Protesters have been on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson August 9. Brown was unarmed, and the shooting was entirely uncalled for, as he was struck by six bullets, including two to the head. But after some unruly protesting following the incident, a police force with military-grade weapons met the situation with undue force, leading to an increased indignation regarding police. Protesters have routinely faced tear gas, the National Guard was called in and journalists were harassed, threatened and even arrested by the police. Given the severity of the police response, for the first time in history, Amnesty International has sent human rights observers to the U.S.
The rationale behind the outcry in Ferguson has been the excessively iron-fisted response of the police who violated the legal, proper way of dealing with protest that was on occasion violent and destructive of property, and great concern has been raised about the militarization of the police. But the dynamics of this situation, of the police responding with more force than the protesters have exhibited, should be considered more closely.
What other courses could the situation wherein some angry people took to rioting and looting have taken? For one, the protesters could have been met with no force from the police. Some say that if there were no police presence to begin with, there would have been no looting and rioting, which is debatable.
Protesters, looters and rioters could have been met with equivalent force, which would likely have taken the form of there not being, say, the National Guard, and press freedom not having been suppressed.
Finally, the police could have met the protesters with much more brutal force, the kind of force, say, that protesters received in Tahrir Square in Cairo during the Arab Spring.
The last scenario raises an interesting matter that I won’t pursue here: at what point is it self-important to feel that we in the US have it really bad, given that much worse police atrocities occur regularly in much of the world? What is the appropriate disposition toward such abuses happening in our country that ensures our not thinking we are entitled to better than the world?
The first two scenarios, though, beg the following question: What is the point of protest, whatever forms it may take? The answer is: to threaten power.
As power is naturally comfortable with existing conditions, if it is not threatened, it will not change. If a protest does not actually threaten power, then power wouldn’t respond with undue force. Corollary being, if power is reacting excessively, it is threatened.
This doesn’t mean that we should desire power to react excessively. Rather, we should realize that a legacy of racism is going to work its way out conflictingly, and the oppressed will act in ways that, if threatening to power, will engender immoderate reaction from power. The notion that power should meet violence with equivalent violence, thus neutralizing just that violence and causing no other harm, is liberal mythology, meant to keep the status quo intact, including its oppressive aspects.
But if the status quo is being destabilized, as the collective will has dictated, immoderate reaction will naturally follow, and it makes little sense to vilify causality. But what we could desire is that the threatening spirit that power picked up on and tried to subjugate persists, not in the form of riots, but through socio-economic transformation in and of the communities. If the communities of Ferguson evolve the current destabilization into such liberatory organization, then that will have been an overall change for the better.
In Ferguson, the signs of this are visible. Even The New Yorker is picking up on that, reporting that the social organization looks “like a movement,” existing from its epicenter of a QuikTrip gas station that had been looted and burned, but has now been converted to a social center called “QT People’s Park.”
But only if these portents culminate in the empowerment and reclamation of dignity by communities sidelined to a second-rate existence, in Ferguson and beyond, will this saga have been for the better. If there is no such starry culmination, we will have but to keep on reciting our laments: Michael Brown’s death was a horrible, horrible, thing.