-class status means his 
future will have more in common with his white friends than any poor 
black kid.” Another – a Guardian contributor, no less – also chimed in: 
“For you to claim shared victimhood on skin colour alone is highly 
disingenuous. Your son is highly likely to do OK, to say the least. He 
has most of the advantages in the world.”

Such responses betrayed complete ignorance about the lived experience of 
race in a country as segregated as the United States. Class does makes a 
big difference, of course: this is America. We have healthcare, jobs, 
university educations and a car; we live in a community with reasonable 
schools, supermarkets and restaurants. In short, we have resources and 
therefore we have options.

We do not, however, have the option not to be black. And in this time 
and this place that is no minor factor. That is not “claiming shared 
victimhood”, it is recognising a fact of life. Class offers a range of 
privileges; but it is not a sealant that protects you from everything 
else. If it was, rich women would never get raped and wealthy gay 
couples could marry all around the world.

To even try to have the kind of gilded black life to which these 
detractors alluded, we would have to do far more than just revel in our 
bank accounts and leverage our cultural capital. We would have to live 
in an area with few other black people, since black neighbourhoods are 
policed with insufficient respect for life or liberty; send our children 
to a school with few other black students, since majority-black schools 
are underfunded; tell them not to wear anything that would associate 
them with black culture, since doing so would make them more vulnerable 
to profiling; tell them not to mix with other black children, since they 
are likely to live in the very areas and go to the very schools from 
which we would be trying to escape; and not let the children go out 
after dark, since being young and black after sunset makes the police 
suspect that you have done or are about to do something.

The list could go on. None of this self-loathing behaviour would provide 
any guarantees, of course. Racism does what it says on the packet; it 
discriminates against people on the grounds of race. It can be as 
arbitrary in its choice of victim as it is systemic in its execution. 
And while it never works alone (but in concert with class, gender and a 
host of other rogue characters), it can operate independently. No one is 
going to be checking my bank account or professional status when they 
are looking at my kids.

Trayvon Martin was walking through a gated community when George 
Zimmerman pegged him for a thug and shot him dead. Clementa Pinckney, a 
South Carolina state senator, was in one of Charleston’s most impressive 
churches when Dylann Roof murdered him and eight others.

I have not only never met an African American who thought they could buy 
themselves the advantages of a white American; I have yet to meet one 
who thinks they can even buy themselves out of the disadvantages of 
being black. All you can do is limit the odds. And when one in three 
black boys born in 2001 is destined for the prison system, those odds 
are pretty bad. Having a black man in the White House has not changed that.


    * * *

*Most days, the park closest to us* looks like Sesame Street. White, 
black and Vietnamese American kids climbing, swinging and sliding. 
Occasionally, particularly late on weekday afternoons, teenagers show 
up. Like adolescents the western world over, they are bored, broke, 
horny and lost. They don’t want to stay at home, but can’t afford to be 
anywhere that costs money, and so they come to the public space most 
approximate to their needs, where they squeeze into swings that are 
meant for smaller kids and joke, flirt and banter. Very occasionally 
they swear and get a little rowdy – but nothing that an adult could not 
deal with by simply asking them to keep the language down because there 
are little kids around. Oh, and in this park the teenagers are usually 
black.

Their presence certainly changes the mood. But the only time it ever 
really gets tense is when the police come. The better police chat with 
them, the worse ones interrogate them. Either way, the presence of 
armed, uniformed people in this children’s space is both unsettling and 
unnecessary. The smaller kids and those new to the park imagine 
something seriously wrong must have happened for the police to be there; 
the older ones (by which I mean those aged seven and over), and those 
who are already familiar with the drill just shrug: the cops are in our 
park again. It is difficult to tell which response is worse.

Once, when some adolescents were hanging out relatively quietly one 
afternoon, I struck up a conversation with a white woman. Her son was 
roughly the same age as mine, we both lived nearby and neither of our 
kids would have to cross a road to get to the park. We were discussing 
at what age we thought it would be appropriate to let our boys come by 
themselves. “The thing is, you just don’t know if it’s going to be quiet 
or if the junior gangbangers are going to be hanging around,” she said, 
gesturing to the youths on the swings.

