Understanding Ferguson; Understanding White Supremacy

Understanding Ferguson; Understanding White Supremacy by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
To look at Ferguson, Missouri is to look at America and its history of white supremacy.
To understand white denial and white privilege one need only look at Ferguson and its aftermath—from the history of racism, housing discrimination, racial profiling  (African Americans account for 86% of all stops, 79% of all searches, and 93% of all arrests), and educational inequality, one need only look at Ferguson and its aftermath.
Reading about Michael Brown's school is to read a snapshot of America.  His becoming yet another victim of racial terror and yet another African AJLove Calderon and I wrote that central to white supremacy is the criminalization of black bodies from cradle to grave:
Race matters even in death.  How else can we explain the lack of concern society shows for the anguish of black parents who have lost a child?  The mantra of not speaking ill of the dead is rarely applied to black youth.  For all too many, that means routinely seeing the victims as criminals, as unworthy of sympathy and assumptions of innocence. Instead of being seen as victims, as someone’s son or daughter, someone’s friend that lost their life, they are turned into criminals deserving of death. 
The killing of Michael Brown (and Renisha McBride, John Crawford, Bo Morrison, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Eric Garner, Shelly Fry, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Rekia Boyd, Amadou Diallo, Timothy Russell, Malissa Williams) is not an aberration; this is the result of white supremacy, history and its persistent and entrenched realities.  Ferguson is a window into America’s racial fabric,  reflecting  the deindustrialization of American cities and the many families that have been left behind in its wake, often confined by prison walls, enforced by guards and police forces.  
Yet, despite stereotypes, it is a story of perseverance and resistance, a community of working-families, a farmer’s market, kids playing on the playground, and so much more.  It is not the caricature that America continues to paint yet a reminder of our failures and misplaced priorities. 
Ferguson is representative of a history of economic neglect. In the school district where Michael Brown attended high school, 98% of families lived in poverty.  Unemployment is 11% and median family income is 37,000.  Ferguson is indicative of hyper segregation and housing discrimination, of white flight and a racially stratified real estate market.  According to David Von Drehle
In 1916, the city passed a zoning law that explicitly restricted black homeowners to certain neighborhoods. The following year, in a case out of Louisville, Ky., the Supreme Court struck down racial zoning laws. So St. Louis realtors responded with a series of restrictive covenants designed to separate the races. White homeowners were forbidden to sell their houses to black customers, and real estate agents could lose their licenses if they participated in a forbidden transaction. Eventually the covenant strategy failed as well. In 1946, the Supreme Court struck down those arrangements in a case that came from St. Louis. Now the metropolis turned to redlining, the practice of steering black buyers into certain neighborhoods by discriminating on their mortgage applications.
The consequences are hyper segregation, or as some have described St. Louis, a community of “sealed neighborhoods;” is the loss of wealth in houses, which contributes to huge wealth disparities and a crumbling tax base. No matter how many times families agreed to increase property taxes (which are highest in the state), it was never enough.  Redlining, divestment, and a segregated housing market guaranteed property values to be so low that no tax rate would produce sufficient revenues to support schools, hospitals, or any number of public services.   It is no wonder that at Michael Brown's school, graduates had to share two gowns.  In America where Black and Brown bodies are “disposable,” investment in policing and control, rather than empowerment and education is commonplace: Jesse Jackson described the state of Fergusonas follows:
High unemployment and low graduation rates result in guns and drugs in and jobs out; hospitals and public schools closing; gym, art, music and trade skills taken out of our public schools; inadequate investments being made in our infrastructure with roads crumbling, bridges falling down and an outdated public transportation system; a failure to address climate change; denial of capital investment for entrepreneurs; abandoned homes and vacant lots; a lack of youth recreational opportunities
To look at Ferguson, to look at the killing of Michael Brown, to look at the criminalization of Brown and those protesting the systemic deaths of Black youth, is to understand America.  We see history; we see the costs and consequences of the PIC and school-to-prison pipeline.  We see the ramifications in investing in tanks not textbooks; in more cops on the street not more teachers in the classroom.  We see the long-term impact of the Reagan revolution and Clinton's calamity.  We see how political leaders, the media, and White America have failed Black families, and communities, from Ferguson to New Orleans, from Oakland to New York City.  We as a result of OUR failures and the pathologies of white supremacy, accountability and justice, responsibility remains a “dream deferred.”

As JLove Calderon and myself wrote in our effort to talk to white America about our complicity in the countless deaths at the hands of police officers, security guards, and others, we penned:
If we want to stop the violence, maybe we should look in the mirror, and look at racism, the most violent weapon in human history.  To deny race is to deny this history. To ignore racism and refuse to deal is to allow for the most dangerous weapon to continue to kill and kill without any consequence and intervention.  To wipe clean this history is to erase the pain and trauma of racial terror.  And worse, to keep repeating it, over and over. Stand up for what’s right
And when we say stop the violence, let’s remember that police violence and state violence are both as American as apple pie. They are the sources of terror each and every day.  They are endemic to American racism; anti-black state violence and anti-black police terror are the most violent weapon in history.
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman.  Leonard’s latest books include  After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness   (SUNY Press),  African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings (Praeger Press) co-edited with Lisa Guerrero and Beyond Hate: White Power and Popular Culture with C. Richard King. He is currently working on a book Presumed Innocence: White Mass Shooters in the Era of Trayvon about gun violence in America.