Indignity in Ferguson

"White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being. And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind."

- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

The killing of Michael Brown was an outrage, if not a crime. This outrage has been compounded many times over by the actions, inactions, and postures of the various state and local authorities towards the citizens of Ferguson over the past several months. From the withholding of information about the circumstances of the killing from Michael Brown's family, to the over-militarized police response to protests, to the pre-emptive state of emergency called several days before the grand jury had even come to a decision, to the unusual late-night announcement of the grand jury's decision not to seek an indictment against Darren Wilson, Michael Brown's killer, the entire process has been a sustained insult to the dignity of the people of Ferguson and African Americans generally. In other words, business as usual in America.

Dignity and hope and love are to the spirit what food and water and oxygen are to the body.  You cannot deprive a person, or a community, or a culture, of dignity, hope, and love and expect them to just put up with it.  The only way to cause people to accept such a fate is to break them, to beat them down or to kill them, whether in spirit or in body.  If they manage to survive unbroken, then they will survive seething; and their frustration, their unruliness, their rage, even their hatred - these will be signs of life, signs of the spirit within them that is still alive and struggling to be free.

In a region of our country, an entire race was enslaved for two hundred and fifty years - and yet they were not broken.  And for another hundred years they were kept in de facto servitude, deprived of equal citizenship and equal dignity - and yet they did not give up. These Americans have continued, generation after generation, to struggle for a better life.

Observe a person who is dying of thirst or hunger or lack of air.  What will they not do to survive? To what will they not resort in their desperation?  Observe the lashing out.  Observe the writhing, the gasping.  Observe the struggle for yet one more breath of life. Human beings are designed to live.  They do not reconcile themselves easily to death, either of the body or of the spirit.  

Human beings don't give up so long as they have breath within them.  The human spirit is not something you can easily kill. Consider our revolution against the British - revolt against indignity is the founding spirit of our nation.  Anyone who can't sympathize with the rage and sorrow in Ferguson is overlooking what it means to be an American.

Any system - whether in the thirteen colonies two hundred and forty years ago, or in Ferguson, Missouri today - that depends on keeping a group of people down indefinitely is going to fail in the end.  What's more, it deserves to.