By Robert N. Driscoll
Tuesday, June 12, 2018
In 2018, the town of Ferguson, Mo. remains a kind of
shorthand for police misconduct, particularly against unarmed black men. News
of police shootings of young black Americans spawns talk of “another Ferguson.”
The deceased in Ferguson, Michael Brown, is usually the first of a litany of
names, followed by Freddie Gray and Trayvon Martin, uttered by activists trying
to raise awareness about perceived policing issues in minority communities.
Yet President Obama’s Justice Department conducted a
thorough review of Officer Darren Wilson’s role in Brown’s death, and found
that Wilson’s use of force was justified because Brown had attacked him and
attempted to grab his pistol. This was not a case where there wasn’t enough
evidence to charge an officer with wrongdoing. The results of the investigation
into Wilson’s conduct were not “inconclusive.” He was affirmatively cleared.
Yet, even with as comprehensive a factual investigation
as one could have, conducted by an administration that could not have been more
sympathetic to the community’s outrage and perception of Michael Brown’s
shooting as unjustified, the narrative that Brown was “yet another” young black
man done in by a racist, overaggressive cop who had no justification for his
actions persists. So it is not without justification that Trump supporters,
among others, look skeptically at those who, facts be damned, continue to cite
Ferguson as an example of an unjustified police shooting, ignoring the Obama
DOJ’s own fairly conclusive report.
Having worked on civil-rights issues at the DOJ, I
understand where those who cling to the now-disproven Ferguson narrative are
coming from, even if I don’t agree with pretending Officer Wilson committed a
heinous crime. There are real issues surrounding policing in inner-city
minority communities, many of which go far beyond use-of-force policies or
shootings, which are, thank goodness, relatively rare. Many members of minority
communities feel that all of the structures and institutions of society — from
schools to employment opportunities to economic development to systems of civil
fines — are actively working against them. Moreover, from their perspective,
the community’s problems and their attempts to bring attention to these issues
are being ignored by the political class and the media.
Thus, for many urban minorities who feel, and often are,
ignored in the national political conversation, incidents like the Brown shooting
become a proxy for a constellation of unrelated issues. Rational or not,
rejection of the legitimacy of the “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” narrative seems to
many like a rejection of their concerns as a whole, not a specific factual
finding in a narrow investigation. This doesn’t make perpetuating a smear
against Officer Wilson justified, but it does help explain the emotional
current that drives such a smear.
Strange as it seems, I thought of all this a great deal
while listening to an audio version of Salena Zito and Brad Todd’s excellent
new book, The Great Revolt: Inside the
Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics. The book is a sophisticated
blend of data and interviews with Trump supporters in key Rust Belt counties
that swung from Obama to Trump — an overwhelmingly white group of people who,
like many inner-city minorities, feel abandoned by the institutions around them
and ignored by the political class and the media.
It seems clear to me that just as Michael Brown served as
an avatar for many minority communities who were tired of being ignored, Trump
is an avatar for many rural and exurban whites who feel the same way. Thus,
rejection of, or even criticism of, Trump for any specific issue (e.g., Trump’s
false implication that Philadelphia Eagles players kneeled during the National
Anthem and disrespected the flag) can be ignored by his supporters, because
they perceive an attack on the president to be, in some way, an attack on their
legitimate demands for cultural and political attention. Proving that a given
claim about Trump is true, or that a given claim of Trump’s is false, will not
change most of his supporters’ minds.
None of this makes me think that facts, as they relate
either to police shootings or to Trump, don’t matter. None of this makes me
less depressed about seeing politicians of any stripe flat-out pretend that
falsehoods are true or truths are false. But I do find it interesting that, at
least in some respects, white, culturally conservative Trump supporters and liberal,
minority Trump opponents might have more in common with each other than either
group would like to admit. For one thing, both groups prove that even people
who are “wrong” can have something important to say, and it would behoove the
rest of us to start listening.
No comments:
Post a Comment