tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/blacklivesmatter-18034/articles
Blacklivesmatter – The Conversation
2020-11-17T13:22:58Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/143313
2020-11-17T13:22:58Z
2020-11-17T13:22:58Z
Racial discrimination ages Black Americans faster, according to a 25-year-long study of families
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/366512/original/file-20201029-21-aenhdo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C11%2C4000%2C2646&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Anti-racism protest, 2020.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/woman-wearing-a-protective-face-mask-reading-i-cant-breathe-news-photo/1218209395">Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/research-brief-83231">Research Brief</a> is a short take about interesting academic work.</em></p>
<h2>The big idea</h2>
<p>I’m part of a <a href="https://cfr.uga.edu/fachs/">research team</a> that has been following more than 800 Black American families for almost 25 years. We found that people who had reported experiencing high levels of racial discrimination when they were young teenagers <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0000788">had significantly higher levels of depression in their 20s</a> than those who hadn’t. This elevated depression, in turn, showed up in their blood samples, which revealed accelerated aging on a cellular level. </p>
<p>Our research is not the first to show <a href="https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-040218-043750">Black Americans live sicker lives and die younger</a> than other racial or ethnic groups. The experience of constant and accumulating stress due to racism throughout an individual’s lifetime can wear and tear down the body – literally “getting under the skin” to affect health.</p>
<p>These findings highlight how stress from racism, particularly experienced early in life, can affect the mental and physical health disparities seen among Black Americans. </p>
<h2>Why it matters</h2>
<p>As news stories of Black American women, men and children being killed due to racial injustice persist, our research on the effects of racism continue to have significant implications.</p>
<p>COVID-19 has been <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/13/stress-was-already-killing-black-americans-covid-19-is-making-it-worse/">labeled a “stress pandemic” for Black populations</a> that are <a href="https://theconversation.com/covid-19-is-hitting-black-and-poor-communities-the-hardest-underscoring-fault-lines-in-access-and-care-for-those-on-margins-135615">disproportionately affected</a> due to factors like poverty, unemployment and lack of access to health care. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365258/original/file-20201023-19-1eyt63q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=30%2C20%2C6679%2C4446&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Young black mother comforting sad school age daughter at home." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365258/original/file-20201023-19-1eyt63q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=30%2C20%2C6679%2C4446&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365258/original/file-20201023-19-1eyt63q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365258/original/file-20201023-19-1eyt63q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365258/original/file-20201023-19-1eyt63q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365258/original/file-20201023-19-1eyt63q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365258/original/file-20201023-19-1eyt63q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365258/original/file-20201023-19-1eyt63q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Racism has a far-reaching impact on children’s health.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/young-black-mother-taking-care-of-her-sad-little-royalty-free-image/1143896999">skynesher/E+ via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>In 2019, the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2019-1765">American Academy of Pediatrics identified racism</a> as having a profound impact on the health of children, adolescents, emerging adults and their families. Our findings support this conclusion – and show the need for society to truly reflect on the lifelong impact racism can have on a Black child’s ability to prosper in the U.S.</p>
<h2>How we do the work</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://cfr.uga.edu/fachs/">Family and Community Health Study</a>, established in 1996 at Iowa State University and the University of Georgia, is looking at how stress, neighborhood characteristics and other factors affect Black American parents and their children over a lifetime. Participants were recruited from rural, suburban and metropolitan communities. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, this research is the largest study of African American families in the U.S., with <a href="https://cfr.uga.edu/fachs/">800 families participating</a>.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365260/original/file-20201023-18-1mcm3we.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Black man concentrates while completing a form." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365260/original/file-20201023-18-1mcm3we.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365260/original/file-20201023-18-1mcm3we.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365260/original/file-20201023-18-1mcm3we.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365260/original/file-20201023-18-1mcm3we.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365260/original/file-20201023-18-1mcm3we.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365260/original/file-20201023-18-1mcm3we.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365260/original/file-20201023-18-1mcm3we.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Early experiences of racism can have long-term physical effects.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/attractive-young-african-american-man-writing-royalty-free-image/181864094">PamelaJoeMcFarlane/iStock via Getty Images Plus</a></span>
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<p>Researchers collected data – including self-reported questionnaires on experiences of racial discrimination and depressive symptoms – every two to three years. In 2015, the team started taking blood samples, too, to assess participants’ risks for heart disease and diabetes, as well as test for biomarkers that predict the early onset of these diseases. </p>
<p>We utilized a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms9570">technique that examines how old a person is at a cellular level</a> compared with their chronological age. We found that some young people were older at a cellular level than would have been expected based on their chronological age. Racial discrimination accounted for much of this variation, suggesting that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0000788">such experiences were accelerating aging</a>. </p>
<p>Our study shows how vital it is to think about how mental and physical health difficulties are interconnected. </p>
<h2>What’s next</h2>
<p>Some of the next steps for our work include focusing more closely on the accelerated aging process. We also will look at resiliency and early life interventions that could possibly offset and prevent health decline among Black Americans.</p>
<p>Due to COVID-19, the next scheduled blood sample collection has been delayed until at least spring 2021. The original children from this study will be in their mid- to late 30s and might possibly be experiencing chronic illnesses at this age due, in part, to accelerated aging. </p>
<p>With continued research, my colleagues and I hope to identify ways to interrupt the harmful effects of racism so that Black lives matter and are able to thrive.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143313/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>This research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
(R01HD080749), the National Heart, Lung, Blood Institute (R01HL118045), the National
Institute of Drug Abuse (R01DA021898). In addition, support for this study was provided by the
Center for Translational and Prevention Science (P30DA02782) funded by the National Institute
on Drug Abuse. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily
represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.</span></em></p>
A study of 800 Black American families shows early experiences of racism have long-term consequences for physical and mental health.
