What Ferguson Tells Us About Protest Culture In America: An Interview with Mark Anthony Neal

What Ferguson Tell Us About Protest Culture in America by Carimah Townes | Think Progress
As the media focuses on the protests and residents of Ferguson, and outrage over the incident goes viral, it is important to understand the shooting, protest, and police response as one aspect of a larger social, cultural, and historical moment. The civil unrest in Ferguson is not a random, isolated event, but the product of “racial segregation, economic inequality and overbearing law enforcement” in the town. And it is a continuation of a legacy of civil unrest in communities of color throughout America.I spoke to Duke Professor Mark Anthony Neal, an African-American Studies scholar with an emphasis on pop culture representation, about racial discourse in America, and how culture helps us define and shape historical moments as they unfold.
When we talk about culture and social movements, it’s easy to jump right into the realm of celebrity and limit the discussion to which artist or actress said xyz. But culture is obviously about customs, and social groups, and how we develop beliefs and ideas that define us. It isn’t just about celebrity. So in looking at Ferguson, what elements of culture should we really hone in on?
I think the idea of community. One of the things we’ve seen in the aftermath of the shooting of Mike Brown is this idea of the community coming together, and in part of that community is the idea of protecting children, and the idea of protecting black masculinity. So when you see the posters of “I Am a Man,” which immediately takes it back to moments during the Civil Rights Movement, there’s this whole idea that a community is going to protect its children. And when their children get shot in the streets, particularly the kind of kid that the community views as someone who’s going to go on to greater things, what you see is this idea of the community closings links and coming together in ways that are very distinctly cultural — that we’ve seen whether we’re talking about Watts in 1965, thinking of the riots in Miami in 1980, and in recent history, what we saw in Los Angeles in 1992.
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