Faith after Ferguson: It’s been 1 year since Michael Brown’s killer wasn’t indicted, and I learned what I really believed in

www.salon.com|Jacqui Germain

I don’t want to romanticize that night. I understand its wide-reaching political ramifications, its contemporary significance, how our nation’s entire social landscape shifted irreversibly, so much energy and tension balancing on a single city at the heart of the country. I get it. That night represented the beginning of something for thousands of people. Standing in the middle of S. Florissant across from the Ferguson Police Department and amid a mass of anxious citizens, we huddled in clusters next to any device capable of livestreaming the announcement of whether police officer Darren Wilson would be indicted for killing Michael Brown. I was standing between a friend’s phone and someone’s open car window with the radio on. Mike Brown’s mom was standing a few feet away, waiting. Someone’s arms were around her shoulders. We listened. No one moved.

And then suddenly, everything did.

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Even as we round the corner into the final year of the Obama administration, organized and semi-organized racists continue to rage against the election of the first African-American president. This Summer, their specified target is the Black Lives Matter movement, and the racist groups in question happen to be gun-toting Oath Keepers and Confederate flag fetishists.

Let’s start with the Confederate flag crackpots. This past weekend, Confederate flag supporters, who insisted they totally aren’t racists, trolled African-Americans in Sunrise, Florida. A group called the South Florida Rednecks launched a motorcycle convoy with their bikes and pickup trucks festooned in the Confederate flag, which is totally not inflammatory at all. But when Black Lives Matter protesters appeared, Raw Story reported that some of the Southern Florida Rednecks brandished knives and firearms, clearly to intimidate the protesters.

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The news that charges are being brought against two journalists for the unholy crime of reporting the news out of Ferguson last year is, on the face of it, ridiculous. “Trumped-up” does not even begin to describe what we are talking about.

The Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery and the Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly were sitting in a McDonald’s when a Ferguson SWAT team suddenly entered the premises. When the journalists started filming them—a completely legal activity, by the way—they were violently detained. That’s the whole story. If anyone should face charges from this incident, it’s the police. Instead, Lowery and Reilly (a former colleague of mine at HuffPost) are both being charged by St. Louis County with trespassing (in a public McDonalds) and “interfering with a police officer,” which I guess means that they asked why they were being taken in for no reason.

We don’t know what’s going to happen, of course, but it would be surprising if Lowery or Reilly were actually convicted of anything. They are both backed by large media companies with good lawyers, and the charges are patently absurd. But that’s what makes the situation so insidious. This isn’t a serious attempt by St. Louis County to prosecute these reporters. It’s a very real threat against journalists everywhere, and it’s just the latest in a disturbing war on reporting that we’ve seen in the past few years.

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Amidst a declared state of emergency in Ferguson, Missouri during the one-year marking of Michael Brown’s death, a small contingent of heavily armed men arrived in town to patrol protests and “protect reporters” from Alex Jones’ Infowars website.

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So, here we are, a year after Ferguson. An 18 year old African American was shot two nights ago during protests, and is in critical condition. He has been charged with assaulting law enforcement. The county has declared a state of emergency and the executive in charge is saying they will not tolerate any more violence. Police arrested many people at various sites throughout the day and night on Monday, including nationally known activists. And just to make sure everyone know they aren’t budging, the Ferguson prosecutor served summons letters to the two reporters the police illegally arrested last year while they were covering the protests — just as the statute of limitations was about to run out.

For all the talking, all the negotiating, all the media, all the reports and all the “reforms” there is still a very long way to go. The people who are protesting and raising political consciousness seem to know that. The police seem to know that. It remains to be seen if the public is in for the long haul. One year later and it feels like Groundhog Day.

Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery charged with trespassing one year after Ferguson arrest

The case arises from Lowery's August 2014 arrest at a Ferguson McDonald's

www.salon.com|Luke Brinker

Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery, among the most prominent national journalists covering issues of law enforcement and racial justice, has been charged in St. Louis County with trespassing and interfering with the work of a police officer.

The Post reports that the charges facing Lowery stem from his August 2014 arrest at a Ferguson, MO McDonald’s, where he was covering protests surrounding the police killing of unarmed black teen Michael Brown.