Sierra Carter, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Georgia State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/65847
2016-09-21T20:32:46Z
2016-09-21T20:32:46Z
Police shootings and race in America: Five essential reads
<p><em>Editor’s note: The following is a roundup of stories related to policing and the Black Lives Matter movement.</em></p>
<p>Police and protesters clashed last night in Charlotte after Keith Lamont Scott, a 43-year-old African-American man, was <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/09/keith-lamont-scott-protests-erupt-police-killing-160921045737483.html">shot and killed</a> by a police officer.</p>
<p>Lamont’s death followed a shooting last week in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where another African-American man, Terrence Crutcher, 40, was <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/20/us/oklahoma-tulsa-police-shooting/index.html">also killed</a> by a police officer.</p>
<p>Police brutality, and the response of groups such as Black Lives Matter, have drawn renewed national attention to issues of race and policing in America. Here are highlights of The Conversation’s coverage of these issues.</p>
<h2>Violence takes a toll</h2>
<p>Through social media, millions of Americans witness images of the death of African-Americans. For African-Americans, the repeated experience of watching these events can have profound impact on their well-being. As pediatrician <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/nia-heard-garris-283549">Nea Heard-Garris</a>, researcher at the University of Michigan, writes about <a href="https://theconversation.com/protecting-our-children-after-the-wounds-of-racism-divide-us-even-more-62471">the impact on black children</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Children can be impacted by traumatic events if they identify with the victim regardless of geography. Think of how youth of color everywhere may identify with these events, based on the ages and races of the victims… we need to protect our children from being the indirect victims of these events as well.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Addressing the problem of anti-black police violence also requires taking into account <a href="https://theconversation.com/slow-death-is-the-trauma-of-police-violence-killing-black-women-62264">the traumatic and long-term deadly effects on the living,</a> who are often women. <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/christen-a-smith-282479">Christen Smith</a>, professor of Anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We know from the stories of black mothers who have lost their children to state violence that the lingering anguish of living in the aftermath of police violence kills black women gradually. Depression, suicide, PTSD, heart attacks, strokes and other debilitating mental and physical illnesses are just some of the diseases black women develop as they try to put their lives back together after they lose a child.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nor are police immune from the effects of violence. A study by <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/john-violanti-282415">John Violanti</a> of the University of Buffalo, State University of New York found that police have a 69 percent greater risk of committing suicide <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-tragic-reminder-that-policing-takes-a-toll-on-officers-too-62256">than other working populations</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The top five most stressful events that police reported were, in this order: exposure to battered or dead children, killing someone in the line of duty, fellow officer killed in the line of duty, situations requiring the use of force and physical attack on one’s person.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Searching for solutions</h2>
<p>Those seeking solutions have scrutinized police departments for their training, practices and culture. Addressing the masculine, aggressive disposition promoted in many departments may be key to reducing police violence, <a href="https://theconversation.com/training-to-reduce-cop-macho-and-contempt-of-cop-could-reduce-police-violence-51983">according to research</a> from <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/frank-rudy-cooper-211706">Frank Roody Cooper</a>, a professor of law at Suffolk University.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“An awareness of the way cop macho leads to "contempt of cop” punishments will not prevent all police uses of force. Training machismo out of police officers’ habits would be worth the effort, though, because it would allow the deescalation of many potential police-civilian conflicts.“</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Police brutality against blacks in the civil rights era, as is the case today, is effective in <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-black-lives-matter-means-beyond-policing-reform-62332">galvanizing minorities around other core issues</a> facing their communities, writes <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/garrett-felber-282957">Garrett Felber</a>, a scholar of 20th-century African-American history and social movements at the University of Michigan:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"The issue at stake, then, is how to take this opening and not only begin to secure justice for the lives lost to police violence, but also to expand on questions about what it means to value black life.”</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65847/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Protests erupted against the killing of black men by police in Tulsa and Charlotte. This roundup looks at research on racial violence and explains where there might be potential solutions.
Danielle Douez, Associate Editor, Politics + Society
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/46491
2015-09-22T01:47:12Z
2015-09-22T01:47:12Z
#BlackLivesMatter and the myth of a postracial America
<p>The prevailing response from white politicians such as GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush to #BlackLivesMatter has been “<a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/jeb-bush-black-lives-matter-slogan-n397466">all lives matter</a>.” </p>
<p>Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley were heavily criticized for initially responding to audience chants that “Black lives matter” with the response that “<a href="http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/august_2015/black_lives_matter_or_all_lives_matter">all lives matter</a>.” </p>
<p>“All lives matter” is a given, almost a cliché. So why would an audience boo a presidential candidate expressing that thought? Because the phrase “All lives matter” dismisses racially structured conditions disadvantaging black people. </p>
<p>As I demonstrate in my most recent book, <a href="http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-074568971X.html">Are We All Postracial Yet?</a>, insisting that black lives matter is necessary because – unlike “all lives” in this society – black lives are too often taken not to matter. </p>
<h2>Presumed to be up to no good</h2>
<p>Black people in the US are considered to not fully belong. Some people – Dylann Roof <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/us/charleston-church-shooting.html">said it explicitly </a>to the <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-charleston-43821">Charleston nine</a> he murdered – consider black people not to belong at all. Black people are far too readily denied decent education and employment, stopped and frisked, apprehended, incarcerated, criminalized, animalized, killed.</p>
<p>Black people in America are objects of <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/Dark-Matters/index.html">social suspicion</a>. Blacks are presumed to be up to no good, to be no good. Black lives are flippantly extinguished, not least by the institutions of law and order, for no good reason other than being suspected because they are black. We need to insist “black lives matter,” to organize around it, because this society provides proof on a daily basis that for it, for many, blacks don’t. </p>
<p>“Black lives matter” is not a cliché. The truth it expresses is far from a given. Its anti-truth is evidenced in the fraught everyday of black lives: Walking while black, driving while black, speaking “as” black, speaking b(l)ack, shopping while black, being at home while black, being black at school, at the pool, in the hands of police, in prison. Just being black.</p>
<p>Black lives matter because this country was founded on black labor, the nation’s great wealth built on black suffering. Black lives matter because, as human life, black lives are often disacknowledged in the insistent universalization that “all lives matter.” </p>
<p>Further, we are a better humanity because of the deep insight black intellectuals and artists provide about what it means to survive in the face of repression, humiliation and death. Black lives matter in exemplifying dignity in the face of its denial, humanity in the face of humiliation. Black humanity matters in celebrating life in the face of suffering, contributing extraordinarily to science, letters and culture. Consider <a href="https://www.bnl.gov/bera/activities/globe/banneker.htm">Benjamin Banneker</a>’s contributions to astronomy and clockmaking, <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/nny/clarkk/">Kenneth Clark</a>’s work evidencing the psychological effects of racism on children, <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_people_dubois.html">W E B du Bois</a>’s challenges to traditional sociology, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAONYTMf2pk">Marian Anderson</a>’s operatic brilliance in the face of white rejection, Toni Morrison’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/magazine/the-radical-vision-of-toni-morrison.html">extraordinary writing</a>, and on and on. </p>