I was stunned. Whenever I have written about police killings at least 
one reader reminds me that black people are most likely to be killed by 
black people. This is both true and irrelevant. First, because all 
Americans are overwhelmingly likely to be killed by assailants of their 
own race, so what some brand “black-on-black crime 
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/15/the-trayvon-martin-killing-and-the-myth-of-black-on-black-crime.html>” 
should, more accurately, just be called crime. But also because black 
people are not, by dint of their melanin content, entrusted to protect 
and serve the public. The police are. Over the last decade I have 
reported from many impoverished neighbourhoods, populated by all races, 
where I have felt unsafe. That hasn’t made me fear black people or any 
other racial group; it has just made me loathe poverty and gun culture 
in general, since it is that toxic combination that both drives the 
crime and makes it lethal.

This woman and I were looking at the same kids but seeing quite 
different things.

“What makes you think they’re going to become gangbangers?” I asked. She 
shrugged. The conversation pretty much dried up after that.

There is a section of white society – a broad section that includes 
affable mothers who will speak to black strangers like me in the park – 
who understand black kids as an inherent threat. Beyond the segregated 
ghettos where few white people venture, the presence of black youth 
apparently marks not just the potential for trouble but the arrival of 
it. When George Zimmerman saw Trayvon Martin, he didn’t see a 
17-year-old boy walking home from the store. He saw someone “real 
suspicious”, “up to no good”, whom he assumed bore some responsibility 
for recent burglaries.

“Fucking punks,” he told the police, referring to Trayvon. “These 
assholes, they always get away.”

Indeed black children are often not even regarded as children at all. In 
Goose Creek, South Carolina, police demanded DNA samples from two middle 
school students after they were mistaken for a 32-year-old suspect. 
After the killing of Tamir Rice – the 12-year-old shot dead by police in 
Cleveland after someone reported him brandishing what they assumed was a 
“probably fake” gun – a police spokesman said it was his own fault. 
“Tamir Rice is in the wrong,” he said. “He’s menacing. He’s 5ft 7in, 191 
pounds. He wasn’t that little kid you’re seeing in pictures. He’s a 
12-year-old in an adult body.” When testifying before the grand jury 
into the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Darren Wilson described 
his assailant more like an animal than a 18-year-old: “He looked up at 
me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe 
it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.” Even after 
Wilson shot Brown he continued to depict him as both physically 
superhuman and emotionally subhuman. “He was almost bulking up to run 
through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting him. And 
the face that he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even 
there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.”

The evidence is not merely anecdotal. A study last year published in the 
American Psychological Association’s online Journal of Personality and 
Social Psychology revealed that white Americans overestimated the age of 
black boys over the age of 10 by an average of four and a half years; 
white respondents also assumed that black children were more culpable 
than whites or Latinos, particularly when the boys were matched with 
serious crimes. “Children in most societies are considered to be in a 
distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the need for 
protection,” wrote Phillip Atiba Goff 
<http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/03/black-boys-older.aspx> 
PhD, of the University of California, Los Angeles.**“Our research found 
that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age 
when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are 
essentially innocent.” My son is tall for his age; these are the things 
you worry about.

It wasn’t long before my wife and I began to notice the degree to which 
some white adults felt entitled to shout at black children – be it in 
the street, or on school trips – for infractions either minor or imagined.

Last summer, on the afternoon I arrived home from reporting on the 
disturbances after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, there 
was a barbecue and music at the local park. I took the kids. The park 
has a water feature that shoots wet jets from the ground and sprays kids 
in fountains from all sides as they paddle around. The younger ones peel 
down to their underwear while the older ones just pile in whatever they 
have on. It was a scorching day and my son and several other kids were 
having a water fight – a tame affair with very little collateral damage 
for those not involved beyond the odd sprinkling. At one stage, while in 
hot pursuit of his main rival, my son splashed a woman on her leg. She 
yelled at him as though he’d hit her with a brick.

I’d seen the whole thing and ran over.

“What’s the problem?” I said.

“Look. He’s covered me in water,” she shouted.

I looked. She was barely wet. But even if he had …

“You’re standing in a children’s park, on a hot day, next to a water 
feature,” I said. “Deal with it. Just stop shouting at him.”

“Don’t you tell me what to do,” she barked.

“Now you’re shouting at me,” I said. “Just stop it.”

“Who the hell are you?” she yelled.

“I’m his dad that’s who.”

“You’re nobody, that’s who you are,” she bellowed. “Nobody.”


    * * *

*One of the first stories I covered* on my arrival was the funeral of 
Mamie Till Mobley, the 81-year-old mother of the late Emmett Till. In 
1955 Mamie sent her 14-year-old son, Emmett, from Chicago to rural 
Mississippi to spend his summer holiday with family. She packed him off 
with a warning: “If you have to get on your knees and bow when a white 
person goes past,” she told him, “do it willingly.”

