How to explain this hellscape? Wilhelm gives us an economic story: capitalists no longer have the capacity or motive to exploit the labor of these men; unnecessary for capital, they are made wards of the state. Michelle Alexander, in The New Jim Crow, gives us a political one: fear of black insurgency (a backlash against the successes of the Civil Rights Movement) led white voters to support “law and order” policies, like increased mandatory minimum sentences and reduced opportunity for parole.* Alexander underplays the impact of a very real crime wave beginning in the late 1960s, but it is true that these policies were first championed by a Republican “Southern strategy” that did little to conceal a core racial animus, and they began to receive bipartisan support in the 80s, when the crack epidemic united the country in fear of black criminality.
However, if white politicians had hoped to specifically target blacks with these punitive policies, they failed. From 1970 to 2000, the incarceration rate for whites increased just as fast, and it continued to increase even as the black incarceration rate began to decline after 2000. Blacks are still incarcerated at much higher rates, but the black-white disparity actually fell over the era of mass incarceration. Even if every black man currently in jail were miraculously set free, in a sort of anti-racist rapture, the US would still have the highest incarceration rate in the world.
1.
St. Louis, a city born in slavery, has a long history of state-mandated racial segregation in the twentieth century: redlining, segregated public housing and restrictive covenants.† Out of urban engineering and “slum surgery”’ there came the 1956 Pruitt-Igoe project, which housed 15,000 people in North St. Louis. Built in part according to Le Corbusier’s principles by Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who would go on to design the World Trade Center, this project became notorious almost immediately for its crime and poverty. Local authorities solved the problem—and that of Pruitt-Igoe’s large-scale rent strike—by simply demolishing it in the early 1970s, in an event that Charles Jencks famously identified as “the day modern architecture died.”* North St. Louis has remained heavily impoverished and racialized to the present, with 95 percent of the population identifying as black, and unemployment among men in their twenties approaches 50 percent in many neighborhoods.
An incorporated city close to the northern edge of St. Louis, Ferguson had been an early destination for white flight, as both workers and jobs moved out of the city in the 1950s and 60s, to escape the desegregated school system and benefit from the lower taxes of suburban St. Louis County. But many of the refugees of the Pruitt-Igoe disaster too fled north to places like Ferguson when other white suburbs blocked the construction of multi-family housing, enforced restrictive covenants, or simply proved too expensive. This was the beginning of another wave of out-migration—this time black—as crime and poverty swept the deindustrialized city through the 1980s and 90s. Whites now began to leave Ferguson, taking investment and tax revenues with them, and the local government started to allow for the construction of low- and mixed-income apartments in the southeastern corner of the town.† These developments fit a general pattern of spatial polarization and local homogenization, as segregation has occurred between blocks of increasing size—town and suburb rather than neighborhood.‡ Through such dynamics, the population of Ferguson has become increasingly black over recent decades: from 1% in 1970, to 25% in 1990, to 67% in 2010. But the local state ruling over this population has lagged significantly behind its rapidly shifting racial profile: in 2014 only about 7.5% of police officers were African-American, and almost all elected officials were white. Meanwhile the gender balance has changed just as rapidly, with Ferguson displaying the highest number of “missing black men” in the US: only 60 black men for every 100 women; thus more than 1 in 3 black men absent, presumed either dead or behind bars.*
A further influx to Ferguson—and specifically Canfield Green, the apartment complex in the southeast where Michael Brown lived and died—came from another mass demolition of housing stock: neighboring Kinloch, a much older African American neighborhood, had also been suffering from the general dynamics of declining population and high crime until much of the area was razed to make way for an expansion of Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. While Kinloch and Ferguson may together form a continuous picture of racialization, urban decay and brutalization at the hands of planners and developers, viewed at other scales it is the polarizations that start to appear: a couple of kilometers from Ferguson’s southern perimeter lies the small townlet of Bellerive. Bordering on the campus of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Bellerive has a median family income of around $100,000.
Indeed, Ferguson itself remains relatively integrated by the standards of St. Louis County, with a quite prosperous white island around South Florissant Road. Both crime and poverty are lower than in neighboring suburbs like Jennings and Berkeley. But it is a suburb in transition. If in the 1960s and 70s the racial divisions of St. Louis County were largely carved out by public policy, as well as semi-public restrictive covenants, in the 1990s and 2000s they tended to follow a more discrete and spontaneous pattern of real estate valuations. Like Sanford, Florida, where George Zimmerman had gunned down Trayvon Martin two and a half years earlier—setting in train the beginnings of a national wave of activism—Ferguson was impacted heavily by the recent foreclosure crisis. More than half the new mortgages in North St. Louis County from 2004 to 2007 were subprime, and in Ferguson by 2010 one in 11 homes were in foreclosure. Between 2009 and 2013 North County homes lost a third of their value. Landlords and investment companies bought up underwater properties and rented to minorities. White flight was now turning into a stampede.
