The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016
Page 43
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Brown vs. Ferguson
* Sidney M. Willhelm, Who Needs the Negro? (Shenkman 1970).
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* For a contemporary discussion of Willhelm’s ideas see “Do Black Lives Matter?” a conversation between Robin Kelley and Fred Moten, on the Critical Resistance website. Automation has long been a key topic for black revolutionaries in the US. See, for example, James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (Monthly Review Press 1963).
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† Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation 2006).
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* These reforms, along with new conspiracy charges that could be used to turn any associate into a state’s witness, effectively gave sentencing power to prosecutors. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow. Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press 2010). However, as James Forman Jr. points out, Alexander’s backlash thesis overlooks the support of black politicians for this same legislation. James Forman Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow,” NYU Law Review, vol. 87, 2012.
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† In 1974 a panel of federal judges concluded that “segregated housing in the St. Louis metropolitan area was . . . in large measure the result of deliberate racial discrimination in the housing market by the real estate industry and by agencies of the federal, state, and local governments.” Richard Rothstein, “The Making of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of Its Troubles,” Economic Policy Institute, 15 October 2014.
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* With a certain historical irony, some would later view the other famous demolition of Minoru Yamasaki buildings as the day postmodernity died.
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† See Chris Wright, “Its Own Peculiar Decor,” in Endnotes 4, October 2015, for an analysis of such dynamics.
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† See Daniel Lichter et al., “Toward a New Macro-Segregation? Decomposing Segregation within and between Metropolitan Cities and Suburbs,” American Sociological Review, vol. 80, no. 4, August 2015.
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* The national average for whites is 99 men for 100 women, 83 for blacks. Wolfers et al., “1.5 Million Missing Black Men,” New York Times, 20 April 2015.
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* “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,” United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, 4 March 2015. The very existence of a DoJ report taking notice of these issues in Ferguson is itself an outcome of the struggles that happened in large part because of them.
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* Senator Rand Paul, “We Must Demilitarize the Police,” Time, 14 August 2014.
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‡ Julie Bosman, “Lack of Leadership and a Generational Split Hinder Protests in Ferguson,” New York Times, 16 August 2014.
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* Solid statistics on participation seem to be unavailable at present, but arrest figures chime with logical readings of the events: in its first phase, Ferguson was clearly a community anti-police riot, and its social character may thus be judged in part by using the place itself as a proxy. Ann O’Neill, “Who was arrested in Ferguson?,” CNN, 23 August 2015.
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† Various, “Reflections on the Ferguson Uprising,” Rolling Thunder #12, spring 2015.
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‡ Bosman, “Lack of Leadership and a Generational Split.”
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* For profiles of the new activists, see “The Disruptors,” CNN, 4 August 2015.
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† The iconic photo of men carrying signs reading “I am a man” is of striking garbage workers in Memphis, 1968. That slogan can in turn be linked back to the 18th-century abolitionist slogan “am I not a man and a brother?,” which was echoed by Sojourner Truth’s “ain’t I a woman?.”
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* A simple measure is the ratio of top to bottom income quintiles within the black population. In 1966 this was 8.4 (the richest 20% blacks had about 8 times the income of the bottom 20%); by 1996 it had doubled to 17. The corresponding figures for whites were 6.2 and 10. Cecilia Conrad et al., African Americans in the US Economy (Rowman and Littlefield 2006), pp. 120-24.
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† See, e.g., Adolph Reed Jr., “Black Particularity Reconsidered,” Telos 39, 1979.
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‡ Of those born into the bottom quintile, over 90% of both blacks and whites earned more than their parents, but only 66% of blacks born in the second quintile surpass their parents’ income, compared with 89% of whites. Pew Trusts, “Pursuing the American Dream: Economic mobility across generations,” 9 July 2012.
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§ From 2005 to 2009, the average black household’s wealth fell by more than half, to$5,677, while white household wealth fell only 16% to $113,149. Rakesh Kochhar et al, “20 to 1: Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics,” Pew Social & Demographic Trends 2011.
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* Alicia Garza, cofounder of the Black Lives Matter network, grew up in predominantly white Marin County, CA, where the median household income is over $100,000. DeRay McKesson, by contrast, grew up in a poor neighborhood of Baltimore. Yet he earned a six-figure salary as the director of human capital for the Minneapolis School District, where he developed a reputation for ruthlessness in firing teachers. Jay Caspian Kang, “Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us,” New York Times, 4 May 2015.
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* Patrick Sharkey, “Spatial segmentation and the black middle class,” American Journal of Sociology 119, no. 4, 2014.
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† Karyn Lacy describes the “exclusionary boundary work” with which the black middle class distinguishes itself from the black poor in the eyes of white authority figures. Blue Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (UC Press 2007).
