On Oct. 12 the good people of Ferguson, Missouri, continued to protest the unjustified shooting death of black teenager Michael Brown by municipal police officer Darren Wilson. Seventeen people were arrested for participating in an unlawful assembly outside a convenience store, and the following day, 50 others were arrested as part of an organized “Moral Monday” protest challenging St. Louis’ casual acceptance of police violence and brutality. Earlier this month, protesters disrupted a bastion of white elitism — a performance of the St. Louis symphony — as well as an event decidedly less elite: a St. Louis Cardinal’s game.
Discontent over the shooting of Michael Brown is not subsiding. It has seemingly evolved into a larger movement aimed at questioning the broader foundations of the system of structural inequality that black and brown men and women face every day. Indeed, it has broken out into the larger culture as a renewed debate over inequality in general in the contemporary United States. As is usually the case in the farce that passes for American political culture these days, perhaps the most interesting arena to watch this play out was not on any actual news program, but on a recent episode of “The Daily Show” in which host Jon Stewart and guest Bill O’Reilly discussed the concept of white privilege.
Laughs were had by all of course, but the comic jabs between Stewart and O’Reilly paper over an admittedly grim reality. A recent study carried out by the journalism nonprofit ProPublica, for instance, finds that black teens are 21 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than their white counterparts. The report’s authors came to this conclusion by examining FBI data accumulated on the topic between 2010 and 2012, which showed that for teens aged 15 to 19, the rate at which black youngsters were gunned down by the boys in blue stood at 31.17 per million, while that for their white counterparts are just 1.47 per million. Even accounting for the higher crime rate of black teens, which itself is heavily inflated by the racial bias that pervades our juvenile justice system, the disparity in police killings of black teens is still far, far higher than one would expect if no bias were at work.
A shoddy, bias-driven machine
This bears out the conventional wisdom that has been widely acknowledged nearly everywhere: The nation’s criminal justice system is mostly a shoddy, bias-driven machine that systematically oppresses black and brown people and deprives them of full membership in American society. It has more or less brought back into being a neo-Jim Crow system in which blacks are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites and black and brown people constitute over half of America’s prison population. Indeed, America in many places has created a school-to-prison pipeline wherein some of our country’s most vulnerable youngsters, again mostly black and brown, are routed from school directly into the correctional system.
Such structural inequality in the justice system implies a thoroughly rigged society wherein the lives of black and brown people are not just devalued, but made systematically much more difficult than what the average white person might expect. Empirically, this is exactly what we find, and study after study after study has demonstrated how racial bias creeps into everyday decision-making processes including hiring decisions to sports referee rulings. It is systematic and permeates almost every aspect of American life, including even the most intimate facets such as sex, love and reproduction. We’re far from where we were in the 1960s, when the legal underpinnings of “American Apartheid” were shattered, but we’re still a long way from the mountaintop, even if we now have the benefit of a having a black president.
And it is in the area of politics and political representation where change most needs to take place. While America may have its first non-white chief executive, the American political establishment at almost every level continues to be overwhelmingly dominated by white people. As a recent study put out by the Reflective Democracy Campaign demonstrates clearly, 90 percent of elected officials are white and 65 percent are white men — a group that, in fact, makes up just 31 percent of the American population. Likewise, the U.S. media is overwhelmingly dominated by white men, as are corporate boardrooms and nearly every other major institution in American public life.
For the most part, this reflects the mundane fact that for much of U.S. history — really, only up until very recently — white people dominated in raw numbers and that all people, whether white, black or polka dotted, tend to trust and support people like themselves more than those they perceive as outsiders. Human nature, combined with raw numbers and the historical legacy of slavery and institutionalized racism, created white-dominated America. Yet this persists today not so much due to a conspiratorial cabal of white men but because of the way in which cultural pressures and forces act upon individuals and individual psychology. If history had played out differently and come to a wholly different outcome wherein black people had historically been on top and white people on the bottom, we would be talking in much the same way, except with the races reversed. It’s just how imperfect humans and their societies have tended to work over time.
Shoddy machines eventually lead to breakdowns
But understanding that fact does not mean one has to accept it for any number of reasons, the most obvious being that it is unfair and unjust but — most importantly — that it is not conducive to a well-functioning society. Societies and political systems that remain dominated for long periods of time by one group of people tend become inward-looking and suspicious of outsiders. The groups leading such societies hoard power and seek to advantage its own, very often at the expense of the broader public. They become, in colloquial terms, run by a self-dealing “good ‘ole boys” network that privileges insiders and excludes outsiders. Of course, this can occur in almost any type of institution, but when it emerges in government it becomes especially pernicious, since the biases of the insider network, both good and ill, are translated into far-ranging public policies.
As a microcosm of what happens when such a network takes over a small town and runs it at the expense of everyone else, Ferguson is a shining example of how things can go downhill very quickly. Though the population is mostly black, it is run by a white political establishment and policed by a nearly all-white police force. A large part of the revenue needed to run both the town and the town’s cops comes from court fees and other fines, and thus, the police are under not-so-subtle pressure to write citations in order to generate revenue.
This naturally pits the white police force against the town’s black residents, and because black people have almost no political representation, the police are free to fall upon the helpless population at will. Very quickly resentment builds and the police transition from being law enforcers, protectors and public servants into something resembling an occupying army more afraid of the population it is policing than any actual criminal element within it.
As the events in this St. Louis suburb demonstrate so clearly, this is a dangerous situation for nearly everyone involved. When trust, respect and legitimacy are lost, cooperation goes out the window and the public and its government go from being one and the same to enemies, pure and simple. Politics becomes in this case not about compromise, comity and the rule of law, but a no-holds-barred contest for supremacy in which the losing side gets permanently locked out of the benefits of political power, government protection and budgetary largesse. In places like Ferguson, this can eventually cause riots and lead to social breakdown.
What happens, though, when the situation applies to a nation as a whole? At the extreme, we get an outcome like Syria or Egypt, where domination by insider elites becomes so odious and tyrannical that popular revolt and civil war become the only means of opposing it. Such a situation could seemingly never occur in the U.S., but — and this has been pointed out in this space before — the demographic, cultural and economic changes America is currently experiencing are doing a great deal to make the future U.S. as a whole look a lot like Ferguson today: divided between a rich, white minority establishment and a largely disenfranchised, multi-racial majority. Can a house so divided stand for long? We’ll find out in a decade or two.