And Who is Surprised? The Department of Justice Details How the Ferguson Police Department is a Racist Cesspool

White supremacy is a global social, political, economic, philosophical, and psychological system (and disposition) that is dedicated to redistributing resources to, and protecting the dominant power position of, White people as a group.

White supremacy works in many ways. One of its primary methods of operation is to assault the mental well-being, sanity, and health of non-whites.

To that end, white supremacy calls into doubt the lived experiences of black and brown people, devalues their truth claims, and distorts empirical reality.

The White Gaze and white racist paranoiac thinking also allows white folks to twist the photographic and visual record to suit their own unreasonable conclusions. For example, Rodney King was somehow a threat to the officers that were savagely beating him or Eric Garner and Tamir Rice somehow provoked their own killings by police as the former pleaded for his life with "I can't breathe" and the latter played in a park.

Likewise, the Ferguson police ran amok and rioted against the black community of Ferguson, but to the eyes of too many white Americans--especially on the Right--those thug cops were either "provoked" or "acting with restraint".

Collectively, white racial logic exacts a high toll on the health of people of color.

As black folks have long joked, the lived experiences and facts known to be true by black and brown folk, are never truly ever taken to be true and real unless a white person validates them. Shorter version: it ain't true unless a white person says it is.

The Department of Justice's report on the Ferguson police department's racism is one such example of said folk wisdom in practice.

The African-American community in Ferguson, Missouri repeatedly and consistently recounted how the police in that area abused, harassed, and mistreated them. Black and brown folks across the country seconded those experiences with their own accounts of racial profiling, abuse, and harassment by the United States' police departments. These life experiences are buttressed by mountains of empirical data detailing how the American justice system is profoundly and consistently racist in how it treats black and brown people.

Racism is a fact. It is not an opinion.

On the Department of Justice report about the Ferguson police department as reported by the Daily Mail:

The U.S. Justice Department has concluded that the Ferguson, Missouri, police department routinely engages in racially biased practices, a law enforcement official familiar with the department's findings said on Tuesday. 

The investigation into the police department began in August after the shooting of unarmed African-American teen Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson sparked national protests.

Analysis of more than 35,000 pages of police records found racist comments from officers as well as statistics that showed African-Americans make up 93 percent of arrests while accounting for only 67 percent of the population in Ferguson, the official said. 

From The New York Times:

It describes a city where the police used force almost exclusively on blacks and regularly stopped people without probable cause. Racial bias is so ingrained, the report said, that Ferguson officials circulated racist jokes on their government email accounts. 

In a November 2008 email, a city official said Barack Obama would not be president long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years?” Another email included a cartoon depicting African-Americans as monkeys. A third described black women having abortions as a way to curb crime.

“There are serious problems here that cannot be explained away,” said a law enforcement official who has seen the report and spoke on the condition of anonymity because it had not been released yet.

Or Mediaite:

The evidence they found demonstrating the Ferguson PD’s “intentional discrimination on the basis of race” included arrest statistics and a lot of racist emails. There were so many of these emails that the DOJ could only choose a few to demonstrate what kind of messages the Ferguson PD sent each other in their spare time: 

A November 2008 email stated that President Barack Obama would not be President for very long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.” 

A March 2010 email mocked African Americans through speech and familial stereotypes, using a story involving child support. One line from the email read: “I be so glad that dis be my last child support payment! Month after month, year after year, all dose payments!” 

An April 2011 email depicted President Barack Obama as a chimpanzee. 

A May 2011 email stated: “An African-American woman in New Orleans was admitted into the hospital for a pregnancy termination. Two weeks later she received a check for $5,000. She phoned the hospital to ask who it was from. The hospital said, ‘Crimestoppers.’” 

A June 2011 email described a man seeking to obtain “welfare” for his dogs because they are “mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English and have no frigging clue who their Daddies are.” 

An October 2011 email included a photo of a bare-chested group of dancing women, apparently in Africa, with the caption, “Michelle Obama’s High School Reunion.” 

A December 2011 email included jokes that are based on offensive stereotypes about Muslims. 

And these weren’t the only emails they found. “Our review of documents revealed many additional email communications that exhibited racial or ethnic bias, as well as other forms of bias,” they wrote, adding that no one at the Ferguson PD was ever disciplined, or even called out, for their behavior: 

Our investigation has not revealed any indication that any officer or court clerk engaged in these communications was ever disciplined. Nor did we see a single instance in which a police or court recipient of such an email asked that the sender refrain from sending such emails, or any indication that these emails were reported as inappropriate. Instead, the emails were usually forwarded along to others.

And as I pointed out--without hyperbole or exaggeration during one of my appearances on Ring of Fire TV--the Ferguson police killed Michael Brown for the Jim Crow era crime of "bumptious walking".

This policy is also detailed by the Department of Justice report:

Ferguson's black residents are also more likely than others to be charged with relatively minor offenses like 'manner of walking in roadway' or 'failure to comply.

White racists in the colorblind era use several rhetorical strategies to deny and deflect the truth-claims of African-Americans and other people of color. 

One of the standard colorblind white racist deflections in the post civil rights era is language such as "minorities are too sensitive", "we need to wait for all the facts to come out", "blacks overreact to minor things", "we need to hear the other side of the story", and "both sides do it!"

The Department of Justice has presented the facts about Ferguson's police department.

As exhaustively detailed by the Department of Justice, the Ferguson police department (and broader law enforcement apparatus) is and was profoundly racist, engaged in a debt peonage collection racket against the black community, and routinely violated the civil rights of black people as a matter of protocol.

Although I know the answer, I must still ask the question: where are the defenders of the Ferguson police department now? How will white racism deniers and others ignore, twist, obfuscate, and reframe the obvious findings about the institutional white supremacy that brutalizes the black people of Ferguson and other communities?

The Department of Justice report on Ferguson's police department highlights the institutional white supremacist cultural practices that enabled and encouraged the white thug cop Darren Wilson to kill the black teenager Mr. Michael Brown.

Alas, but even in the Department of Justice report we are left with a paradox--one not uncommon along the colorline. It is upsetting and frustrating: the Department of Justice can conclude that the Ferguson police are profoundly racist, yet somehow Darren Wilson did not violate the civil rights of Michael Brown.

Here, the "colorblind", neoliberal, corporate, "multicultural", Racial State maintains a veneer of legitimacy by being adaptive and making minor (and obvious) concessions to the justice claims of people of color, but ultimately it does not equally value the personhood, safety, and security of non- whites.

This is a con game and hustle that typifies race in the post civil rights era United States.

The Department of Justice report on Ferguson is a minor validation of what black and brown folks (and informed, honest, forward thinking white folks who have begun to think past their personal investment in Whiteness) have long known. We who are black and brown must always remind ourselves that it is not us who are crazy, irrational, deranged, or detached from empirical reality.

No, it is White America that is sick and insane with racism.

They need to heal themselves; we need to keep ourselves safe, happy, and psychologically healthy.