#FergusonTaughtMe

The one-year anniversary of Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri was a few days ago. The events in Ferguson began a movement for racial justice in our country that has been compared to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's. This year has taught me and changed me more than I can say, but I thought I'd join with others in sharing what #FergusonTaughtMe.

#FergusonTaughtMe to pay attention

Around the middle of last August, I was consumed by packing for a stressful semester and moving everything to campus. My focus was on syllabi and course schedules and suitcases and friends I hadn’t seen since May. Anything that wasn’t happening directly in front of me was entirely off my radar. I saw the name of a town I’d never heard of creeping around the edges of my facebook page, maybe I saw that someone had been shot, maybe I saw that the shooter had been a police officer. But it was this facebook status, posted on August 14^th that got me to finally look further, to pay attention:

"Watching a livestream of this stuff in Ferguson. How is this America? How are people not pissed about this?"

#FergusonTaughtMe the power of a hashtag

I learned about Michael Brown, learned he had his hands up when he was shot, learned that he, too, had been preparing for a semester of college. A friend and I processed this together the following days. On August 17th, she sent me a message: “Look at the Ferguson hashtag on Twitter right now.” I logged into my account for the first time in months and clicked on #Ferguson at the top of the list of trending topics. My computer screen was filled with images of smoke and guns, anger and lament, on-the-ground news reporters and protestors updating me every millisecond. Every time tear gas was shot dozens of accounts would tell me, someone would post a selfie of their swollen faces, someone would post a video of people running, someone would post a picture of people stealing milk from a McDonald’s to pour on the eyes of those affected.

This was something entirely different from the type of news I had seen before. I had never been so in the moment. As I used hashtags more and more, I learned that they are more than a new manifestation of online forums or discussion boards. As Suey Park and Eunsong Kim argue in their essay “Hashtags as Decolonial Projects with Radical Origins,” hashtags create spaces that bring communities in diaspora together, bridging time and space to host and develop conversations that are already happening in isolation. When these communities are brought together, differences can be recognized, goals can be developed, and collective decolonization can be brought back to local contexts. 

#FergusonTaughtMe that these aren’t isolated incidents

The blogs and articles I read connected Brown to Trayvon Martin, whose story a year before had taught me that race does have something to do with it, who taught me that I walk through this country with privilege because of my skin. But with Michael Brown I learned more. I saw statistics about mass incarceration and about police brutality. I saw repeated references to a book my Michelle Alexander arguing that the prison industrial complex is The New Jim Crow. I saw the words “school to prison pipeline,” which I had learned months before in an education course. And I began to make connections (rather, I slowly became aware of the connections that others have seen for years). As the names piled up—Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Anthony Hill, Walter Scott, Freddie Grey, Sandra Bland—the connections became even stronger.

#FergusonTaughtMe to tell a story

In the months following Michael Brown’s death, facts were spit out from people on both sides of the debate to form a case for or against Darren Wilson. The initial eyewitness accounts told us that Brown had his hands in the air when he was shot, but further investigation including additional eyewitnesses and an autopsy suggested this wasn’t the case. By this time #HandsUpDontShoot had become a rallying cry and the symbol that was used by football players, politicians, and musicians on large platforms to communicate solidarity with the movement for racial justice that had formed. Detractors criticized the continued use of the phrase and gesture under the pretense of protecting “the truth” and a narrative that aligns with “the facts”—two phrases that are assumed to mean the same thing—effectively distancing themselves from not only the narrative but the movement itself. Brenda Salter-McNeil defended the use of the phrase, saying this:

"You see, that phrase and these protests aren't just about the death of Mike Brown and what happened on August 9th. It's gone so far beyond that now. It's not about whether or not his hands were up! We will never know what happened that day in Ferguson because Michael Brown, Jr is dead and cannot tell us his side of the story...#HandsUpDontShoot started with Mike Brown, to be sure, but his horrific death launched a movement that has grown so far beyond the moment on Canfield Drive last August. It's a rallying cry for the crisis of unarmed Black people being killed and that's why I use the phrase...Hands Up, Don't Shoot is a metaphor for this movement, this outcry against injustice, and I will use it for as long as it takes."

What Salter-McNeil and all of the outraged understand is the use of symbolism and metaphor. Michael Brown was of course just Michael Brown, just one person, and Darren Wilson if of course just Darren Wilson, just one person. But their story and its ending struck a chord with communities across the country and around the whole who knew this story, the story in which an interaction influenced by power differences resulting from race turned brutal or deadly. The Truthful narrative being told is, in part, that the American criminal justice system disproportionately targets black and brown individuals and communities. No matter what facts were discovered and debated, this Truth would not have changed. We can read statistics that make this Truth clear, but only a story has the power to ignite communities and spark a movement.

#FergusonTaughtMe that my understanding demands a response

As these stories and these names and these connections came together to reveal to me these Truths, I knew I had to do something. But I found myself asking the same question I have heard several others ask over this year: “what should I do?” This is a question I have asked myself repeatedly over this year and a question I ask myself now and a question I will ask until there is nothing left to be done. The answer is often elusive and doesn’t look the same for everyone. Quite often it doesn’t look the same for me from one day to the next.

But what we are to do isn’t the only thing in question. We also must be questioning our motives for asking this question in the first place. Austin Channing Brown recently wrote a blog post on this question, saying that this question can be motivated by white saviorism:

"I sometimes wonder if white people read and listen to stories about racial injustice and believe that [people of color] are the ones who need to be saved. The system of racial oppression is killing us in America, but know it is you who needs to be saved from participation in the system."

It’s become popular to say that racism is a system of oppression and is different from individual racial bias, and that’s entirely true. But we are individually racially biased, which is a result of and the main perpetuation of systemic racism. We can (and must) change all of the systems and the structures, but we must be saved ourselves. I’ve seen the sinful doctrine of white supremacy within myself and have (with the grace and prodding of God and those he’s put around me) put myself to the long, hard work of repentance.

Much of that internal change is done through reading and learning. Brown writes that "reading and learning is a big part of the work. It's part of having our worldview shaken, relearning American (maybe even world) history. It's being able to see and recite the connections from yesterday to today. The reading and learning never stops because there is always more. More ways to be challenged. More stories to hear. More studies to take note of. More myths to bust. A commitment to learning is necessary for this work."

I used Twitter and Facebook to amplify the voices of people of color and found myself changing, noticing and publicly pointing out racial disparities I never would have noticed before, such as that the only speaking person of color in the movie Boyhood was the prop of a white savior storyline or that a friend of mine said “this Walmart is scary” but meant “everyone else here is black.” The more I read, the more I noticed, and the more I continued asking the question: “what should I do?”

My answer has been, for the most part, speaking out on social media. My Facebook—which I had been told in the past is “entertaining”—has become my main platform. I started inconsistently using Twitter and too-infrequently writing on this blog. And that’s certainly a start. But as I continue to be saved from my own bias—my own racism—I continue to be pushed to learn more and do more.

#Ferguson is still teaching me

#FergusonTaughtMe more than I could put into a tweet or a blog post, and it is still teaching me. The change that has occurred in me over this year is continuing, and I hope will continue for the rest of my life.