A little background seems in order,
particularly for readers from other countries, who might not know.
Yes, there is a black president.
However, the US is a segregated country. It is and always has been
institutionally a profoundly racist country. Slavery was defeated,
but Jim Crow essentially remains. Only the formalities have changed.
You don't need a “whites only” sign
to maintain a very separated, unequal society. My own history is a
classic illustration.
When I was a toddler, my parents
decided to buy a house in the suburbs of New York City. My dad had a
good union job as a university professor and my mom also taught there
part-time, and part-time to piano students who came to our house.
Even with this sort of employment, even back in 1969, it was a
stretch for them to buy a house in what was then a fairly remote
suburb, even though it was a less expensive one to buy a house in
than some others. But with help from their fairly
gainfully-employed, homeowning parents, they were able to swing it.
Like so many other similar suburbs
around the US, growing up in Wilton, Connecticut, the town I lived in
was almost entirely white. Out of the 1,200 students at Wilton High
School, there was a small handful of nonwhite students – one
Iranian, two Latinos, and a handful of African-American students,
like five or so, all of them bused in from the black-majority,
impoverished city of Bridgeport, an hour away.
Ten miles away was South Norwalk, which
at the time was, like most of the cities in the US then and now, the
very image of urban decay, full of boarded-up, abandoned buildings,
overflowing garbage cans, stripped cars, and densely-populated,
barren government housing known as “the projects.” All the kids
from places like Wilton knew never to set foot in places like South
Norwalk. The expression was, “that's a bad neighborhood.” “Bad”
in this case almost always means “black.” In polite society in
places like Wilton, you didn't refer to it as a “black”
neighborhood. That would raise questions. We used the term “bad”
because it's safer.
Some of my friends and I did set foot
in South Norwalk, though – to buy drugs. There, as a cowering
young teenager, I waited outside the projects in the car while my
more worldly friends went inside. I remember feeling safer when the
police were passing by and shining their floodlights in at us, even
though we were there to buy drugs. When the police cars left, the
projects were in total darkness, I remember, since all of the street
lights around them were out for one reason or another. But they'd
always be back minutes later.
I'd talk to people there from this town
ten miles away from my home sometimes, but I often wouldn't
understand them. For the most part they spoke a different dialect of
English from mine – not because they were from a different region
that had developed a different accent or dialect because they were
separated from other parts of the country. But because I and these
other people who both grew up in the little state of Connecticut were
separated by racism, and economics (which are concepts that generally
go hand-in-hand in the US).
My parents always told me as a kid that
the main reason we had left New York City was for the schools. This
is one of the main reasons for the massive phenomenon known here as
“white flight.” The last thing they wanted to do was to move to
an almost completely homogenous town. See, the bizarre state of
affairs that many people outside of the US are unaware of is that
education in this country is about 98% locally-funded, mostly through
local real estate tax. So, in wealthier communities they are able to
spend much more on education, and they do.
So you end up with a situation where
the vast majority of people who grew up in places like Wilton become
home-owning college graduates with good jobs, and the majority of
people growing up in the projects of South Norwalk end up not going
to college, not owning homes, not getting good jobs, and in a huge
number of cases, not even being functionally literate. And in so
many cases, dying violent deaths at a young age.
White kids from the suburbs like me are
the ones doing most of the drugs, statistically. But for the most
part, we're not the ones taking the risk of importing, manufacturing
and distributing the drugs. That's too risky, you could go to jail
for that. So the politicians we elect refuse to fund education or
other aspects of the social welfare in any kind of meaningful,
national way like they do in civilized countries. Then the very
large suburban white population descends upon these neglected
communities to buy illegal drugs, thus fueling a massive, prohibited
drug economy, and the gang violence that prohibition tends to
engender. (Especially when the prohibition is combined with racist
laws, racist police departments, and an utter lack of local, regional
or national government spending on anything other than law
enforcement, the military, and building more highways for people from
the suburbs to use.)
I went to three different summer camps
as a kid, some of them for multiple summers, and at all of them, I
don't recall there being a single person of color -- either campers
or staff. When I went to a private college in the midwest, out of
two thousands students, there were maybe two or three
African-Americans, and several Africans, including my roommate,
Enock, from apartheid South Africa.
