Ferguson Trajectory

There will be other Darren Wilsons very soon. His resignation arrives even as we struggle to make sense of the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, a young boy playing with a BB gun in a public park, who was mistaken for a threatening grown man. Security video shows the small boy walking aimlessly in circles – bored and playing outside by himself, until a police cruiser races right alongside him. Within seconds – before the car even came to a stop – Rice was gunned down.

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The challenge, right now, is to refuse to accept the retirement of Darren Wilson, to insist that we keep talking about him. That we keep pulling him back into the spotlight, and that we study him – as an object of scrutiny, as an exemplar of American racism.

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WEB Du Bois, in his 1890 Harvard Commencement address, titled “Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization”, issued a vigorous critique of the former President of the Confederacy. […] In those days, Davis’s reputation was being gradually repaired, as the North “buried the bloody shirt”, and the south labored to build monuments to the man once branded a traitor and held in confinement at the war’s end in Fort Monroe.

Like Jefferson Davis, Darren Wilson’s reputation is about to undergo a similar repair.

In the blink of an eye, Darren Wilson could become the next Mark Fuhrman, slouching into his new role as a handsomely paid Fox News “expert”, deployed whenever circumstances require a defense of some other white police officer accused of racism. Michael Brown, Fuhrman said just a few days ago, was “the suspect from the very beginning to the very end”, a rather candid expression of racial profiling – invoking, as it does, the criminalization of the black male body from the cradle to the grave. As Wilson slides into the conservative commentariat, we, in turn, could become focused on simple, easy solutions – like vest cameras, community policing strategies, and diversity training initiatives.

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If we truly wanted to resolve this problem, though, we’d do something bigger and bolder. We’d acknowledge that what we see on the proverbial “street” is just a phantasm, just a trick of the eye. We’d study the policeman’s gaze with a much greater degree of seriousness, and treat racial sight as an endemic, disturbing feature of American history and culture. We’d launch major studies of what cops see when they look for race and class, gender and sex, so that we’d have more to talk about than Dave Chappelle’s famous skit about police sketch artists. We would illuminate the illogic of racial sight, and, in doing so, we’d acknowledge that we cannot police what we invariably see through the lens of the terrible and the fantastic. We have many serious structural problems to address – most especially, the widening, color-coded gaps between rich and poor – but these are historically and politically linked to things as simple as sight. We cannot emphasize the structural solutions and leave intact the racial sightline that led to Michael Brown’s transfiguration into a “demon” [as described by Darren Wilson in his grand jury testimony].

  The Guardian