Dear White America: I know it’s hard, but you have to acknowledge what’s happening in this country

www.salon.com|Pia Glenn

First of all, I’ve seen people angry about the moniker “white privilege” in and of itself, bemoaning the very existence of this annoying two-word phrase (and even more so the three words “check your privilege”) as nothing more than the verbal folly of the Outrage Committee and Social Justice Warriors who want to ruin the Confederate flag and gay jokes and everything good about America. I can understand the fatigue at the sheer amount of times we say the phrase—I even get tired of saying/typing it. But can you allow for the possibility that we’re saying it so much because you haven’t heard us yet and it’s crucial that you accept it as reality?

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On Sunday it will have been a year since Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, by white police officer Darren Wilson. The killing itself provoked violent protests, and a grand jury’s decision in November not to indict Wilson unleashed another wave of unrest. At least superficially, the events resembled, on a much smaller scale, the 1992 Los Angeles riots that followed the police beating of Rodney King.

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Darren Wilson is the subject of a fascinating profile in the New Yorker this week, in which he reveals what his life was like in the days after he shot Michael Brown dead, as well as what his life is like now.

Throughout Jake Halpern’s piece, Wilson seems somehow both keenly aware of the racial dynamics of his statements and insensitive to the point of defiance when it comes to the implications of them. For example, when discussing the possibility that members of the black community don’t trust police officers because of a legacy of brutality, he quickly dismissed the validity of such claims.

I met a girl I really liked. I’ll call her Jessie. She was gorgeous, she was smart, and she liked to talk shit. She lived in Queens but I met her at a literary festival in Jamaica. We watched Prodigy from Mobb Deep get bumrushed onstage by a drunken local whom the crowd liked more, and then we stayed up all night, blah blah blah. It didn’t occur to me, not for one second, that her politics or her race consciousness or whatever might be different than mine, because I had met her. Even though she was from a tiny town in Oregon and had grown up in a mega-Christian family. After all, she’d renounced that shit and moved to New York and she liked me. Then Mike Brown got murdered and Jessie couldn’t understand the rush to condemn Darren Wilson.

Liz Garbus has long used film as a means to take a closer look at people who don’t quite fit the mold or expectations society sets for them, whether through personal choice, circumstance, or a pure inability to conform.

The Academy Award-nominated filmmaker first came to prominence with the 1998 documentary that she co-directed with Wilbert Rideau and Jonathan Stack, “The Farm: Angola USA,” a look at the lives of six inmates at the infamous Louisiana penitentiary. Following the film’s success, she co-founded the production company Moxie Firecracker Films with Rory Kennedy. Since then, she’s directed a number of documentaries focused on various criminals, politicians and icons, including Bobby Fischer and Marilyn Monroe. At face value, her subjects may seem quite different, but if anything Garbus’ careful and intimate portraits show that no matter where along society’s spectrum a person lies, there are universals of the human existence that connect us all.

We don’t have what is commonly termed “de facto” segregation—primarily resulting from private prejudice, income differences, preferences to live separately, or demographic trends. Our segregation is “de jure,” resulting mostly from racially explicit public policies designed to create residential patterns we too easily accept as natural or accidental. These policies were blatant violations of constitutional guarantees that have never been remedied. Without remedy—desegregation, in short—we are sure to see more Fergusons, and Baltimores, and Clevelands, and vainly hope to avoid them by teaching police to be gentler.

Police brutality has been an integral part of the black experience since the birth of the modern law enforcement. Until recently, however, it was difficult to establish how stark or pervasive the problem was; this opacity plagues many aspects of the U.S. criminal justice system. In part, the data has been hard to come by due to the decentralized nature of policing in America: while the FBI attempts to collate national statistics on the use of force, they rely exclusively on voluntary reporting from America’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies–the overwhelming majority of which (more than 95%) do not participate fully or at all.

The growing mountain of videotaped and photographed evidence of wanton police violence against unarmed and innocent black and brown Americans could have provided the fuel and basis for an “ideologically disruptive moment,” a sense of moral outrage and shame on the part of White America to reform the country’s police. Unfortunately, images of black pain and suffering have not translated into progressive, institutional political change. Why? Part of the answer lies in how social and cognitive psychologists have demonstrated that white people, quite literally, do not feel the pain of non-whites.