Michael Brown and Ferguson in Historical Context: No One Does It Better. White People are America's Foremost Experts on Rioting

Events continue to develop in Ferguson, Missouri. In the aftermath of Sunday night's civil disturbances, the Missouri's Governor has deployed the national guard to supplement the local police department. The autopsy results on Michael Brown's body indicate he was shot several times in the face, arm, and torso. The evidence from the autopsy is consistent with the witnesses who say that Michael Brown was surrendering and the killer cop Darren Wilson shot him multiple times. 

President Barack Obama delivered a careful and empty statement on the events in Ferguson, Missouri where he played Scold-in-Chief for Black America while also trying to condemn police violence in his role as Chief Law Enforcement Officer for the United States. Eric Holder--Obama's conscience and mouth piece on matters of the color line--is going to Ferguson to monitor the federal investigation into the murder of Michael Brown.

Ferguson is now a theater for race and politics. It features many actors.

Historians, sociologist, political scientists, and other experts who could put these events within a broader context have not been featured by the mainstream media. For example, I have yet to hear someone talk about the Kerner Commission Report on national TV or radio. Alas, for the corporate news media the money is in the sizzle and not the steak. Consequently, substantive answers to questions about the horrible events in Ferguson are less compelling than is a narrative that the events in Ferguson are a surprise, mysterious, or complicated.

To point.

The Right-wing propaganda machine has offered up a woman by the name of "Josie" who has crawled out the bowels of the White Right's propaganda sewer to now be interviewed by CNN about "what really happened" when Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. 

Josie is a Darren Wilson's low rent version of "Deep Throat".

She offers a version of events in which Michael Brown is a negro cocaine fiend, rampaging and "bum-rushing" Darren Wilson. "Josie" must have taken lessons in Negro dialect from the same school that coached George Zimmerman's father and teaches white women how to best tell the news media and police that a nebulous black man kidnapped their kids. I am surprised that Josie did not say that Michael Brown called Darren Wilson a "honky".

Josie's role in the Ferguson debacle is important: will a semi-random, anonymous white woman who is trotted out by the Right-wing hate media and calls into CNN be given the same level of credibility as three independent black witnesses, whose accounts are more of less the same, as to the truth of what transpired when Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown? 

Moreover, Josie's story is pure bovine scatology as exposed by its lie that Wilson was responding to the report of a theft that was never called in to the police.

If Pew's new survey on the divergence in racial attitudes between white and black Americans regarding the murder of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson is any indication, the white racial frame will elevate a phantom white woman whose hearsay mirrors what they would like to believe about white victimhood in the face of black "histrionics" about racism to the level of empirical truth. 

We must not forget how on a foundational level, racism is fundamentally about resources and power. 

The institutional white supremacist American social order that killed Michael Brown also works through emotion and psychology. 

The instinctive defense of white on black police violence is an act of transference and idealization. As I wrote here, white society views black life as less than--it is somehow predatory and dangerous.

Some white folks wish that they were the cops beating and killing black and brown people; the vast majority of other white folks are glad that the police are there, even if they are overzealous on occasion, because the the latter are protecting "good people" like "us" from "bad people" like "them". 

Winston Churchill famously said that "We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us." As an arm of the racial state, police fulfill that role for White America.

"Rioting" is the meta narrative and assumption tying together how the news media frames the events in Ferguson, Missouri. This language and its underlying assumptions are very important because they 1) depict the anger and rage at the murder of Michael Brown by the police as somehow unreasonable, irrational, and uncontrolled and 2) is part of a long tradition where Whiteness and White Supremacy, as America's historically dominant political ideologies, re-imagine violence and disruptive social behavior as something inseparable from blackness and the black community. 

The white racial frame rewrites American history by ignoring how the language of "riots" and "rioting" has historically been used to describe white on black racial pogroms, lynchings, and a centuries-long campaign of ethnic cleansing. It was only in the aftermath of the 1960s and its urban rebellions that the word "riot" came to be synonymous with black people.

No group of people riot like white Americans. White Americans are geniuses and experts in the art. 

There are no black on white versions of the Great Chicago race riot, East St. Louis, Tulsa, Washington D.C., Rosewood, and the many hundreds if not thousands of black towns and communities that were destroyed by rampaging white mobs. 

The civil disturbances in Ferguson, Missouri are not a "race riot". However, the subtext and framing of those events by the American news media and the white American collective consciousness is located within a visual lexicon and its associated history of images, associations, and cultural narratives about black violence and criminality. 

White America makes sense of the events in Ferguson, Missouri and the killing of Michael Brown relative to a cognitive schema that is heavily influenced by prejudice, racism, and old fashioned bigotry towards black people. Those biases have to be overcome in order for White America to fully understand how Ferguson's black community is acting in a very restrained, rational, and righteous way. 

There are a good number of white folks who are on the right side of history in regards to these matters.

Unfortunately, too many others would rather accept the default assumption that black people are criminals, ergo Michael Brown must have done something wrong to "provoke" a white cop into killing him execution-style in broad daylight. White privilege is moral rot: it corrupts the souls of those who are invested in it by making clear matters of right and wrong into something flexible and malleable.

One of those white lies is that violence and "rioting" are acts committed by "urban blacks". To inform white folks that their people are America's greatest experts in domestic mass violence is an impolitic truth that would shatter the lie of Whiteness as an identity which is benign and innocent. 

Few people are willing to speak that uncomfortable in the mainstream media, our classrooms, or in other spaces where teaching and political socialization take place. The consequences are too great.