At the age of 18, growing up in a
country with tens of millions of people of African descent who lived
within a hundred miles in any direction, Enock was the first friend I
ever had who was black. And somehow I had to go to Indiana to meet
him.
The US is nothing like it is in the
Hollywood movies. These days, much more often than not, the movies
and TV shows like to depict a multiracial, relatively egalitarian,
solidly middle class society. In reality, there are occasional
pockets that more or less accurately reflect Hollywood's version of
society. But that's not at all the norm. The norm is segregation.
The norm is white and black people who
only meet from either side of the checkout counter.
Since I dropped out of college I have
lived in many towns and cities – Boston, Brookline, Somerville, and
Medford in Massachusetts. Seattle and Olympia, Washington. Berkeley
and San Francisco, California. New Haven and Southbury, Connecticut.
Houston, Texas. Now in Portland, Oregon. All of these cities are
almost completely segregated by race. The ones that aren't
segregated are that way because they barely have any people of color
in them.
I have lived in neighborhoods that were
almost completely white, or almost completely black, or almost
completely Latino. I'm not sure if I have ever personally been to a
town in the US that reflects the demographics of the country as a
whole, where different people live together in a more random sort of
pattern. I'm not sure if a town like that exists. Though I haven't
yet been to all of them. The only time that such a demographic seems
to exist, from what I've seen, it's temporary. Temporary because
when either white flight or its opposite, gentrification, is taking
place in a neighborhood, town or city, it doesn't happen immediately.
It takes a few years, or longer.
Despite the obvious realities of
Apartheid in the US, as a white person I could nonetheless mostly
ignore the fact that I lived in a violently racist, terribly unequal,
segregated society. Like other white people with a conscience, I
could think about it if I wanted to, and then stop thinking about it
when I wanted to. My ability to keep it all at a theoretical
distance ended suddenly in the early morning hours of May 1st,
1993, when my housemate and close friend, Eric Mark, was killed in a
gang-related shooting when we went out that night in San Francisco.
The exact circumstances really don't
matter, except that Eric was killed by a violent street gang, and the
proliferation of heavily-armed gangs on the streets of American
cities is a direct consequence of a vicious combination of poverty,
racism, and drug prohibition. But beyond that, what really matters
is that Eric's death blew my sheltered white middle-class world into
shreds, permanently. Because suddenly for me people no longer fit
into boxes according to class, race, national origin, etc. Now
people only fit into two boxes, I suppose: those who had suffered
the sudden, violent loss of friends and relatives, and those who
hadn't.
I suddenly could plainly see the
extraordinary pain on the faces of my neighbors in the neighborhood I
lived in in San Francisco, which at the time was around 95% black,
and on the faces of the Central American refugees that made up the
vast majority of the population in the neighborhood in which Eric was
killed. (Both of these neighborhoods have since been gentrified,
with most of the former residents forced by economics to move to
places like Oakland, San Jose, or further afield.)
Ever since Eric's death, hearing a
gunshot reverberating among the hills of San Francisco – a common
occurrence – was no longer just a loud noise. Since that time,
people became more human, more mortal, more three-dimensional.
Except those who had grown up the way I grew up, and had managed to
maintain their protected lives. Those people suddenly became more
foreign to me, harder to relate to.
So I guess that's the background. Too
much background, perhaps. Anyway, Ferguson.
I tend to structure my tours around
protests. All sorts of protests around all sorts of issues, but the
kind that are planned in advance – against a meeting of the G8, or
the World Bank, or a climate summit. If there's a protest planned
with less advance notice, I try to make it to them, too. Which
mainly works if it's near home, or near the tour route if I'm touring
at the time.
Police kill black men under very
questionable circumstances more than once a week in this country.