Emmett didn’t follow her advice. While in the small town of Money, in 
the Delta region, he either said “Bye, baby” or wolf-whistled at a white 
woman in a grocery store. Three days later his body was fished out of 
the Tallahatchie river with a bullet in his skull, an eye gouged out and 
his forehead crushed on one side.

Raising a black child in a racist society poses a very particular set of 
challenges. On the one hand, you want them to be proud and confident of 
who they are. On the other, you have to teach them that they are 
vulnerable precisely because of who they are, in the knowledge that 
awareness of that vulnerability just might save their life. We are 
trying to raise self-confident children for long lives, not hashtags for 
slaughter.

Explaining the complex historical and social forces that make such a 
dance necessary is not easy at the best of times. Making them 
comprehensible to a child is nigh impossible without gross 
simplifications and cutting corners. Once, during our 10-minute walk to 
daycare, my son asked if we could take another route. “Why?” I asked.

“Because that way they stop all the black boys,” he said.

He was right. Roughly twice a week we would pass young black men being 
frisked or arrested, usually on the way home. He was also four, and 
until that point I was not aware that he had even noticed. I tried to 
make him feel safe.

“Well don’t worry. You’re with me and they’re not going to stop us,” I 
told him.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because we haven’t done anything,” I said.

“What have they done?” he asked.

He had me. From then on we took another route.

When I interviewed Maya Angelou in 2002, she told me that the September 
11 attacks of the previous year were understood differently by African 
Americans. “Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in 
America,” she said. “But black people have been living in a state of 
terror in this country for more than 400 years.” It is that state of 
terror that has been laid bare these last few years.

The American polity and media episodically “discovers” this daily 
reality in much the same way that teenagers discover sex – urgently, 
earnestly, voraciously and carelessly, with great self-indulgence but 
precious little self-awareness. They have always been aware of it but 
somehow when confronted with it, it nonetheless takes them by surprise.

The week I arrived, in December 2002, the Senate minority leader, 
Mississippi Republican Trent Lott, resigned from his leadership position 
after he said in a speech that America would have been a better place 
had the segregationist Strom Thurmond won the presidency in 1948. The 
mainstream media saw nothing outrageous in this – as if it was just the 
kind of thing a conservative southern senator might say. It took 
bloggers to make it a story. As I write, some southern states are 
debating whether to keep the Confederate flag flying on state grounds in 
various guises – as though it took nine people dying on their doorstep 
to understand its racist connotations.

It is as though the centuries-old narrative of racial inequality is too 
tiresome to acknowledge, except as a footnote, until it appears in 
dramatic fashion, as it did after Hurricane Katrina or the protests in 
Ferguson. At that point the bored become suddenly scandalised. In a 
nation that prides itself on always moving forward, the notion that they 
are “still dealing with this” feels like an affront to the national 
character. That’s why Obama’s candidacy had such a simple and uplifting 
appeal to so many Americans. As the radical academic and 1970s icon 
Angela Davis explained to me in 2007, it represented “a model of 
diversity as the difference that makes no difference, the change that 
brings about no change”.

This most recent episode of racial awakening has lasted longer than 
most. For the last couple of years the brutal banality of daily life for 
some people in this country has become visible and undeniable to those 
who have no immediate connection to it. But nothing new has happened. 
There has been no spike in police brutality. What’s new is that people 
are looking. And thanks to new technology (namely the democratisation of 
the ability to film and distribute), they have lots to look at. As a 
result, a significant section of white America is outraged at the sight 
of what it had previously chosen to ignore, while a dwindling but still 
sizeable and vocal few still refuse to believe their eyes.


    * * *

*I’ve never found it particularly useful* to compare racisms – as though 
one manifestation might be better than another. Every society, 
regardless of its racial composition, has overlapping and interweaving 
hierarchies. Insisting on the superiority of one over another suggests 
there are racisms out there worth having – a race to the bottom with no 
moral centre.

In June 1998, as the public inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence 
laid bare one of the more insidious examples of British racism, news 
arrived from Jasper, Texas, about the murder of James Byrd. Byrd, an 
African American, had been picked up by three men, one of whom he knew 
and two of whom were white supremacists. Instead of driving him home, 
they took him to a remote country road, beat him, urinated on him and 
chained him by his ankles to their pickup truck before dragging him for 
more than a mile until his head came off. Then they went for a barbecue.

