Ferguson Reference

I have over-shared. I have treated very serious events that happen in the world as if they were demands for my opinion. Last night, a federal jury in St. Louis elected not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, for killing Michael Brown, an unarmed black civilian. So, it would seem a perfect time to make my own comment on how patterns of dispossession and violence correlate in modern history, with American cases some of the best known.

Today, I have to remember that white consternation does nothing. What is meaningful comes from real listening one has done, on openly hearing voices of color and opening oneself to recognize a different subject of what is in effect a different country. For this, I am limiting comments here to reference to Ta-nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations". This essay is a work of history more sober and lucid than much of what is published by academic historians.

Last night, disproportionate amounts of the discourse focused on particulars: particular people's disrespect for property maybe associated with peaceful protest, particularities of police force-doctrine and whether and how Wilson followed them.

What this did was to obscure focus on the permanent structures "within which violence circulates" as Talal Asad says. It obscures focus on what race is and how it renders people of color vulnerable as others are not.

Arguing that race is not a determinate part of people's lives right now in the US is arguing against history. It is the same thing as arguing that anti-Semitism was created by a few malefactors in Germany in the 1930s without a long history dispossession. It is the same as arguing Apartheid was anomalous to what came before and after in South African history without recognizing the structures of the colonial and globalizing economies and the deployment of the concept of color.

Arguing America is the kind of place where everyone spontaneously, where everyone makes her own destiny and which destiny is accountable only to his own fault is to think we have an exceptional innocence and freedom from mutual responsibility.

No one who thinks about history can honestly think this, and no one has ever thought this about any place and time other than his own. It's this granting this ahistorical liberty and deference to those in our society with some of the most power and authority that we all have to do something about.