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‡ Western and Pettit show that in 2008 the incarceration rate for college-educated black men was six times lower than the rate for poor whites who failed to graduate high school. Bruce Western and Becky Pettit, “Incarceration and Social Inequality,” Daedalus (Summer 2010), 8–19.
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* On the gap between proletarian and middle class black identity, see Ytasha L. Womack, Post Black: How a New Generation Is Redefining African American Identity (Chicago Review Press 2010); Toure, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now (Free Press 2011).
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† The Open Society Foundation invested $2.5 million in Ferguson “community groups.” See “Healing the Wounds in Ferguson and Staten Island,” Open Society Foundations blog, 19 December 2014.
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* On the subsequent trajectory of DeRay and other activists, see John Clegg, “Black Representation After Ferguson,” The Brooklyn Rail, 3 May 2016.
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† Garner apparently sold “loosies”—individual cigarettes purchased in neighboring states where taxes were lower—and had already been arrested multiple times in 2014 for this minor misdemeanor. For the cops this was part of the “broken windows” policing strategy made famous by the NYPD. “Beyond the Chokehold: The Path to Eric Garner’s Death,” New York Times, 13 June 2015.
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* Grand Juries play a filtering role in relation to normal court proceedings, det
ermining in secret whether criminal charges should be brought. They are led by a prosecutor, and the defense presents no case. The lack of accountability here makes them a preferred option in these sorts of circumstances. Normally the absence of defense increases the likelihood of indictment, but if the prosecutor who leads the jury is reluctant to indict (due to institutional ties with the police) then non-indictments are more or less guaranteed, and can always be blamed on the Grand Jury itself.
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* For an account of the Duggan case, and the riot wave that followed it, see “A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats,” Endnotes 3, September 2013.
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† The prosecutor who supervised the Grand Jury investigation, Daniel Donovan, was subsequently elected to represent Staten Island, a borough heavily populated with police officers, in the United States Congress. The city later settled a wrongful-death claim by paying $5.9 million to Garner’s family.
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* “Rough ride”: a police technique for inflicting violence on arrestees indirectly, through the movements of a vehicle, thus removing them from the culpability of more direct aggression. Manny Fernandez, “Freddie Gray’s Injury and the Police ‘Rough Ride,’” New York Times, 30 April 2015.
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† The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary (Research and Destroy, New York City 2015).
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* Baltimore was the first city to adopt a residential segregation ordinance (in 1910). Richard Rothstein, “From Ferguson to Baltimore,” Economic Policy Institute, 29 April 2015.
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* Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Black and Blue: Why does America’s richest black suburb have some of the country’s most brutal cops?,” Washington Monthly, June 2001.
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† In 1970 there were 54 black legislators in the US. By 2000 there were 610. Most are in state houses, but the Black Caucus has become a powerful force in Congress, with over 40 members.
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† 44% of Baltimore’s police are black, compared to 60% of its population, but the wider metropolitan area from which police are recruited is 30% black. See Jeremy Ashkenas, “The Race Gap in America’s Police Departments,” New York Times, 8 April 2015.
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* Hillary Clinton, “It’s time to end the era of mass incarceration,” 29 April 2015.
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† Kellan Howell, “Baltimore riots sparked not by race but by class tensions between police, poor,” Washington Times, 29 April 2015.
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‡ See “A Statement from a Comrade and Baltimore Native About the Uprising’ on sic journal.org.
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* See Antonia Blumberg and Carol Kuruvilla, “How The Black Lives Matter Movement Changed The Church,” Huffington Post, 8 August 2015.
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* Stephen Steinberg, “The Liberal Retreat From Race,” New Politics, vol. 5, no. 1, summer 1994.
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† For contemporary evidence of the structural determinants of crime see Ruth Peterson and Krivo Lauren, “Segregated Spatial Locations, Race-Ethnic Composition, and Neighborhood Violent Crime,” Annals of the American Academy, no. 623, 2009.
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‡ Drug offenders make up a much higher proportion of federal prisoners, but only 6% of prisoners are in federal prisons. See Forman Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration.”
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§ If we look only at homicides (generally the most reliable data), from 1980 to 2008 blacks have been 6–10 times more likely than whites to be victims and perpetrators. Alexia Cooper and Erica Smith, “Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980–2008,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2010, p. 32.
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* Jamelle Bouie, “The Trayvon Martin Killing and the Myth of Black-on-Black Crime,” Daily Beast, 15 July 2013.
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† Indeed, in questioning the reality of crime, liberals suggest that the most dispossessed are obediently acquiescing to their condition.
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‡ See Alex Vitale, “We Don’t Just Need Nicer Cops: We Need Fewer Cops,” The Nation, 4 December 2014.
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* Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau 2015), p. 85. Coates further describes this as “raging against the crime in your ghetto, because you are powerless before the great crime of history that brought the ghettos to be.”
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* See “A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats” and “The Holding Pattern” in Endnotes, 3 September 2013.
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