The Battle of Ferguson I

This post seeks to address what I consider to be the inevitable consequences of the development of racially driven animosities between the African-American community in Ferguson, Missouri and municipal authorities within the St. Louis suburb, originating with the shooting death of Michael Brown, an African-American teenager, by a police officer, Darren Wilson, on August 9, 2014.  In the past week, the governor of Missouri has mobilized National Guard forces to deal with potential violence arising in the aftermath of an expected grand jury decision on the possible indictment of Officer Wilson on charges related to the shooting of Mr. Brown.  Emphatically, I would consider a violent reaction in Ferguson to the legal process in this case to be entirely inevitable (and completely tragic), hence the title of this post.  Such a reaction will reflect not merely the relative disempowerment of a majority African-American community in Ferguson in regard to the organization and operations of the municipality's police force but also a broader sensibility of racial disempowerment in regard to the criminal justice process, as it impacts African-Americans, across the U.S.  The array of issues involved here is far too broad for me to adequately address in a single post.  However, I want to advance a short set of propositions here that I hope will convey both my limited understanding of the stakes involved in the battle of Ferguson, my disappointment with the direction that this struggle between a community and its police force has taken since August, and my hopes that something truly revolutionary will emerge from what is currently taking place.  Succinctly, it is my position that the underlying issues in the conflict over Michael Brown's death at the hands of a police officer can only be adequately resolved through a radical transformation in the organizational and procedural theories governing law enforcement processes in the U.S., in particular, on the professionalization of police departments.

1.  The grand jury deliberations on the actions of Officer Wilson need to adhere rigorously to legal standards for the state of Missouri on the criminal culpability of police officers in relation to the use of deadly force while on duty, accounting for the potential threat posed to Officer Wilson's life at the hands of Mr. Brown.  As such, it is critical that the potential for violent reaction within the African-American community of Ferguson not enter into these deliberations, in order to prejudicially bias the findings of the grand jury against a decision that Officer Wilson was not criminally liable for the death of Mr. Brown.
The point here is that Officer Wilson needs to be accorded the full Constitutional privilege, as a U.S. citizen, of an impartial hearing to determine whether his actions were both proper in relation to police procedures on the use of deadly force and, assuming they were not, whether his actions satisfy conditions for the issuance of an indictment for manslaughter, murder, or some other criminal offense for pursuit by prosecutors in St. Louis County.  At stake here are the procedural due process privileges enjoyed by Officer Wilson, against which the eventual reactions that might occur in Ferguson have absolutely no bearing.  This conclusion subsumes two separate arguments.  First, legal inquiries into possible criminal violations of the law must rigorously adhere, on the one hand, to the outlines of the law and its definitive conditions for identifying the commission of a crime and, on the other hand, the detailed evidence regarding the particular act under consideration for the issuance of a criminal indictment.  In these circumstances, ex ante considerations on the potential outcomes of a criminal indictment or the failure to issue a criminal indictment are emphatically not pertinent.  Second, the issues inciting civil disturbances in Ferguson since August are strictly irreducible to the actions committed by Officer Wilson on August 9.  Whatever actually happened to Michael Brown at the hands of Officer Wilson, it seems clear that a problem exists in the relationship between African-American communities across the U.S. and the American law enforcement community that will not be resolved by a criminal indictment against Officer Wilson.  The death of Michael Brown, an African-American teenager in a majority African-American community at the hands of a White police officer in a majority White police department, is symptomatic of a much larger problem demanding a radical solution that cannot emerge from the deliberations of a grand jury.  Acknowledging these arguments does not suggest, one way or the other, that Officer Wilson meticulously followed proper police procedures in the use of deadly force in defense of his life.  Rather, it suggests that nothing will be solved, one way or the other, if the deliberations on the fate of Officer Wilson are not perfectly fair and unbiased by considerations on the maintenance of the peace in Ferguson. 

