church & state.

an ongoing discussion/moment of clairty.

words. 

"The thing about Ferguson is it doesn't need messaging or intermediaries. You can understand everything that's happening even by staring at a muted TV—sometimes especially so, if Don Lemon's busy giving a lecture to black kids about saying "ma'am" with their pants on tighter, or whatever his job is. All you need is a functional long-term cultural memory. An unarmed black teenager is dead, shot multiple times by a white cop from a disproportionately white PD in an overwhelmingly black community. You know everything that that means.

All the usual dismissals fall impotently away. You can't dismiss these people as bored, privileged interlopers when you see an economically depressed local community responding to its own structure. The message is a centuries-long refrain about legal force used as an instrument of terror by an economic and racial overclass, and the moment you might dismiss that as the airy evocation of some college revolutionary, it is instantly reinforced by rubber bullets, by snipers on rooftops, by the brutal color binaries of white faces and long black guns firing clouds of white gas at black men and women who stand palms upraised. Journalists will exit the craft table area for that.

...The citizens of Ferguson are speaking to the instrument they democratically and economically empower, and in the process have been maligned by every element indebted to modern security theater—the conservative crowd that pushes law-and-order both as a governing plank and a handgun sales pitch. (Not to mention networks that just love gee-whiz military stuff on the teevee.) Beyond the bestializing of blacks as part of a centuries-long narrative of dehumanization, the ease—almost necessity—with which the right addresses Ferguson citizens' publicly impeaching the legitimacy of the state as "animals" speaks to the desire to see them caged. Someone can be paid to build that cage, so long as the right people are elected to fund it. The most seductive aspects of modern U.S. prison culture are temporary walls you can move to wherever they're necessary.

...it's easy to read the terrifying police response to Ferguson, as so many have, as not a local government responding to the voices of the community but rather an occupying force addressing an insurgency of the ineluctable other that needs to be subdued. It's an attitude made more immediate and more horrible by the spontaneity of Ferguson citizens' outrage at Mike Brown's shooting and by the legacy of racial repression in America. But it's an attitude we have accepted elsewhere because it's been expressed more telegenically about less sympathetic groups amid better planned repressive theater.

It's very easy for a wing of the American political population to say that the residents of Ferguson belong in a cage and that events in that town over the last few weeks have confirmed that. It's easy, because they're falling back on the same screaming leitmotif running through 400 years of African-American history. But it's only gotten easier in the last 15 years, because they've been egalitarian enough to throw the rest of us in with it, and for the most part, we've gone quietly."

ROLLING STONE: Insecurity State: The Politics Behind the Drama in Ferguson