It's so routine that most of these events don't inspire a large-scale
community reaction. Sometimes, though, if the circumstances are
completely insane – such as an unarmed man with his hands raised in
surrender being shot multiple times in the head at very close range
by an enraged cop for nothing but a refusal to move to the sidewalk,
and then his body is left face-down in the street for over four
hours, while aggressive police refuse to allow the victim's mother to
go to her son – there is a community reaction, as was the case with
the racist execution of Michael Brown, Jr.
Protests had been happening for a week
in and around Ferguson before it finally occurred to me that this
mobilization of the community there might just keep happening.
Usually these things fizzle out over the course of a few days. But
the outrageously disproportionate and violent police reaction to
thousands of nonviolent protesters (as well as to the comparatively
small number of people engaged in property destruction and looting of
liquor stores and gas stations) fueled more outrage.
So I called my friend Chrissy, who
lives four miles down the road from where Michael Brown was killed.
As I had predicted, she had been out protesting with the Ferguson
community every day since the shooting, and she brought me up to
speed on events. I got a plane ticket the next day, for the first
day I could get there on frequent flier miles, which was last
Saturday night.
As I waited for Saturday to arrive and
continued to follow events in Ferguson, post to social media my
thoughts about things, share the song I wrote about Mike Brown, etc.,
I was shocked every day by some of the idiotic comments I was seeing
from clueless white people talking about Mike Brown's character, or
talking about waiting for the authorities to investigate what
multiple people witnessed. Most people commenting were in sync with
my take on the situation – that a racist cop serving a racist
institution executed a young black man in the street while he had his
hands raised in the air. But a number of people commented or emailed
me privately to express their perspective that Mike Brown was
something other than an angel, which, true or not, is completely
irrelevant. Just as irrelevant as their comments about the cop
having no record of prior complaints against him.
These comments from people were another
reminder that what you might call “white progressives” is a very
mixed bunch. I write songs about many different issues and sing for
many different kinds of causes, and it never ceases to distress me
that people who are so hip to anti-imperialism or environmentalism
might on the other hand be so ignorant when it comes to the realities
of institutionalized racism in the USA.
And then there's the gaping divide
between white progressives and the black community. I tour all over
the country, playing in many different places. I've been to St Louis
many times. Like Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia and many other
cities in the US, St Louis has a population that has an
African-American majority. Knowing that fact, it's always hard not
to notice that at my shows in places like St Louis or Philadelphia,
my audience is usually around 90% white -- about as white as a show
might be in Idaho. This, essentially, is my audience: white
progressives with a penchant for acoustic music, and a smattering of
other folks who don't fit some aspect of that mould.
Normally, at least 9 times out of 10,
if I'm planning to go to a protest in the US or just about anywhere
else in the world, if I put the word out among my activist-oriented
contacts (that is, my email list, Twitter followers, etc.) that I'm
coming to town, I'm soon going to hear from someone about singing at
the protest or other events happening that call for music. This time
that didn't happen. (And I say that just to illustrate the point
about the separation of racially-divided communities in the US, not
to complain that I didn't get a chance to take my guitar out of its
case.)
As a further illustration of this
divide, people I know in St Louis were asking protest organizers
about what's happening next. Things were moving fast day by day, and
inevitably people were organizing by the seat of their pants, and in
any situation like this it's going to be hard to know what's going to
happen next. But the response of the organizers was interestingly
confounding in this particular situation. They would generally tell
people to check their social media.
There's a phenomenon that I only just
heard about in St Louis called Black Twitter. I also just learned
that per capita, African-Americans use Twitter around twice as much
US society as a whole. But me and the white folks I know in St Louis
aren't on the right feeds, and were basically unable to rely on
social media to keep us informed, unlike everybody else around there
– the overwhelmingly African-American majority involved with the
protests.
Reiko took me to the airport in
Portland on Saturday afternoon. The young African-American man
working at the restaurant we went to first asked me where I was
headed. I said something about protesting the cops in Ferguson, and
somehow we ended up with an extra meal.
Upon landing in St Louis I took the
shuttle to the rental car place, and was asked the same question by
the white woman behind the counter. I told her I came to attend a
funeral in Ferguson. She had a bit of a scowl on her face then, and
spoke to me with suspicion after that. Perhaps she would have said
more, but she seemed to be mindful of the two black men in line
behind me to rent cars.