Because property taxes are linked to valuations, the Ferguson city government had to look elsewhere for funding. Between 2004 and 2011 court fines netted $1.2 million, or around 10% of the city’s revenue. By 2013 this figure had doubled to $2.6 million, or a fifth of all revenues. The city’s annual budget report attributed this to a “more concentrated focus on traffic enforcement.” In that year the Ferguson Municipal Court disposed of 24,532 warrants and 12,018 cases, or about 3 warrants and 1.5 cases per household. A Department of Justice report would soon reveal that these had been far from evenly distributed across the population:
African Americans account for 85% of vehicle stops, 90% of citations, and 93% of arrests made by FPD officers, despite comprising only 67% of Ferguson’s population. [They] are 68% less likely than others to have their cases dismissed by the court [and] 50% more likely to have their cases lead to an arrest warrant.*
In high poverty areas like Canfield Green, non-payment of fines could easily lead to further fines as well as jail time, and the report found that “arrest warrants were used almost exclusively for the purpose of compelling payment through the threat of incarceration.” Here the disappearance of white—and the destruction of black—wealth had led to a mutation in the form of the local state: revenue collected not through consensual taxation but by outright violent plunder.
2.
On August 9, 2014, police left Michael Brown dead, and in a pool of blood, for four and a half hours, whilst “securing the crime scene,” or so they later explained. With Brown lying still on the tarmac, a large angry crowd gathered in Canfield Green, as residents poured out of surrounding apartments. Cops reported gunfire and chants of “kill the police.” “Hands up, don’t shoof and “We are Michael Brown” would soon be added to the chorus, while someone set a dumpster on fire; signs already that an anti-police riot was in the offing.
At a daytime vigil the next day, 10 August 2014, a black leader of the County government tried to calm the mounting unrest, but was shouted down. Members of the New Black Panther Party chanted “Black Power” and berated “that devil rap music.” As day tilted into evening, the large, restive crowd met with massive police presence—a conventional proto-riot scenario. Confrontations ensued: a cop car and a TV van attacked; shops looted; a QuikTrip gas station the first thing aflame. This acted as
a beacon, drawing more people out. The scorched forecourt of this place would become a central gathering point for protests over the coming weeks. And rather than the mythically random object of “mob rage,” it was a deliberately selected target: rumor had it that staff had called the cops on Brown, accusing him of shoplifting. The QuikTrip was followed by some riot standards: parked vehicles set alight; looting on West Florissant Avenue—plus a little festivity, music playing, people handing out hot dogs. The cops backed off for hours, leaving that odd sort of pseudoliberated space that can appear in the midst of a riot.
As the eyes of the nation turned to watch, people joined in on social media with the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown hashtag, mocking the media selection of the most gangsta possible victim portraits. Activists from St. Louis—some of whom had been involved in a spontaneous march the year before, through the city’s downtown, in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman—began to descend on the suburb. Meanwhile standard mechanisms sprung into action: on 11 August the FBI opened a civil rights investigation into Brown’s shooting, while NAACP President Cornell William Brooks flew into Ferguson, calling for an end to violence. President Obama intervened the next day with a statement offering condolences to the Brown family and asking for people to calm down. In response to Trayvon’s death his rhetoric had been characterized by tensions between racial particularity and the universality of national citizenship, tensions which registered a constitutive contradiction of American society. Faced with an immediate wave of rioting, it was predictable which way these would now be resolved: Obama eschewed any racial identification with Brown or his family, in favor of “the broader American community.”
But the rioting rolled on over days; action necessarily diffuse in this suburban landscape, police lines straining to span subdivisions. Away from the front lines strip malls were looted while carni-valesque refrains lingered in the air: protesters piling onto slow-driving cars, blasting hip-hop, an odd sort of ghost riding. In altercations between cops and protesters the latter sometimes threw rocks or Molotovs. But they were also often hands-up, shouting “don’t shoot.” In retrospect, this may look like an early instance of the theatrics of this wave of struggle, and it would soon become a familiar meme. But it was also apparently a spontaneous response to the immediate situation, right after Brown’s shooting, before the media-savvy activists rolled into town at the end of the month—for it had an immediate referent, not only symbolically, in Brown himself, but also practically, as protesters confronted the diverse toolkit of the American state: SWAT teams, tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper balls, flash grenades, beanbag rounds, smoke bombs, armored trucks. The nation was aghast as images scrolled across screens of this military hardware, of a cop saying “Bring it, you fucking animals”—coverage that police attempted at points to shut down.
Social contestation in the US has long faced much greater threat of physical violence than in other comparable countries—indeed, those protesting in Ferguson would also at points be shot at with live ammunition by unidentified gunmen, and sometimes get hit. (This is surely one reason why such contestation often seems markedly muted, given conditions.) Police violence against unarmed black people was thus not a simple content of these protests, an issue for them to merely carry along, like any other demand. It was also implicated in the nature of the protests themselves, where everyone out on the streets those days was a potential Mike Brown. There was, we might say, a peculiar possibility for movement unification presenting itself here, a unity one step from the graveyard, given by the equality that the latter offers; a unity of the potentially killable. Hands up, don’t shoot. And as the country looked on, this performance of absolute vulnerability communicated something powerful; something with which police were ill-equipped to deal: Will you even deny that I am a living body?