<p>Black people have represented the country in the highest of ways while being maligned in the most malicious of ways. Black lives matter because the historical struggle for rights, justice and full citizenship has been America’s struggle to fulfill itself, the rights achieved on black backs ultimately the rights of all.</p>
<p>Black lives matter because black people continue to exemplify what it means to be human in the face of inhumanity and dehumanization, to live a human life against the constraints of “racialization,” in the face of insistent institutional violence and (social) death. </p>
<h2>Gathering steam</h2>
<p>And so, it is not surprising that some have begun to attack the movement.</p>
<p>Bill O’Reilly, self-proclaimed defender of black civil rights, has called the movement’s leading organizers “<a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/bill-oreilly-black-lives-matter-loons">loons</a>.” He dismisses the movement for “using <a href="http://www.mediaite.com/tv/oreilly-scolds-black-lives-matter-for-gestapo-tactics-condemning-white-society/">Gestapo tactics</a>.” Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade has characterized #BlackLivesMatter as a “murder mob” that should be branded a “<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-lives-matter-fox-news-hate-group_55e5c102e4b0b7a9633a3b12">hate group</a>.” </p>
<p>Conservative commentator John McWhorter, repeatedly declaring <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/30/end-of-racism-ped-cx_jm_1230mcwhorter.html">racism over</a> in America, has likened the anti-racist movement to a “<a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/27/antiracism-our-flawed-new-religion.html">religious cult</a>.”</p>
<p>Pushing back against this dismissal, “#BlackLivesMatter” has moved steadily from the margins to contest the mainstream. They mix streetwise protest and savvy social media use, legal challenge and advocacy. They disrupt, shout down, resist. </p>
<p>“#BlackLivesMatter” is gathering steam as the compelling rights movement, a liberation struggle of <a href="http://blacklivesmatter.com/">our time</a>. The social movement is surfacing rampant subterranean police violence and discrimination toward black people, holding police accountable for the stream of killings suffered by innocent, unarmed black folk by officers and their surrogates. </p>
<p>“#BlackLivesMatter” challenges political leadership to realize blacks’ full rights. They have prompted the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign to take seriously <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-black-lives-matter_55f9ca9ce4b00310edf57b02">the concerns</a> they are pushing, to engage with the affiliated <a href="http://www.joincampaignzero.org/#vision">Campaign Zero</a> seeking to transform policing culture and its oversight. Likewise <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/18/politics/hillary-clinton-black-lives-matter-meeting/">Hillary Clinton</a>.</p>
<p>“#BlackLivesMatter” works to advance the longstanding liberation struggles of black folk. Taking its cue from the abolition to the civil rights movements, they have built global networks of moral and material support. In a world in which white people are a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/sep/03/race.world">shrinking minority</a>, fully recognizing that black lives matter is both a political and moral imperative. This is no longer a world, if it ever was, one can endlessly dominate or suppress by militarizing the police locally or globally. </p>
<p>All this is not to say the social movement that is “#BlackLivesMatter” is beyond criticism. Movement spokespeople have largely failed to link the trials of black life in America to a critique of prevailing political economy producing the structural conditions reproducing inequality for blacks. There are slippages in strategy, sometimes a lack of clarity on what is being demanded of political candidates, occasionally inconsistencies between various representatives. All of this may be attributed to the growing pains of a liberation movement that includes horizontally distributed decision-making, soft leadership and widespread use of social media. This is a social landscape in sharp contrast with that of the civil rights movement. </p>
<p>Compelling social movements are struggles against entrenched structures and cultures of entitlement, self-protected privilege and unquestioned institutional access for the anointed to the exclusion of the unbelonging. </p>
<p>Everyone is humanized both by the work of “#BlackLivesMatter,” the social movement, and especially as a result of actualizing the realization that black lives matter as much as those with full social standing. Establishing in full that black lives matter, as social value, civil rights commitment and liberation struggle, makes for the sort of society we should be striving collectively to realize.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/46491/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Theo Goldberg receives funding from
University of California Multi-campus Research Program Initiative
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Mellon Foundation</span></em></p>
The truth expressed by #BlackLivesMatter is not a cliché. That’s because for many Americans, black lives still don’t.
David Theo Goldberg, Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/46909
2015-09-04T04:44:50Z
2015-09-04T04:44:50Z
Why Biko’s Black Consciousness philosophy resonates with youth today
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93775/original/image-20150903-8827-1joyx91.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Black students at University of Stellenbosch protest against the institutions's language policy they say discriminates against them by favouring Afrikaans.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Times Media/Adrian de Kock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em><strong>Foundation essay</strong>: Our foundation essays are longer than usual and take a wider look at key issues affecting society.</em></p>
<p>Peter Gabriel’s <a href="http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/petergabriel/biko.html">song</a> characterising the influence of <a href="http://azapo.org.za/azapohistory/bantu-stephen-biko/">Steve Biko</a> is as apt today as it was in the 1980s:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You can blow out a candle but you can’t blow out a fire. Once the flames begin to catch the wind will blow it higher. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The <a href="http://overcomingapartheid.msu.edu/sidebar.php?id=65-258-4">41th anniversary </a> of Biko’s death this month comes in the wake of high-pitched invocation in South Africa of the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/definition-black-consciousness-bantu-stephen-biko-december-1971-south-africa">Black Consciousness</a> philosophy he espoused. </p>
<p>Interestingly, the philosophy appears to have gained traction largely among the country’s black youth born after the end of apartheid in 1994. The appeal of Black Consciousness among the so-called <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-27146976">“born-frees”</a> is reminiscent of the way it influenced the generation that took part in the liberation struggle. </p>
<p>Is this a coincidence of history or a confluence of historical verities? Black Consciousness is a transcendence that connects generations, which in <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/fanon/">Frantz Fanon’s</a> watchwords in <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/1961/preface.htm">The Wretched of the Earth</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Born-frees and struggle generation</h2>
<p>Political scientist Robert Mattes <a href="http://afrobarometer.org/sites/default/files/publications/Working%20paper/AfropaperNo131.pdf">describes</a> South Africa’s freedom struggle generation as that which, through the Soweto uprisings, brought to “an abrupt end in 1976, white confidence and African quiescence”. This is the generation of those who turned 16 between 1976 and 1996. It experienced the wrath of apartheid. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/south-africa-holds-first-multiracial-elections">first inclusive vote in 1994</a> marked the end of, <a href="http://www.academia.edu/1471160/The_Born_Frees_The_Prospects_for_Generational_Change_in_Post_Apartheid_South_Africa">according to Mattes</a>, “a long trauma of protest, struggle and violence”.</p>
<p>As Mattes further <a href="http://www.cssr.uct.ac.za/sites/cssr.uct.ac.za/files/pubs/WP292.pdf">explains</a>, the born-frees refer to those who, starting in 1997:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… move through the ages of 16, 17 and 18 and enter the political arena with little if any first-hand experience of the trauma that came before.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Some characterise born-frees as who were born in 1994 and voted for the first time in the 2014 general elections. This discussion subscribes to the latter characterisation. </p>
<p>The born-frees are not a homogenous generation. There are who that are at the universities. Others, because of their socioeconomic circumstances, loiter in the streets. </p>
<p>The political generation’s theorists are unanimous in their assertions that the born-frees are different from the struggle generation in many ways. As Mattes <a href="http://www.cssr.uct.ac.za/sites/cssr.uct.ac.za/files/pubs/WP292.pdf">explains</a>, the born frees are “more modern, with higher levels of education”, urbanised and “cosmopolitan in their outlook” than the struggle generation.</p>