2.  Accounting for not only the outcome of grand jury deliberations but also the potential outcome of the full criminal justice process (trial, determination of guilt, sentencing) for Officer Wilson and the likelihood that, at any stage, the hopes of the African-American community in Ferguson for justice/retribution will be derailed, it is inevitable that, at some point, a violent reaction will again occur in Ferguson and, possible, in other African-American communities elsewhere in the U.S. 
How many generations of Americans have to witness at least one major outburst of extreme urban racial violence before we recognize that, in all its complexity, we have not resolved the problem of racialism, as a foundational attribute in American culture?  As a nation, we have a long history of race riots, not limited to the extreme incidents of urban violence occurring in the late 1960s (e.g. the Newark riots of 1967) or the Los Angeles riots of 1992 after the Rodney King beatings by Los Angeles police.  Both the Newark riots of 1967 and the 1992 Los Angeles riots arose in response to actions by police.  It might, thus, be easy to generalize the source of urban violence as a response to the repressive actions of the state against African-Americans.  In my opinion, such a generalization would be inadequate in representing the broader significance of racialism, as a culturally-propagated reduction of social differentiations to intra-species genotypic diversities, to the entire course of U.S. history.  In certain respects, we need to approach the progress of American racialism with a degree of Hegelian sophistication in comprehending the extent to which our sensibilities toward race have transformed themselves into a conviction that we, as a nation, should divorce ourselves from racialism, developing a consciousness that recognizes itself in opposition/negation of race.  In this manner, identifications with a racially blind society obscure identifications with unambiguous racial groupings as the same racial groupings unconsciously determine diverse economic and political policy decisions within government and everyday life.  (That is, we have convinced ourselves not to see our noses as plainly as our faces in recognizing that racial differentiations determine political and economic outcomes on a wide scale within the U.S. even as we try to convince ourselves that race does not matter because we've passed a few pieces of legislation to deal with it.) 
              There will be new riots in Ferguson, and the rest of the country will continue to ask why, if only because, like a continuously suppressed/forgotten nightmare, we continue to fail to recognize the unbearable consequences of our racially defined national origins.  Fundamentally, these new riots will continue to seek to address an undiscovered realization that African-Americans in the U.S. are being subjected to an endless reiteration of second-class citizenship, intertwined, since the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, in a perception that the success of Blacks depends on governmental assistance/affirmative action/quotas.  Thus, African-Americans have gone from a state of active discrimination to a state of perpetual dependency on the state against discrimination, accompanied by a conviction among White Americans that such protections constitute excessive and unnecessary protective measures operating to their detriment (i.e. "reverse discrimination"!).  I succinctly question the possibilities for emergence from this fatal loop of characterizations as long as we continue to regard racial differentiations as a subject for necessary state remediation.  That is to say, the fact that the state must remediate racially based discriminatory actions creates a sensibility that the state will remediate racial discrimination, generating new manifestations of racial discrimination that the state must remediate. 
             In the context of criminal justice practices, this interprets itself as a continuous reiteration of discriminatory policies that must be remediated by judicial precedence, only to be recreated under the particular specifications of new adjudical policy, to be once again challenged by defenders of judicial equality, accounting for race.  Thus, criminal "profiling" by police based on the racial characteristics of individuals, as a maligned standard practice in law enforcment, has raised legal and Constitutional issues in relation to individual protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by police under the Fourth and (through selective incorporation) Fourteenth Amendments.  And yet, to the extent that the particular circumstances involved in certain actions by police have supported the use of racial characteristics as a tool in mitigating criminal activities, particularly in regard to gang activity in association with the drug trade, the Federal judiciary has carved holes into individual protections in order to preserve the ability of local police departments to stop and detain particular individuals without warrant or evidence of criminal activity based on characterizations with emphatic racial components (see Jody Feder, "Racial Profiling: Legal and Constitutional Issues," Congressional Research Service, 16 April 2012, at: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL31130.pdf).
           Concluding, the larger problem here is that police practices, emerging from a national cultural context that is immersed in racialism, contain explicit racial components that can only be meaningfully challenged through a foundational reexamination of racialism in American culture.  The validity of racial profiling as a tool in law enforcement, thus, can only be adequately evaluated when we have acknowledged that the racially-reductive common-sense of American culture is an insurmountable frame of reference.   When African-American residents of Ferguson plead for an indictment of Officer Wilson as a prerequisite in the state's recognition of Michael Brown's humanity and the expectation that Michael Brown should have been afforded basic liberties and privileges as an American citizen against the arbitrary actions of law enforcment officials, they are invariably issuing arguments in a cultural millieux in which their racial positionalities, that of Michael Brown, and that of Officer Wilson assume an exaggerated importance.  Implictly, to the extent that justice for the African-American community of Ferguson (and elsewhere) would only be served by Officer Wilson's indictment and criminal prosecution, what we are confronting here is a differentiation between "Black justice" and "White justice" (i.e. the exoneration of a (White) police office who properly exercised the use of deadly force when his life was endangered in the course of exercising his legally prescribed duties).  The fact that these two conceptions are distinct, separable, and incommensurably at odds in a zero-sum manner reflects the manner in which American racialism overdetermines the terms of the confrontation and the necessity that racialist conceptions are obscured by an ideological commitment to racial neutrality.  In this sense, the recurrance of urban violence in Ferguson reflects the deeper frustration of the community and of African-Americans in general that racialism is not being actively confronted in American culture.