Hundreds of people, at least, came from
all over the country to be part of what was happening in Ferguson, as
well as media from around the world. There were white people coming
from various places, along with much larger numbers of people of
African descent, but from what I saw, most of the white people at
protests and other events were journalists on assignment.
Upon arrival at Chrissy's place in
Florissant, we reminisced about past protests we had been at together
– the teargas-drenched FTAA talks in Miami in 2003, the NATO
meetings in Chicago a couple years ago which involved Occupy kids
getting charged with terrorism for alleged possession of molotov
cocktails, and others. And I heard stories about the ongoing
protests in Ferguson, and the especially hairy first few days, which
saw so many nonviolent marchers and journalists both gassed and
arrested, and some shot.
In the morning we drove down Florissant
Avenue to the Target store whose parking lot had been largely taken
over by military and police vehicles, which was the police “command
center.” We passed a new, shiny Quick Trip gas station/market that
was surrounded by a shiny new fence. This wasn't the Quick Trip
where the alleged theft of Cigarillos had taken place, but they were
taking no chances. We passed a liquor store that had been boarded
up, and the “ground zero” Quick Trip, which was a blackened hull.
Locals knew that not all of these
boarded-up buildings had been victims of the recent unrest – many
of them were businesses that had shut down years before, in this
economically struggling part of the world. We visited the site of
the murder, on a small street just off of Florissant Avenue. One
thing that's hard to glean from the news coverage is the feel of the
place. While it is not doing well economically, there isn't the same
kind of ghost town feel that you find in large parts of St Louis.
It's got a suburban feel to it. The apartments around where Mike
Brown's grandmother lives seem nice and well-maintained, though
small. There's a lot of green space around them, fields and trees.
We parked in the shade on this
scorching hot day, and we met a middle-aged man who came to Ferguson
from South Bend, Indiana. We walked toward the makeshift memorials
for Mike Brown, one of which was in the middle of the street, on the
yellow lines, where he was gunned down, arms raised. People say
there is still dried blood beneath the now-dried up flowers that
stretch up and down the yellow lines. Someone leaned a very large
wooden cross against a tree in memory of Mike. There was a crowd of
a couple dozen people talking and milling about. Local people,
journalists, and various visitors like us. (Including two other
white people, a gay couple from St Louis I believe.) During the few
minutes we were there, several police cars drove by, in a way that
somehow felt inherently disrespectful.
The word managed to trickle down to me
that there was a Peace Fest that was happening that day in St Louis
which was a place people were going, so we headed there next. It was
an annual event planned well in advance, a small, free festival with
a theme focusing on ending gang violence. There were the usual
booths from local sponsors, and then there were other tents set up by
activist sorts who I imagine might not have been there otherwise,
like some folks who came from Chicago with some freshly-made,
powerful “Hands Up, Don't Shoot” t-shirts (one of which I
bought).
I had been hearing rumors of people
coming to the St Louis area from all over for the weekend. When
there are ongoing protests around a particular theme – Occupy Wall
Street, protests against Israel's war in Gaza, etc. – things often
heat up on the weekends. This wasn't the case last weekend. Well,
the weather heated up, a lot – every day it was well above 100
degrees Fahrenheit, and extremely humid. But the numbers of people
engaged in marches and the like had decidedly dwindled.
The world's media was still around to
report on daily events, so a few hundred people coming to the Peace
Fest was among the top news stories on AP that day. Many parents of
other young men unjustly killed were in town, and one of those who
spoke at the Peace Fest was Trayvon Martin's father.
Among the small white minority at the
Peace Fest were a number of members of the Revolutionary Communist
Party from Chicago, San Francisco and perhaps elsewhere, and one lone
old guy pushing the newspaper of the extremely bizarre Spartacist
League, who, last I checked, dedicated most of their paper's column
inches to criticizing other leftists.
In another part of town the Festival of
Nations was on, and as the name implies, there were several stages
with musicians from around the world, as well as a huge array of
fried food from dozens of different countries. I guess whatever your
national cuisine is, you have to fry it in order for it to be
palatable to Missourians, I don't know. Just about the only thing
among the food tents that wasn't fried was the Ethiopian food, so we
ate that.
