Good article. Excerpt: Those who question what the protesters’ violence in Ferguson in August achieved now have their answer. Would you have heard of Brown without it? Would the attorney general have led an investigation without it? Can you name another child who has been killed by the state since then? For there have been many. If it takes a riot for America to remember their names then that tells you more about the country than it does about the rioters. So long as the grand jury prevaricates we will be asked to suspend judgment until a verdict is in and then let the law run its course. That, we are told, is how society functions. But when black kids fill the jails and the morgues so disproportionately we are in a state of extreme dysfunction and the law – or at least the manner in which it is enforced – is in no small part responsible. “To suspend judgment,” wrote James Baldwin when covering a trial in 1982, “demands that one dismiss one’s perceptions at the very same moment that one is most crucially – and cruelly – dependent on them.” There is more to justice than the law. And the law is too often, too brutally and too brazenly proving itself unjust.
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 14:47:16 +0000
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