<p>A significant part of the struggle generation’s activism was inspired by Biko’s Black Consciousness philosophy from the late 1960s. The philosophy spawned radicalism characterised by confrontation with the apartheid machinery. The epochal <a href="http://overcomingapartheid.msu.edu/sidebar.php?id=65-258-3">June 16, 1976</a> students uprisings are a case in point. The students’ revolt breathed new life into the moribund struggle for liberation. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93756/original/image-20150903-8817-1reztxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93756/original/image-20150903-8817-1reztxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93756/original/image-20150903-8817-1reztxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93756/original/image-20150903-8817-1reztxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93756/original/image-20150903-8817-1reztxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1165&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93756/original/image-20150903-8817-1reztxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1165&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93756/original/image-20150903-8817-1reztxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1165&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Crowds pay tribute to anti-Apartheid hero Steve Biko as former President Nelson Mandela unveils a statue of him in 1997.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But why are the born frees increasingly attracted to Biko’s Black Consciousness philosophy in post-apartheid South Africa? Why are they being radicalised when they should be enjoying the fruits of democracy brought by the struggles of the previous generations?</p>
<h2>Long-lasting legacy of influence</h2>
<p>To understand the reason for the growing attraction to Biko’s views and their continued relevance, we should ask: did black people attain, in Biko’s words, their “envisioned self which is a free self” in 1994 and “rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude”?</p>
<p>The born frees <a href="http://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/stefannorgaard_finalcddrlthesis_0.pdf">increasingly think not</a> – especially those in the lowest strata of society, unable to afford a tertiary education, facing a bleak future and feeling alienated.</p>
<p>They question the very concept of freedom and being born free as an <a href="http://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/stefannorgaard_finalcddrlthesis_0.pdf">oxymoron</a>. These concepts have failed to instil a sense of pride in their blackness. Officialdom’s response is to spew statistics that seemingly prove performance by the state, largely in dispensing the largesse. </p>
<p>In many ways this trivialises the complexity of the post-apartheid society, following many years of apartheid colonialism. Various instances of making blacks feel inferior challenge the state performance narrative as, in the <a href="http://www.hepgjournals.org/doi/abs/10.17763/haer.63.2.c626327827177714?journalCode=haer">words</a> of critical theorist Donaldo Macedo, “the pedagogy of big lies”. </p>
<p>Theologian Ndikho Mtshiselwa <a href="http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?pid=S1017-04992014000100005&script=sci_arttext">argues</a> that the fundamentals of the apartheid colonial social order are still in place, with the democratic regime unwittingly administering them, instead of changing or providing leadership in their destruction. </p>
<p>This is the irony of South Africa’s transition from apartheid colonialism, which gave the colonial matrices of power the space to, in decoloniality scholar Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s <a href="http://www.thethinker.co.za/resources/48%20Thinker%20full%20mag.pdf">words</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… continue to exist in the minds, lives, language, dreams, imaginations and epistemologies of modern subjects.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As long as this situation exists, Biko’s philosophy of black pride continues to be relevant. <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/definition-black-consciousness-bantu-stephen-biko-december-1971-south-africa">As Biko said</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It seeks to infuse the black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion and their outlook to life.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93772/original/image-20150903-8822-1mq1dvf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93772/original/image-20150903-8822-1mq1dvf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93772/original/image-20150903-8822-1mq1dvf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93772/original/image-20150903-8822-1mq1dvf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93772/original/image-20150903-8822-1mq1dvf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93772/original/image-20150903-8822-1mq1dvf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93772/original/image-20150903-8822-1mq1dvf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A student beats the statue of Cecil John Rhodes with a belt as it is removed from the University of Cape Town in April 9.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Mike Hutchings TPX</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Two decades into South Africa’s democracy, the rise of largely born-free movements such as <a href="http://rhodesmustfall.co.za/">#RhodesMustFall</a> and <a href="http://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/stellenbosch-group-won-t-apologise-1.1852747#.VeV6pvmqqko">Open Stellenbosch</a>, which transcend party-political affiliations, expose the limitations of the transitional arrangements from which the post-apartheid state was constructed. </p>
<p>In ways reminiscent of Biko’s Black Consciousness movement, these challenge the colonial matrices of power which eluded the making of the post-apartheid state. The matrices foster institutional racism based on <a href="http://www.philosophybasics.com/movements_hegelianism.html">Hegelianism</a> - a body of thought that characterises the cognitive faculty of Africans as, in Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Diagne’s words in <a href="http://www.codesria.org/spip.php?article643">The Meaning of Timbuktu</a>, the “other reason and philosophical spirit” is bereft of the “capacity to think and live by a consistent system of sound principles”. </p>
<p>This is what students at the universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch are fighting against. Their struggle seeks to restore and assert <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/definition-black-consciousness-bantu-stephen-biko-december-1971-south-africa">black pride</a> – the essence of Biko’s philosophy of Black Consciousness. </p>
<p>The same spirit exists at the University of the Witwatersrand, where Western epistemology is increasingly being challenged in the debate on curricula transformation.</p>
<p>The born-frees are grappling with the question of the meaning of freedom in post-apartheid South Africa. They seek an <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/24/south-africa-race-panashe-chigumadzi-ruth-first-lecture">antidote</a> to their reality wherein blackness continues to be mocked and marginalised. </p>
<p>Their reality is one in which language policy is overtly used to limit the number of black students at historically white universities. They also have to contend with situations whereby white students enjoy privileged status under the guise of <a href="http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Student-injured-as-sjamboks-fly-in-Stellenbosch-college-protest-20150901">dual language</a> instruction to perpetuate the falsehood of separate but equal.</p>
<p>This much is evident in the accounts of 32 students at the University of Stellenbosch in the online documentary <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF3rTBQTQk4">#Luister</a>.“Luister” is Afrikaans for listen.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sF3rTBQTQk4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">#Luister video.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The struggles of the born-frees beg the questions: </p>
<ul>
<li><p>Hasn’t the struggle generation betrayed its children with the architecture of the post-apartheid state? </p></li>
<li><p>Did it err when it focused more on political transformation to the detriment of social and economic dimensions? </p></li>
<li><p>Hasn’t the <a href="http://www.southafrica.net/za/en/articles/entry/article-southafrica.net-south-africas-rainbow-nation">“Rainbow Nation”</a> invention unwittingly normalised coloniality?</p></li>
</ul>
<p>The cries of black students expose a failure to adequately situate the theoretical and strategic policy orientations of the post-apartheid transformation agenda in Biko’s Black Consciousness philosophy.
As long as black pride is not attained in post-apartheid South Africa, Biko’s philosophy remains relevant. Its transcendence continues to connect generations.</p>
<p><em>The article has been updated to reflect the 40th anniversary of Biko’s death.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/46909/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mashupye Herbert Maserumule received funding from the National Research Foundation for his doctoral work on Good Governance in the New Partnership For Africa's Development. He is affiliated to the South African Association of Public Administration and Management(SAAPAM). Maserumule is the chief editor of Journal of Public Administration. </span></em></p>
Black youth are grappling with the question of the meaning of freedom in post-apartheid South Africa. They seek an antidote to their reality wherein blackness continues to be mocked and marginalised.