Mokabe's cafe nearby was adorned with a
large antiracist banner, and felt like liberated territory. Early
evening Chrissy had a weekly soccer get-together with friends in the
neighborhood where the loose-knit Catholic Worker movement has
various houses in the midst of block after block of abandoned,
boarded-up, or just completely gutted buildings that the city hasn't
done anything with for ages. Much of the city is like that.
The area where we went later in the
evening for dinner and to hear some music was just on the other side
of what's known locally as the Delmar Divide. On one side of Delmar
Boulevard is a ragged neighborhood where every other house is boarded
up, and 99% of the population is black. The only statue of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr is nearby. On the other side of Delmar –
which used to be the other side of the tracks, back when St Louis had
decent mass transit, a long time ago – is a posh street adorned
with American flags every ten feet or so, lined with overpriced
restaurants and cafes filled with white people, a large number of
whom live in gated communities right there, only a block from the
boarded up neighborhood on the other side of Delmar.
The commercial street with the cafes
and such there is the only one you can drive on without a password
for frequent stretches. Every street coming off of it has a gate on
it. Talking to one member of the all-white crowd of people in the
restaurant where we ate, at one point she commented that although she
lived in the neighborhood, she didn't know anyone who lived in the
neighborhood on the other side of Delmar. Quite likely she had never
dared even take a walk on that side of the disused train tracks.
We passed through Ferguson on the way
to Florissant later that night, and a small march was proceeding down
a sidewalk beside the main drag, Florissant Avenue, maybe a couple
dozen people.
When I initially got the plane ticket,
the timespan was fairly random. I just figured I'd come for three
nights. It turned out that my timing was accidentally going to
coincide with Michael Brown, Jr's funeral, which I heard about on the
AP newswire. I hadn't brought much in the way of clothing that's
really appropriate for the occasion, but I did have a “Hands Up,
Don't Shoot” t-shirt now, and I figured that would be OK.
There had been rumors the previous day
that the Westboro Baptist Church was planning to show up outside the
funeral, but when we went to the megachurch by 9 in the morning,
there was no sign of those bigoted lunatics, thankfully. The line to
get into the church went around the block, and there was a huge media
presence, with loads of satellite trucks. By the time we got to the
entrance of the sanctuary, it was full, and we were directed to an
auditorium, which also soon filled up, with close to five thousand
people altogether, and many hundreds more outside.
I very rarely attend church services of
any kind, and this one was easily the most exciting church service
I've ever experienced. The chorus and band were fantastic, and even
in the auditorium, watching things in the sanctuary on screens and
listening through speakers, the people in there danced, clapped and
sang magnificently.
There was much talk from the lengthy
string of male ministers who dominated the program about stopping the
violence in the black community. Their animated speeches seemed to
focus more on gang violence than on police violence, and decidedly
focused more on peace than it did on justice. That theme changed
noticeably with Attorney Benjamin Crump's short speech and
introduction to Reverend Al Sharpton, who gave a long, eloquent,
impassioned plea for movement-building, for justice, for
accountability on the part of the police.
Every time I hear Reverend Sharpton
speak I wonder what the heck the pundits in the corporate and
“public” media are talking about when they constantly berate him
as a “divider.” It seems so obvious to anyone who's paying
attention that he's not dividing anyone – in fact he's trying to
unite people, behind common sense. Talking about obvious divisions
doesn't make you divisive. (Ignoring them does make you divisive,
though!) The worst thing you could say about Al Sharpton, it seems
to me, is that he still has faith in the Democratic Party. Why an
apparently sensible person like him would have such faith is a
complete mystery to me.
Well under 1% of those in attendance at
the homegoing service were white, and most of those whites were
journalists. Some white antiracists I talked to didn't go to the
funeral because they felt like doing so would somehow be intrusive.