Such messages, broadcast on the national stage, seemed to pose a threat to police legitimacy, and raised practical questions about the continuing management of the Ferguson unrest. Criticism of the militarized policing came even from the midst of the state—albeit its libertarian wing.* On the 14th the Highway Patrol—a state police force, less implicated in the immediate locality, with a much higher ratio of black officers and a distinctly non-militaristic style—was ordered in as an alternative, softer approach with a view to easing tensions, apparently with some success. In the evening hours, a captain even walked with a large peaceful demonstration. At “an emotional meeting at a church,” clergy members were despairing at “the seemingly uncontrollable nature of the protest movement and the flare-ups of violence that older people in the group abhorred.”‡ Meanwhile, Canfield Green turned into a block party.
After five days of protests often violently dispersed, the name of Brown’s killer, Darren Wilson, was finally announced, along with a report that Brown had stolen a pack of cigarillos from Ferguson Market & Liquor—not the QuikTrip gas station—the morning of his death. The timing of this identification of criminality was probably tactical; it was soon followed by an admission that Wilson had not stopped Brown for this reason. That night, Ferguson Market & Liquor received similarly pointed treatment to the QuikTrip: it was looted. The next day a state of emergency and curfew was declared. There were now a small but significant number of guns on the streets, often fired into the air, and police were getting increasingly nervous. On 12 August Mya Aaten-White, great-granddaughter of local jazz singer Mae Wheeler, was shot whilst leaving a protest; the bullet pierced her skull but missed her brain, lodging in her sinus cavity. She survived and refused to cooperate with police investigations.
While some came in from neighboring areas, those out on the streets in the early days remained predominantly local residents.* But a mass of creepers was already climbing over Ferguson’s surface, forming vegetal tangles, trying to grasp some masonry: Christian mimes, prayer and rap circles, wingnut preachers, the Revolutionary Communist Party, “people who would walk between the riot cops and the crowd just saying ‘Jesus’ over and over again”; a generalized recruitment fair.† Bloods and Crips were out, participating in confrontations with cops as well as apparently protecting some stores from looters. Nation of Islam members too took to the streets attempting to guard shops, arguing that women should leave. Others called for peace in the name of a new Civil Rights Movement. Jesse Jackson was booed and asked to leave a local community demonstration when he took the opportunity to ask for donations to his church. “African-American civic leaders” in St. Louis were said to be “frustrated by their inability to guide the protesters.” A rift seemed to be opening.‡
This riot could easily have remained a local affair like those in Cincinnati 2001, Oakland 2009 or Flatbush the year before. Yet it happened to coincide with a high point in the national wave of “black lives matter” activism that had started right after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, and it managed to shake free of local mediators, opening up a space for others to interpret and represent it at will. Soon social media-organized busloads of activists descended on Missouri from around the country—Occupy and Anonymous apparently identities at play here, plus a scattering of anarchists. In the following month “Freedom Rides”—another Civil Rights reference—were organized under the Black Lives Matter banner: it was at this point that this really emerged in its own right as a prominent identity within these movements. Ferguson was mutating from a terrain of community riots into a national center for activism. Key figures began to emerge, often identified by their number of Twitter followers: some local, like Johnetta Elzie (“Netta”) and Ashley Yates; others who had made the pilgrimage, like DeRay McKesson from Minneapolis.*
3.
In retrospect, Black Lives Matter can be viewed as two movements: media-savvy activists and proletarian rioters, for the most part divided both socially and geographically. But in Ferguson’s aftermath this divide was spanned by a shared sense of urgency, by the diverse resonances of a hashtag; by developing institutional bridges, and perhaps above all by the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement itself, w
ith its ability to conjure black unity. The similarities were many: “black lives matter” evoking the older slogan “I am a man,”† the faith and religious rhetoric of many activists, the tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience and media visibility—contrasted with the far more opaque riots, not to mention the direct involvement of Civil Rights organizations and veterans themselves.
The key to this encounter is the simple fact that the historic gains of the Civil Rights Movement failed to improve the lives of most black Americans. Today racial disparities in income, wealth, schooling, unemployment and infant mortality are as high as ever. Segregation persists. Lynching and second class citizenship have been replaced by mass incarceration. The fight against a New Jim Crow would thus seem to require the kind of movement that overthrew the Old. But something fundamental has changed and therefore troubles this project: a small fraction of African Americans reaped significant benefits from the end of de jure discrimination. In 1960, 1 in 17 black Americans were in the top quintile of earners; today that number is 1 in 10. Inequality in wealth and income has risen significantly among African Americans, such that today it is much higher than among whites.*
For some Marxists, the participation of the black middle class in anti-racist movements is seen as a sign of their limited, class-collaborationist character. When such people become leaders it is often assumed they will attend only to their own interests, and betray the black proletariat.† It is true, as such critics point out, that the institutional and political legacy of Civil Rights has more or less been monopolized by wealthier blacks. But the intergenerational transmission of wealth is less assured for African Americans, whose historical exclusion from real estate markets has meant that middle income earners typically possess much less wealth than white households in the same income range. As a result, those born into middle income families are more likely than whites to make less money than their parents.‡ Downward mobility was amplified by the recent crisis, which negatively affected black wealth much more than white.§
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