The next day, during an editorial meeting at the Guardian which featured 
a discussion of the Lawrence inquiry followed by the Byrd murder, one of 
my colleagues remarked, of Byrd’s killing: “Well at least we don’t do 
that here.”

“That will be of little comfort to Doreen and Neville Lawrence,” I thought.

I have more cousins in the US than in Britain. They are doing fine. At 
one stage I fully intended to immigrate here. While that plan no longer 
stands, it still doesn’t strike me as insane.

While I have been in America, I have not been shot at, arrested, 
imprisoned or otherwise seriously inconvenienced by the state. I do not 
live in the hollowed out, jobless zones of urban economic despair to 
which many African Americans have been abandoned. I have been shouted at 
in a park, taken different routes to school, and occasionally dealt with 
bigoted officials. (While driving through Mississippi to cover Katrina I 
approached a roadblock that all the other journalists had easily passed 
through, only to have a policeman pat the gun in his holster and turn me 
around). These experiences are aggravating. They are not life-threatening.

I am not Michael Brown. But then Michael Brown wasn’t Michael Brown 
before he was shot dead and had his body left on the street for four 
hours; Eric Garner was just a man trying to sell cigarettes in the 
street before he was choked to death in Staten Island; Tamir Rice was 
just a boisterous kid acting out in a park before a policeman leaped out 
of his squad car and shot him within seconds. Being shot dead by the 
police or anyone else is not the daily experience of black people in 
America.

But what became clear following the Department of Justice report into 
the Ferguson police force was just how extreme and commonplace these 
aggravations could be. To cite just a few examples: between 2007 to 
2014, one woman in Ferguson was arrested twice, spent six days in jail 
and paid $550 as a result of one parking ticket for which she was 
originally charged $151. She tried to pay in smaller instalments - $25 
or $50 a time - but the court refused to accept anything less than the 
full payment, which she could not afford. Seven years after the original 
infraction she still owed $541 – this was how the town raised its 
revenue. It was not a glitch in the system; it was the system.

Then there was the 14-year-old boy that the Ferguson police found in an 
abandoned building, who was chased down by a dog that bit his ankle and 
his left arm as he protected his face. The boy says officers kicked him 
in the head and then laughed about it after. The officers say they 
thought he was armed; he wasn’t. Department of Justice investigators 
found that every time a police dog in Ferguson bit someone, the victim 
was black.

Then there was the man pulled out of his house by the police after 
reports of an altercation inside. As they dragged him out he told them: 
“You don’t have a reason to lock me up.”

“Nigger, I can find something to lock you up on,” the officer told him.

“Good luck with that,” the man responded. The officer slammed the man’s 
face into a wall and he fell to the floor.

“Don’t pass out, motherfucker, because I’m not carrying you to my car,” 
the officer is claimed to have said.

This was the same month Brown was killed. Were it not for the 
disturbances following Brown’s death, there would have been no 
investigation – not only would we have heard nothing of these things 
but, because no light had been shone on them, the Ferguson police would 
be carrying on with the same level of impunity. This was a small 
midwestern suburb few had heard of – unremarkable in every way, which is 
precisely what makes the goings on there noteworthy. If it was happening 
there, then it could be happening anywhere.

It is exhausting. When the videos of brutality go viral I can’t watch 
them unless I have to write about them. I don’t need to be shocked – 
which is just as well because these videos emerge with such regularity 
that they cease to be shocking. Were it not for the thrill of seeing an 
unjaded younger generation reviving the best of the nation’s traditions 
of anti-racist resistance, I would be in despair.

The altercations in the park, the rerouted walks to school, the 
aggravations of daily life are the lower end of a continuum – a dull 
drumbeat that occasionally crescendos into violent confrontation and 
even social conflagration. As spring turns to summer the volume keeps 
ratcheting up.

“Terror,” the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes in his book Fear of 
Small Numbers, “is first of all the terror of the next attack.” The 
terrorism resides not just in the fact that it happens, but that one is 
braced for the possibility that it could happen to you at any moment. 
Seven children and teenagers are shot on an average day in the US. I 
have just finished writing a book in which I take a random day and 
interview the families and friends of those who perished. Ten young 
people died the day I chose. Eight were black. All of the black parents 
said they had assumed this could happen to their son.

As one bereaved dad told me: “You wouldn’t be doing your job as a father 
if you didn’t.”

• Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread 
<https://twitter.com/gdnlongread>

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