Mashupye Herbert Maserumule, Professor of Public Affairs, Tshwane University of Technology
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/46375
2015-09-04T04:44:24Z
2015-09-04T04:44:24Z
Marikana artwork provides a tool for conscientisation
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92785/original/image-20150824-17762-1r706q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">It may seem like photographer Greg Marinovich captured a bare landscape in his photos of Marikana, but the dreary photos are filled with haunting memories of the massacre that took place there.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Greg Marinovich</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/marikana-massacre-16-august-2012">killing</a> of 34 striking miners near the Lonmin platinum mine at Marikana in South Africa’s North West province in 2012 was the single biggest use of deadly force by the authorities against civilians since 1960’s <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/sharpeville-massacre-21-march-1960">Sharpeville massacre</a>. </p>
<p>The tragedy was a depressingly familiar response of South Africa’s authorities to a perceived challenge to hegemonic power. It was, simultaneously, a disturbing new departure. That it occurred 18 years after the demise of apartheid set the country back ethically and politically.</p>
<p>The powerful clash of entrenched mining capital, race, labour and deadly violence embodied by the massacre has also been a point of interest to many South African artists.</p>
<p>South Africa has been visually imagined by many artists as a country being constantly dug up and penetrated, or, alternatively, emptied out to represent the beauty of a ‘<a href="http://www.nfsa.gov.au/digitallearning/mabo/tn_01.shtml">terra nullius</a>’. </p>
<p>The visual profile of the mining headgear and mine shaft is perhaps the most characteristic symbol of the tortured character of South Africa’s history. It is an allegory for the racialisation of space and capital and the forced removal of black people from the urban landscape and economic opportunity. In recent times, artists as disparate as <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/william-kentridge">William Kentridge</a> and <a href="http://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/steve-mcqueen/">Steve McQueen</a> have taken up the trope. </p>
<h2>Outpouring of creativity</h2>
<p>But it is Marikana which dominates recent South African memory. It has produced, in addition to much debate, many different aesthetic responses. The recent third anniversary of the massacre offers some useful perspective on how various responses to the tragedy can offer South Africans a different and more nuanced emotional perspective.</p>
<p>To say that art should be apolitical is often misguided. The work produced by South African artists in light of Marikana has in common with other socially and politically engaged art a revelatory and revolutionary commitment to change and democracy. It has this in common, for example, with the outpouring of creativity in response to the <a href="http://blacklivesmatter.com/">#BlackLivesMatter</a> mobilisation campaign against racist police brutality in the US. </p>
<p>In this case, in a wider social movement involving many different kinds of activism, art played a central role in enabling people to understand and articulate their anger. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.hankwillisthomas.com/">Hank Willis Thomas</a> is a good example within the #BlackLivesMatter campaign. He deconstructs and re-contextualises the imagery of advertising and popular culture. This reveals how racism and capitalism work in concert to destroy black lives all over the world.</p>
<p>Three very different examples of South African artwork produced in response to the Marikana tragedy give us some insight as to the ways in which art can be used as both a tool for political conscientisation and a means to psychologically process traumatic events.</p>
<h2>The ‘small koppie’</h2>
<p>Soon after the massacre took place, photojournalist <a href="http://www.thebangbangclub.com/greg-marinovich.html">Greg Marinovich</a> captured another way of envisioning South African post- or neo-colonial space. This was done in poignant photographs of the ‘Small Koppie’ (hill) killing field at the site.</p>
<p>Quasi-documentary photographs of empty and melancholy landscapes such as those by artists like <a href="http://wsoa.wits.ac.za/fine-arts/jo-ractliffe/">Jo Ractliffe</a> or <a href="http://www.goodman-gallery.com/artists/davidgoldblatt">David Goldblatt</a> beg questions of framing, veracity and back story as to what is excluded. Marinovich’s forensic images are focused around the investigative marking and lettering of each individual murder site. They offer a haunting sense of culpability in the absence of detail and habitation in this killing field. </p>
<p>As he writes in <a href="http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-08-30-the-murder-fields-of-marikana-the-cold-murder-fields-of-marikana#.VdrFZZcnKLY">an article</a> accompanying the images, this cul-de-sac, surrounded by steep rocks, was where police gunned down many of the striking miners after the initial police engagement. </p>
<p>Equipped with this knowledge, the viewer cannot see the landscape as empty. Instead it is full of the horror of the massacre, even without any explicit detail. </p>
<h2>The massacre in film</h2>
<p>A very different kind of intervention and response to the massacre takes place in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0449365/">Aryan Kaganof’s</a> lyrical agitprop <a href="https://vimeo.com/120610859">film</a> Night is Coming – a Threnody for the Victims of Marikana. </p>
<p>The initial edit of the film juxtaposes footage of an exclusive, and almost exclusively white, academic music symposium at Stellenbosch University at the time of the massacre. It has a hypnotic manipulated edit of the ‘official’ available news footage of the original engagement between the miners and the police who shot them down. </p>
<figure>
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/120610859" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Kaganof’s original commission was to film the proceedings of the academic conference. He uses the premise of the exclusive and highly detached theoretical discourse happening at the event as a counterpoint to the Marikana footage. He subjects this to an almost unbearably extreme slowing-down. The altering of its duration renders it at once more poignant and more abstracted. </p>
<h2>Diminishing of human life</h2>
<p>A final example of an immediate artistic response to the tragedy was an exhibition of eleven oil paintings by artist <a href="http://artthrob.co.za/Artists/Mary-Wafer.aspx">Mary Wafer</a>. It consists of a set of paintings in a muted palette, with a fragile and delicate use of the artist’s trademark black paint, which is based on aerial reconnaissance photographs and other media images of the site. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92794/original/image-20150824-17799-1yqusb5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92794/original/image-20150824-17799-1yqusb5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92794/original/image-20150824-17799-1yqusb5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92794/original/image-20150824-17799-1yqusb5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92794/original/image-20150824-17799-1yqusb5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92794/original/image-20150824-17799-1yqusb5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92794/original/image-20150824-17799-1yqusb5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Wafer Lines Oil on Canvas LR x.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The titles of the images mirror the sparseness of their style. Aerial I, II and III all abstract both the site itself and the aerial photographs which they refer to. The paintings all contain a flock of black marks which could be people, though they have no detail. The birds’ eye view presages both the tragedy and the diminishing of the value of human life it presupposes. </p>
<p>All of these works both aestheticise the tragedy of Marikana, and pass judgement on the events. The artists use their images to change the viewer’s relation to the events. In so doing, they provide a different framework for understanding the tragedy and others like it as at the same time aesthetically and politically significant.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/46375/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Sey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The Marikana tragedy has dominated recent South African memory and produced many different aesthetic responses.
