Rhetoric Race and Religion
The blood of Michael Brown has seeded the soil of a great American revolution—sprouting yearlings of new black leadership onto the political and public landscape. The Ferguson Rebellion has exposed deep-seated racism, hyper-militarized state forces, unabashed police brutality and the soul-crushing poverty that will come to define “the Age of Obama.” It also revealed the open hostility between many from a younger generation of activists and elites of the traditional civil rights, religious and civic organizations of the Black freedom struggle.
The extrajudicial killing of Mike Brown was followed by the lynching-like display of his body to his shocked and grieving community for over four hours. This sinister threat and clear provocation bred even greater contempt for the Ferguson Police Department, a department that is 94 per cent white, charged to protect and serve a community that is 67 per cent black; a department that has issued arrest warrants on two-thirds of its black population. The hyper-militarized police response included teargas, rubber bullets, tanks, drones, an unrelenting assault on the freedom of the press and a globally televised attack on First Amendment rights and peaceful protests. This in turn, fomented a rebellion led by poor and working class black youth.
Meanwhile, traditional civil rights institutions and religious leaders failed to understand the foment of the younger generation. Older leaders called for protester restraint and highlighted black-on-black crime, affirming popular notions of black pathology. Many condemned the vicious policing during the Ferguson Rebellion as an afterthought – further alienating a dispossessed generation. On more than one occasion high profile black leaders denounced black youth who took to the street as thugs, rioters and looters. A significant portion of Rev. Al Sharpton’s sermon during Mike Brown’s funeral service was devoted to criticizing a generation of young blacks, painting them as gun-toting thugs who have “ghetto pity parties”. The NAACP was silent for nearly three days following Brown’s killing and the subsequent social unrest. The venerable civil rights’ organization’s first comment on the ugly affair came in the form of a quickly deleted tweet: “When someone outside of our race commits murder we want upheaval, but we need same for all murder.” This ill-fated statement resulted in a swift social media backlash, further underscoring the distance between the historic civil rights organization and a younger generation.
By placing the emphasis on respectability politics instead of on the visceral pain and rage so eloquently articulated on the streets of Ferguson, traditional leadership attempted to shame the courageous yet maligned young folks who forced the nation to acknowledge their humanity in face of inhumane treatment by law enforcement. Diminishing Mike Brown with that same chimera of ‘respectability’ – and the popular obsession of the absent black father – obscures the fact that Mike Brown had four loving parents (step and biological) and was part of an intergenerational community.
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