Ferguson case: If we want change, we must recognize the past

Ever since news broke of the grand jury’s decision to forego indicting Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown, I have been wrestling with my notions of “right” and “wrong.” Was the grand jury’s decision right? How could it be wrong? And if it’s right, why does what happened in Ferguson still feel so wrong?

As I watched chaos rapidly unfold throughout the country following the announcement, I came to a conclusion: The grand jury’s decision never mattered. 

Michael Brown and Darren Wilson, through a series of fumbled events, have come to embody the battle between power and justice during a time when the ideals have never been more intertwined. 

What they have come to represent, however, is the inevitable polarization between black and white Americans. 

And so, once again, our country finds itself having the “race talk.” But when will we stop talking and start acting? No doubt the question on everyone’s mind: Where do we go from here?

First, let’s take a stroll through the past.

But when I refer to the past, I don’t mean the one that has come to dominate our debates. Though we could continue to inspect the events of Aug. 9, 2014, with painful and fruitless compulsion, we’ll never get anywhere that way. That’s because only two people, one of which is dead, truly know what happened that day. The other has already denied race as a factor: When asked in an interview if his encounter with Brown would have turned out differently if Brown had been white, Wilson said no. 

That may be true, racial biases aside. But how likely was it that Brown would have been white?

Since the separation of St. Louis from St. Louis County in 1876, the demographic ratios of neighboring regions have been severely skewed. In Ferguson, that skew has resulted in a population represented by 67 percent black and 29 percent white by 2010. 

Meanwhile, our nation has internalized a “war on crime” initiative that, coupled with a surplus of military equipment, has resulted in the militarization of police forces in small communities such as Ferguson.

While at first it may appear that the initiative has been moderately effective, considering that crime rates have been decreasing, the number of homicides caused by police has increased.

This trend is also tied to the particular communities in which the “war on crime” plays out.

I’m from Sunnyvale, Calif. Sunnyvale does not only have a punny name, but it is also one of the safest U.S. cities, with a crime rate of 132.3 out of one thousand in 2012, significantly lower than the national average of 301.1. 

Ferguson, on the other hand, had a crime rate at 381.1 in 2012, which is significantly greater than the national average. 

Does that mean that the people in Sunnyvale are less criminally inclined? Of course not. People come, and people go. But a community is forever, and so are the factors that make it a community. 

Sunnyvale, as part of the Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, is steeped in affluence. In fact, it was named the eighth-snobbiest mid-sized city in America on the Movoto Real Estate blog as a result of factors like a high cost of living, large percentage of the population with a college degree and a significant number of private schools, country clubs, performing arts, art galleries and restaurants. 

Ferguson, however, is not quite as affluent a community. Like similar suburbs surrounding urban cities, Ferguson experienced drastic changes during de-industrialization. The most drastic change, termed “white flight,” resulted in wealthy individuals abandoning their suburban homes when the economy changed. Taking advantage of what they assumed to be an opportunity to gain access to better homes and schools, many poor — and often black — individuals moved into the abandoned suburbs. 

Here’s where we can identify problems. We can, for the sake of argument, exclude racial biases held by police officers as a factor, though prejudices are still undeniably an integral aspect of our nature. 

Still, regardless of any racial biases that may or may not have been involved,, we have developed police forces that approach crime with an “attack” tactic and have the resources and capabilities to inflict significantly more harm in the name of defense. These forces are being unleashed to fight crimes in small communities. The communities that are more poverty-stricken will experience more crime, and, as a result, will come into contact with police forces more often. Because of historical disadvantages and a “late start” to the wealth race, these communities tend to be concentrated with black individuals. 

So, community interactions with police forces, which should never have been a matter of race, has inevitably become linked with race. 

As The New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow put it, “So, what are we saying to the vast majority that are not involved: that they must accept the unconscionable racial imbalance in the police shooting numbers as some sort of collateral damage in a war on crime? No!”

Well, what do we do about it?

Maya Angelou famously said, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” 

If the protests can teach us nothing, then let them serve, at least, as a symbol of the catastrophe that ensues when history is repeatedly ignored, dismissed and ridiculed. Because in the years since Martin Luther King’s fight for civil rights, we have treated race as a matter of the past, when in reality, it has transcended beyond the past, cementing itself into the present — our communities and our police forces.

If we don’t address the disadvantages of the past, we will continue to have a race-dominated present. If we believe that what happened in Ferguson was wrong, then we have to change what it means to be right. 

Write to Bethel at beh56@pitt.edu