James Sey, Research Associate, Research Centre, Faculty of Fine Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45930
2015-08-11T20:32:50Z
2015-08-11T20:32:50Z
Why Ferguson erupts
<p>Peaceful demonstrations designed to mark the one-year anniversary of the killing of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer <a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/man-accused-of-trading-shots-with-police-in-ferguson-charged/article_1b2ea8e3-2386-565a-8184-c74c1eac8319.html">turned violent</a> on Monday.</p>
<p>With the benefit of hindsight it is clear that conditions there – and in many similar communities across the country – remain ripe for violent encounters between the police and citizens. </p>
<p>Given the fragmented and exploitative structure of governance in St Louis County, we believe the community upheaval and sporadic violence following Michael Brown’s killing are not surprising.</p>
<h2>A few miles from the border</h2>
<p>We are criminologists who have studied crime and social conditions in the St Louis area for several decades. Our university, the University of Missouri - St Louis, is located just a few miles from the Ferguson border. </p>
<p>Ferguson is not a ghetto. It is an established, solidly working-class suburban municipality on the outskirts of St Louis. Ferguson saw significant demographic change during the 1990s, going from a majority white to majority black population. The <a href="http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/29/2923986.html">racial makeup</a> of the town has since stabilized at roughly two-thirds black and one-third white.</p>
<p>Ferguson has benefited in recent years from the establishment of large corporate operations on its borders, including the headquarters of Express Scripts and Emerson Electric, which have been <a href="http://www.fergusoncity.com/120/Business-Development">a boon</a> to local businesses. The downtown is not thriving, but it is not dying either. There are specialty shops, a brew pub, a wine bar, and several restaurants. In many ways, Ferguson has more in common with suburban and small-town America than it does with the nation’s disadvantaged inner-city neighborhoods. </p>
<h2>Not a ‘risky’ place</h2>
<p>There is some poverty and some crime, though not as much as in the rougher parts of St Louis or even many other <a href="http://ucr.mshp.dps.mo.gov/ucr/ucrhome.nsf/">inner-ring suburbs</a>. </p>
<p>No one can reasonably label Ferguson as being an especially risky or dangerous place. That is part of what made the Michael Brown killing so shocking – it might have happened in any number of American suburban communities. But that also may help to explain why it happened in Ferguson. </p>
<p>It is in places like Ferguson that the chances of a deadly misreading between the police and the citizenry may be most likely to occur, precisely because neither the police nor citizens expect that their encounters will turn take a lethal turn. When a violent encounter does occur, the police may lack the experience or training to defuse it and resort to deadly force.</p>
<p>But why did the Ferguson shooting erupt in violent protest when most other police killings in places like Cincinnati and Staten Island have not? </p>
<h2>Fragmentation and fees</h2>
<p>Part of the answer lies in the peculiar <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2015/04/02-ferguson-fragmentation-fiscal-disparities-katz-kneebone">fragmentation</a> of St Louis County into dozens of small municipalities, most of which have their own police forces and courts. Many of them were created by whites fleeing St Louis after World War II who used racial covenants and zoning ordinances to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/08/10/st-louis-county-a-year-later/">keep out</a> African Americans. Today, many of these municipalities rely heavily on traffic fines and court <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/10/28/new-report-details-the-disastrous-municipal-court-system-in-st-louis-county/">fees</a> to stay afloat. </p>
<p>This patchwork of speed traps is a bad joke among more affluent inhabitants of St Louis County. </p>
<p>But it is no joke for those who accumulate traffic fines they cannot afford to pay, miss court dates and are jailed on outstanding arrest warrants. As the Washington Post’s Radley Balko has documented, that is an all-too-frequent <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/08/10/st-louis-county-a-year-later/">experience</a> for the county’s disadvantaged black residents, convinced they are <a href="http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf">harassed by the police</a> and abused by uncaring white prosecutors.</p>
<p>During the past year, the Missouri legislature has <a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/ferguson-commission-approves-calls-to-action-prepares-to-finish-work/article_6ec7dc0c-9407-5483-a4a2-0cb7fb322b03.html">capped</a> the portion of municipal budgets that can be derived from traffic fines, and the governor established a commission to recommend other reforms to mend broken police-community relations. </p>
<p>Only time will tell whether such efforts can undo years of political neglect and economic exploitation in St Louis County. We should expect continuing community unrest anywhere that similar conditions are allowed to continue to smolder. That may be Ferguson’s most enduring lesson.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/45930/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Wright has received funding from the National Institute of Justice and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation to study street crime in and around St. Louis.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Rosenfeld has received funding from the National Institute of Justice to study the effect of policing on crime rates in St. Louis.
He served on a committee established by the Ferguson Commission to examine law enforcement practices and police-community relations in Missouri.</span></em></p>
Two criminologists long associated with the University of Missouri – St Louis dispel myths about Ferguson, a community that borders the campus, and explain what’s behind the violent protests there.
Richard Wright, Chair, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Georgia State University
Richard Rosenfeld, Founders Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri-St. Louis
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45815
2015-08-10T10:12:43Z
2015-08-10T10:12:43Z
How Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter taught us not to look away
<p>One year ago, on August 9 2014, then-police officer Darren Wilson shot and <a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/calm-returns-to-scene-of-ferguson-shooting/article_04e3885b-4131-5e49-b784-33cd3acbe7f1.html">killed Michael Brown</a> in Ferguson, Missouri. </p>
<p>Wilson estimated during the grand jury hearings that the entire incident lasted <a href="http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/2014/one-minute-of-white-supremacy-the-ferguson-transcripts-and-the-murder-of-michael-brown/">“less than a minute”</a> from start to finish. </p>
<p>From that minute has grown a movement, reinforced on a seemingly daily basis by new violence. The people in that movement are determined to keep our attention focused on these killings and the system that has produced them. It is a movement organized around hashtags, not leaders, above all #<a href="http://blacklivesmatter.com/">BlackLivesMatter</a>. </p>
<p>It is part of a worldwide transformation I describe in my recent book <a href="http://www.penguin.co.uk/books/how-to-see-the-world/9780141977409/">How to See the World</a>, an exploration of how visual media are making social change. Call it visual activism.</p>
<h2>A global transformation</h2>
<p>Today #BlackLivesMatter is part of an ongoing global transformation. Since 2008, <a href="http://blog.euromonitor.com/2012/02/special-report-the-worlds-youngest-populations-.html">more than half of people</a> worldwide are under 30. The <a href="http://www.who.int/gho/urban_health/situation_trends/urban_population_growth_text/en/">majority</a> now live in cities for the first time in history. And close to half the world’s population has <a href="http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/">access to the internet</a>. The urban young are using the worldwide web to circulate astonishing numbers of still and moving images. Three hundred hours of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html">YouTube</a> video are uploaded every minute. Shared photographs are uncountable, at least one trillion in <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/number-photos-taken-2014-approach-1-trillion-thanks-013002154.html">2014</a>. </p>
<p>These new conditions are producing a new politics. Eighty-five percent of African Americans aged 18-29 have <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/us-smartphone-use-in-2015/">smartphones</a>, several points higher than their white counterparts. The young, often queer, often female, black activist generation that has come into being <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32039-rev-sekou-on-today-s-civil-rights-leaders-i-take-my-orders-from-23-year-old-queer-women">since Ferguson</a> relies on social media to make these protests, and the actions that cause them, visible in new ways.</p>
<h2>The danger of ‘reckless eyeballing’</h2>
<p>“Not looking” was part of slavery and Jim Crow for the enslaved and segregated, respectively. Violating this code became known as “<a href="https://wp.nyu.edu/howtoseetheworld/2015/05/30/auto-draft-46/">reckless eyeballing</a>.” It is still operative in America’s immense prison network that has been called the “<a href="http://newjimcrow.com/">New Jim Crow</a>” for its disproportionate number of African-Americans. Prisoners can be accused of reckless eyeballing just for looking at guards.</p>
