Ive been reading articles on Ferguson and Mike Brown for the last two days. Where do we start in thinking about this tragedy, this travesty and the systemic inequalities in our justice system or the rest of our society. Do we start with the wail of Mike Browns mother upon learning of the grand jurys failure to indict the man who killed her son? Do we start with the inconsistencies in the way the prosecutor decided to present this case to the grand jury as opposed to the ways he presents the cases of others accused of a crime? Do we focus on the particulars of how the prosecutor disregarded and discounted some witnesses and yet, as Lawrence ODonnell pointed out on MSNBC last night, absolutely relied on the one witness who corroborated Darren Wilsons testimony, despite the fact that that witness changed his/her testimony from their original statement (in the first statement to the police this witness said Michael Brown was walking on the sidewalk as the witness was walking on the sidewalk, which was clearly not the case; the witness also placed his/herself at a 100 yards away but then changed it in the grand jury to 50 to 75 yards away--which is still farther away than other witnesses who contradicted Wilsons testimony). Or do we talk about the ways the citizens of Ferguson for years have been both racially profiled and ticketed and arrested in numbers way beyond their portion of the population of the town and how that money was the mainstay of the police budget--so in fact they were being robbed to pay for the salaries and equipment of the very police that were racially profiling them? Or do we go to the larger systemic issues such as those outlined in Michelle Alexanders The New Jim Crow? Or do we go to Alexanders heart rendering account of her efforts to explain Ferguson and the injustices of the American legal system to her ten year old son, to her dilemma of trying to tell the truth to her son and yet not terrifying him with the knowledge that what happened to Mike Brown could also happen to him? nytimes/2014/11/26/opinion/ferguson-telling-my-son-michelle-alexander.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 21:39:52 +0000
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