Rhetoric Race and Religion
Frustration and anger among young black Americans at an older generation’s apparent failure to adequately respond to the killing of Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson upended a key event at a weekend of mass protest on Sunday.
The showdown exposed a generational divide over how best to confront police racism, brutality and use of excessive force as organisers of the“weekend of resistance”, which has drawn activists from across the US, plan to stage mass civil disobedience across St Louis on Monday.
While older civil rights leaders hark back to the more peaceful methods of half a century ago, some younger people question their effectiveness today and are pressing for more confrontational tactics.
The fuse was lit when hundreds of people who came to hear the intellectual and activist Cornel West speak were subjected to speeches by a succession of preachers from the major religions offering essentially the same message about loving one’s fellow man and standing up against injustice. The meeting was billed as being “in the tradition of the civil rights movement” but the tone was in part governed by the venue for the meeting, St Louis University, a Catholic institution.
Some in the audience grew restless and then angered at the series of reverends, imams and rabbis until a small group of activists demanded to speak. They were supported by chants of “let them be heard” and “this is what democracy looks like”, a rallying cry at protests over Brown’s shooting.
Tef Poe, a St Louis rapper and activist for Hands Up United, a campaign group seeking racial justice in Ferguson, took the microphone and noted that the Christian, Jewish and Muslim preachers on the stage were not the people on the street trying to protect people from the police.
“The people who want to break down racism from a philosophical level, y’all didn’t show up,”
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