<p>On the other side of the color line is what scholars call “the gaze,” a means of asserting power through surveillance, whether actual or implied. Looking back at that gaze was to risk violence, even death. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/">killed</a> for allegedly wolf-whistling at a white woman.</p>
<p>The #BlackLivesMatter movement that began after <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/02/26/trayvon-martin-was-shot-and-killed-three-years-ago-today/">the death of Trayvon Martin</a> in 2012 insists not just that we sneak a sidelong glance, but that we pay full attention to the repeated deaths of African Americans. This looking is not a gaze, because it does not claim power over the victims. Rather, it creates the digital form of what Martin Luther King Jr called “the <a href="http://www.thekingcenter.org/king-philosophy#sub4">beloved community</a>.” </p>
<p>The civil rights movement looked above all for <a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=YRJ1f4g39JQC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=television+Civil+Rights+Movement&ots=Hv8ZkLDHGt&sig=XOxzfupdZbvVOHCd1FWdrxcq6OY#v=onepage&q=television%20Civil%20Rights%20Movement&f=false">mainstream media coverage</a>. In 1965, the television broadcast of the events in Selma convinced many of the need for the Voting Rights Act, passed later that year. </p>
<p>Today’s movement is directed at social media, using Twitter, Vines and Instagram as forms of protest and means of information. Police are now claiming that the likelihood of being recorded, the so-called “<a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-nationwide-crime-wave-1432938425">Ferguson effect</a>,” is limiting their actions. The body-cam <a href="http://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/hamilton-county/cincinnati/watch-body-cam-video-released-in-sam-dubose-shooting">video</a> taken during the killing of Sam DuBose in Cincinnati led to a rapid indictment on murder charges because it contradicted the officer’s story.</p>
<h2>Forms of protest</h2>
<p>All #BlackLivesMatter protest memes call attention to time and duration. The chant “Hands up, don’t shoot,” performed with raised hands, repeats a version of what activists believe were Michael Brown’s last words. It freezes time in that crucial moment before he died and defies the imaginary police to shoot.</p>
<p>The second major form of protest adapts the “die-in,” long a staple of environmental, antiwar and AIDS activism. Activists created several means of timing the die-ins. A participant might count out “I can’t breathe” 11 times, as Eric Garner did. Or the die-in might be timed to last four-and-a-half minutes to symbolize the four-and-a-half hours that Michael Brown’s body lay in the street. </p>
<p>Or the intention might be to disrupt the circulation of goods and people on which everyday city life depends. Each time, the protests refuse to go away, refuse to move on and insist on being seen.</p>
<p>In these performances, activists made themselves vulnerable. “Hands up” performs the act of surrender. During a die-in, participants lie on the ground, unable to see, open to any attack or to arrest. But other participants “livestream” the events to the internet for others to watch. </p>
<p>And so police often do not intervene, as if recognizing the moral force of the protests. That situation changed on December 20 2014, when the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/nyregion/two-police-officers-shot-in-their-patrol-car-in-brooklyn.html?_r=0">murder</a> of two New York City police officers seemed to create a moral equivalency for the police side, reinforced by their dramatic <a href="http://time.com/3652979/deblasio-nypd-funeral/">turning of backs</a> to Mayor Bill de Blasio. The police refused to look – and won.</p>
<p>For many commentators, that victory signaled the failure of #BlackLivesMatter. But as the violence has continued, the social media coverage has been sustained, and changes have come. There was no indictment for the deaths of Michael Brown or Eric Garner, but indictments have come swiftly in the cases of Walter Scott, Freddie Gray and Sam DuBose. </p>
<p>With the outcry over the death of Sandra Bland in Texas, the longstanding need to #SayHerName – meaning to pay as much attention to the deaths of women as men – has been achieved. <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/hillary-clinton-addresses-u-s-racism-problem-s-article-1.2301952">In a recent speech</a>, Hillary Clinton adopted the slogan #BlackLivesMatter. </p>
<p>Even the Confederate flag has suddenly lost its legitimacy as a symbol, a visible gain for a visual activist movement. </p>
<p>What happens next? Keep looking.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/45815/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicholas D. Mirzoeff does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A movement grew out of Michael Brown’s death one year ago. The people in #BlackLivesMatter want us to fully witness violence against black youth. Their tools are cell phones and social media.
Nicholas D. Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/43593
2015-06-20T14:13:26Z
2015-06-20T14:13:26Z
Look for the patterns in Charleston
<p>When you read about Dylann Roof, think about the patterns he represents. </p>
<p>There’s more than one.</p>
<p>Over the next few days, we’re going to hear about mental illness. We’re going to hear about troubled loners. We’ll hear about a young man’s racist fantasies, so outrageous that he would
<a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/6/18/8806633/charleston-shooter-flags-dylann-roof">celebrate the apartheid regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia</a>. </p>
<p>We’ll hear from family, neighbors and high school friends, and the picture that will start emerging is of a young man who was <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/18/us/charleston-church-shooting-suspect/">strange</a>, <a href="http://www.rawstory.com/2015/06/lindsey-graham-downplays-race-after-black-church-shooting-people-looking-for-christians-to-kill-them/">disturbed</a>, <a href="http://www.insideedition.com/headlines/10834-shooter-dylann-storm-roofs-friends-hes-a-pill-popping-gun-toting-loner-who-made-racist">sick</a>, abnormal. </p>
<p>The message will be that the massacre in Charleston was an unpredictable, unavoidable tragedy carried out by an individual madman.</p>
<p>Don’t lose sight of the patterns.</p>
<h2>A crime of hate</h2>
<p>When Dylann Roof shot and killed nine African Americans at a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, it was a hate crime. </p>
<p>We know, because Roof told the survivors precisely why he had come to <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/18/the-incredible-history-of-charleston-s-emanuel-a-m-e-the-bravest-church-in-america.html">this historic church</a> to commit mass murder: <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/video/church-gunman-reportedly-said-i-have-to-do-it-467402819802">“You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go.”</a> </p>
<p>It was an act of domestic terrorism. Roof has reportedly told investigators that <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/19/us/charleston-church-shooting-main/">he wanted to start a race war</a> with his actions. Shooting nine black people as they prayed was a way to terrorize all black people and to destroy the safety and comfort of what should be the safest of spaces.</p>
<p>It was also part of a pattern.</p>
<h2>Everyday racial violence</h2>
<p>The United States is a dangerous place to be a black person. </p>
<p>Black Americans are <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/09/19/the-racial-divide-in-americas-gun-deaths/">twice as likely to die from gun violence</a> as white Americans are. Hispanic and Asian Americans are less likely to die from gun violence than white Americans – gun violence is a tragedy that disproportionately affects black Americans.</p>
<p>So is murder. In 2012, blacks represented 13% of the US population and represented 50% of homicide victims. Black men were 8.5 times more likely to be the <a href="http://www.vpc.org/studies/blackhomicide15.pdf">victim of a homicide than white men</a>. </p>
<p>Politicians and commentators – notably <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/11/24/what-rudy-giuliani-gets-wrong-about-the-deaths-of-young-black-men/">Rudy Giuliani</a> – are fond of pointing out that most black men who die of homicide are killed by other black men. That’s true. But it’s also true that white men are mostly killed by other white men.</p>
<p>Most murders – 78% between 1980 and 2008 – are committed by someone the victim knew well: a family member, friend or other acquaintance. Given high rates of <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/15/AR2006101500913.html">homophily in American society</a>, it’s not surprising that black people know – and kill – black people and white people know – and kill – white people.</p>
<p>What is surprising is how police handle these murders. </p>
<h2>Tension with the police</h2>
<p>In New York City, <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/forgotten-record-murder-rate-cases-unsolved-article-1.1566572">the “clearance rate” for homicides with white victims is 86%</a>. For homicides with black victims, the rate is 45%. </p>
<p>In other words, in the majority of homicide cases in which the victim is black, the case is <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06/chester-gun-violence-black-deaths-matter">unsolved and the murderer remains on the streets</a>. </p>