Like just because the event is open to the public doesn't mean it's
OK to invade the cultural space or something. Maybe I'm just thick,
but I'm pretty mystified by that perspective. Seems to me, someone
was killed by the police, and anybody who shows up at the funeral is
showing solidarity with that person, his family, and his community,
whoever that may be, wherever in the world they may be. (Period.)
The embarrassing reality was that, far
from being unwelcome, we were treated in that church like
ambassadors. Every other person I passed by at the end of the
service thanked me for coming, and shook my hand, for being a white
person who showed up. I was reminded of that saying, I don't
remember who said it, about how sometimes you just need to show up.
The fact that we were there to mourn the sudden, early death of a
young man with great potential who was killed in a racist hate crime
was horrific as it was, but the almost complete lack of visible
solidarity from anyone outside of the black community was about
equally depressing. (As was the dominant message of most of the
speakers preceding Crump and Sharpton, that not being violent,
praying, and voting would solve everything.)
Outside the church, a hundred or so
black motorcyclists were now revving their engines at deafening
volume and producing such clouds of smog that it resembled a tear gas
attack in several ways. The colorful bunch had been requested by the
Brown family to escort the funeral procession, rather than the
police.
Chrissy and I walked down the street
toward where we parked, now being thanked for showing up by people
outside a car repair shop. We hadn't really eaten yet that day and
it was now afternoon, so we skipped off to a nearby diner, which was
filled with other well-dressed people from the funeral who had the
same idea. We talked with many of them there, all of whom recognized
us from the funeral (we were very recognizable there) and thanked us
for showing up.
At the cemetery, the motorcyclists were
guarding the entrance theatrically. We parked nearby and walked in.
There may have been no police in there, but the fire department had
managed to create a small presence, handing out cold bottles of
water. At the cemetery the crowd was much smaller, maybe two hundred
people. Someone close to the casket was talking, but there was no
amplification, so only people really nearby could hear that. People
started singing “We Shall Overcome.” I didn't know the songs
about Jesus they were singing at the church, but I knew this one, and
joined in, quietly, singing a bass part.
Members of the Nation of Islam had been
present in large numbers outside the church, and some were at the
burial as well. Someone, I didn't see who, said in a nasally voice
very much resembling Louis Farrakhan, “the white man really is the
devil.” Everyone else ignored him. Spike Lee walked away from the
casket with his family, toward his car. I wanted to tell him how
much I loved his movies, but figured it was the wrong time.
Chrissy and I headed back to our car,
and met a journalist from Guatemala who had driven to St Louis from
Austin, Texas to attend the funeral. He was telling us how he was
embarrassed to take out his fancy camera because he didn't want to
just be another journalist, since really he was mainly there in
solidarity and had come on his own dime.
We thought we'd visit the site of the
most recent “officer-involved shooting”/racist execution in the
area, which happened last Tuesday, not very far from where Michael
Brown was shot. There was a makeshift memorial there, too. Teddy
bears, flowers and a plastic, upside-down American flag.
There was a “town meeting” at the
Missouri Museum of History. We got there early. The exhibits in the
museum that were not closed off for the evening's event were a
bizarre mix. A collection of photographs related to the Mississippi
River on one floor. A collection of newspaper covers praising the
achievements of local Nazi sympathizer airman, Charles Lindbergh on
another floor. A statue of a dead, rich white slaveowner named
Thomas Jefferson in the front of the building. He wasn't even from
Missouri.
But the program of events held
regularly at the museum was much more interesting than the museum
itself would indicate, and it included the event that evening, which
was being led by Kevin Powell, an author and activist from New York
City.
My 60 hours in Missouri ended with a
visit to a swimming pool, in the forest down the hill from a house a
half mile down a private road in the far reaches of Florissant, so
close but so far from Michael Brown's little apartment in Ferguson.
Early the next morning, eating
breakfast at the airport before boarding my flight home, CNN was
reporting on a new audio recording that indicated that Officer Darren
Wilson had fired ten shots at Michael Brown, Jr, rather than six, as
had been previously reported. The next day, back home, while taking
my morning walk around the swamp on the campus of Reed College, I
heard the news that two more young black men somewhere in the US who
had posed no threat to police whatsoever had been been shot and
killed the day before.
