On August 9th there was a confrontation between an 18 year old young Black man named Michael Brown and a White Police Officer named Darren Wilson which resulted in Brown being shot and killed by Wilson.
Though eye-witness accounts vary widely, not one witness we have heard from, regardless of his/her version of the events, claims that either Brown or Wilson spoke any racial epithet. And Officer Wilson was a 6 year veteran of the police force with not one complaint ever lodged against him, racial or otherwise.
Therefore, the one and only racial component to this incident is the physical fact that Michael Brown was Black and Darren Wilson is White – which, in and of itself, is meaningless. Black and White people interact countless times every day without any racism involved.
This means the entire three months of racially charged protests/looting/rioting by various groups and individuals who have descended on Ferguson, and the increasingly vile comments/threats so many of them have made, are based on absolutely nothing……other than their intention to make it a racial incident for their own purposes.
Which they have certainly done.
And now it has come to light that, last month, a group of the protest “leaders” (who appointed them? You? I know I didn\’t), have issued a letter which does absolutely nothing but exploit Michael Brown\’s death to inflame racial tensions.
You can read the entire letter by clicking here. But let me give you enough to get its gist:
An Open Letter From Ferguson Protestors and Allies (10.17.14)
We are living an American Horror Story.
The unlawful slaughter of black bodies by the hands of power has continued day after day, year after year, century after century, life by precious life, since before the first chain was slipped around black wrists.
The story has come alive once again in Ferguson. Ours were the bodies, the strange fruit that swung from the poplar trees. Ours were the bodies, the motionless forms stretched out in the street for 4.5 hours. Ours were the bodies, left to be seen to rot as warnings against being too uppity, too confident, too bold, too free.
In Ferguson, police met our protesting of police brutality with the disgusting irony of greater brutality, the likes of which Americans had never seen on our own soil. In this American town, officers tapped their batons, pointed guns in our faces, kneed our women\’s heads, threw our pregnant mothers to the ground, jailed our peaceful clergy and academics, and tear gassed our children.
Even in the face of this terror, we will continue to force the readers and writers of this, a most American of horror stories, to face the blackness that they fear, the blackness they have spent this entire story trying to erase, trying to soften, trying to co-opt, trying to escape. We will no longer allow you to escape this story and pretend that the epidemic of black lives dying by white hands is merely a figment of an active Black imagination. You must come face to face with the horror that we live daily. You must come to know and profess the truth of this story, and be determined to end it.
We are not concerned if this inconveniences you.
Dead children are more than an inconvenience.
We are not concerned if this disturbs your comfort.
Freedom outweighs that privilege.
We are not concerned if this upsets order.
Your calm is built on our terror.
We are not concerned if this disrupts normalcy.
We will disrupt life until we can live.
This is an American Horror Story. Together, we are writing the final chapter.
There it is. In all its “glory”.
Absolutely nothing but an angry, threatening screed about race. Nothing but a demand that White people be assessed collective guilt – as if every White person is at fault for every problem, every depredation, ever visited upon any Black person.
Then we have the narrative about Ferguson – where “protesters” spent days rioting and looting as police stood by and watched the main street of town become a “five finger discount center”. To the writers of this letter, it was the scene of “greater brutality, the likes of which Americans had never seen on our own soil”.
That\’s quite a view of history. Lucky the civil war was much less violent than Ferguson, Missouri.
And, armed with this bizarre-world body of “knowledge”, the protesters inform us that they will force White people to face “the blackness that they fear”…, etc. etc. yada yada yada.
You may gather from this that I am not in sympathy with these protesters.
Well, you\’re right. And why should I be?
-They are the ones who have turned this into something it did not have to be.
-They are the ones exploiting the death of this young man for all it is worth.
-They are the ones who are using Michael Brown to make threats and demands against White people – not White people of ill will or White people who have actually wronged Black people, but just White people. All of us. Every one.
They are the racists.