<p>And while we’re talking about the police, let’s remember that at least 101 unarmed black people were <a href="http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/">killed by law enforcement in 2014.</a> That includes Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley and Darrien Hunt, but it also includes dozens you probably haven’t heard about, like <a href="http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2014/05/06/family-coach-killed-basketball-fight-loved-kids-coaching/8778079/">Justin Griffin, a 25-year-old basketball coach</a> who had an argument with a referee – the referee was an off-duty sheriff’s deputy, and he and another deputy beat Griffin to death. </p>
<p>From 2010-2012, <a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white">teenage black men were 21 times more likely than teenage white men to be killed by police</a>.</p>
<p>We need to learn to see these patterns.</p>
<h1>#blacklivesmatter</h1>
<p>Thanks to Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, we have a narrative – #blacklivesmatter – that helps draw connections between Walter Scott’s death at the hands of the police in North Charleston and the slaughter of nine of Charleston’s finest citizens at the hands of Dylann Roof. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"609517056002793473"}"></div></p>
<p><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/01/black-lives-matter-patrisse-cullors-baltimore-protests_n_7187954.html">As Cullors has explained</a>, #blacklivesmatter is not just about the death of black people at the hands of police or vigilantes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The media really wants to say ‘This happened in Ferguson, this happened in Baltimore, this happened in New York. Are they the same?’ Yes, they’re the same. Black people are not a monolithic group, but what we are facing is something that’s extreme – and that’s poverty, that’s homelessness, that’s higher rates of joblessness, that’s law enforcement invading our communities day in and day out – and we are uprising.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Cullors talks about a “Black Spring,” a parallel to the Arab Spring, in which black people and their allies start uprising and demanding a more just nation. </p>
<p>People who knew Roof tell us that he was obsessed with the protests resulting from the Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray deaths – a Black Spring is exactly what he appears to have feared the most. </p>
<p>Those he killed, notably <a href="http://www.emanuelamechurch.org/revpinckney.php">the Reverend Clementa Pinckney</a>, who as a state senator was a key figure in the fight to bring <a href="http://www.thestate.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/the-buzz/article24839449.html">body cameras to South Carolina police</a>, were <a href="http://magazine.good.is/articles/charleston-victims-church-killings?utm_source=thedailygood&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailygood">precisely the people</a> working to better the lives of the black community – and the community as a whole – in Charleston, South Carolina.</p>
<h2>It happened in South Carolina</h2>
<p>Was Dylann Roof a troubled loner? </p>
<p>Yes. But he was also a resident of a state where a segregationist flag flies above the State Capitol and <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/charleston-church-shooting/south-carolinas-confederate-flag-not-lowered-half-mast-after-church-n378316">can’t be taken down or lowered to half-mast without approval by the state assembly</a>. </p>
<p>To reach the scene of his crime, he drove <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2015/06/19/read-jon-stewarts-blistering-monologue-about-race-terrorism-and-gun-violence-after-charleston-church-massacre/">on highways named for Confederate generals</a>. He lives in a country where black people are disproportionately the victims of official and unofficial violence. </p>
<p>Dismissing him as a uniquely sick individual ignores the pattern.</p>
<h2>Gun problems</h2>
<p>Roof also lives in a nation with a unique and problematic relationship with guns. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xkWQ_uRC9WU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">2008-2015: Obama addresses the nation after gun massacres.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rates of private gun ownership are <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/12/1/what-makes-americas-gun-culture-totally-unique-in-the-world-as-demonstrated-in-four-charts/">higher in the US than anywhere else in the world</a> – twice as high, for instance, as that of Yemen, a conflict-torn nation in the throes of a domestic insurgency.</p>
<p>Our gun murder rate is off the charts: <a href="http://www.humanosphere.org/science/2014/03/visualizing-gun-deaths-comparing-the-u-s-to-rest-of-the-world/">to find adequate comparisons, we need to look at countries like Iraq and the Democratic Republic of the Congo</a>. </p>
<p>Not only were Dylann Roof’s crimes part of a pattern of gun violence that’s near-unique to the US, they are part of a pattern of mass shootings. </p>
<p>Mother Jones, tracking shootings by single killers in public places in which four or more people were killed, has identified more than <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map">70 mass shootings in the US since 1982</a>. Like most mass killers, Roof used a handgun, and like the vast majority of mass killers, he obtained his weapon legally.</p>
<p>We have a pattern of mass gun killings in the US, and we have a pattern of doing nothing about them. </p>
<h2>Resisting gun control</h2>
<p>Two years after the massacre of elementary school students in Newtown, Connecticut, The New York Times has tracked gun laws passed in the year after the Newtown shootings. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/10/us/state-gun-laws-enacted-in-the-year-since-newtown.html">The results: 39 laws tightened gun restrictions; 70 loosened them.</a> </p>
<p>If the pattern continues, South Carolina – a state where you do not need a permit to own any sort of handgun – is more likely to legalize concealed carry without a permit than it is to pass significant restrictions on handgun ownership.</p>
<p>We didn’t have to wait long to hear the argument that more guns would have saved lives in Charleston. Fox and Friends managed to find a pastor who argued that religious leaders should <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/06/18/3671110/state-gun-laws-south-carolina/">preach while armed</a>, so that they could defend the flock from attack.</p>
<p>NRA Board member Charles Cotton found a way to blame Roof’s crimes on a <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/06/18/nra-board-member-blames-murdered-reverend-for-d/204057">man he slaughtered, Reverend Pinckney</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“he [Rev Pinckney] voted against concealed-carry. Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead. Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>American resistance to sane gun control laws is based on fantasy. </p>
<p>We fantasize that guns will protect us from being victims of crime. They don’t. Gun owners are <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/mar/25/guns-protection-national-rifle-association">five times more likely to be shot than non-owners</a>. </p>
<p>Women who live in a house containing one or more guns are <a href="https://www.vpc.org/fact_sht/womenfs.htm">3.4 times more likely to be killed than women who live in gun-free homes</a>. </p>
<p>We fantasize that we will stop crimes with guns, if only pastors or teachers or any brave civilian were allowed to carry concealed weapons. </p>
<p>We’d do well to remember <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2011/01/friendly_firearms.html">Joe Zamudio</a>, a bystander at the rally where Representative Gabby Giffords was shot, who had a concealed weapon and narrowly missed killing not the gunman, but the man who wrestled the weapon away from the gunman.</p>
<p>These fantasies keep us from seeing the pattern. </p>
<p>We live in a country where it’s far too easy for anyone – a disturbed individual, a criminal or an ordinary untrained citizen – to obtain a gun, and where gun violence is an endemic public health problem. People in other countries think we’re crazy. </p>
<p>But so long as we treat each mass shooting, each black death as an isolated tragedy, there’s nothing we can do. </p>
<p>Look for the patterns.</p>
<p>America’s obsession with guns is a big part of what makes this nation so dangerous for black people. America’s endemic racism is a big part of what makes American buy, own and lobby for guns, to protect ourselves from an “other” that we fear.</p>
<p>Jon Stewart did a wise thing in reacting to the shootings in Charleston – <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2015/06/19/read-jon-stewarts-blistering-monologue-about-race-terrorism-and-gun-violence-after-charleston-church-massacre/">he admitted that there were simply no jokes that could be made.</a> But he also articulated a sense of hopelessness that’s easy to feel, and hard to fight: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I honestly have nothing other than just sadness once again that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal, yet we pretend doesn’t exist. And I’m confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jack shit.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We’ve got to do better than that.</p>
<p>Help people see, and help us fight, these patterns.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43593/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ethan Zuckerman receives funding from the Knight Foundation, Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation and Google Ideas. He is affiliated with the Open Society Foundation, and nonprofits Ushahidi, Global Voices and PenPlusBytes.</span></em></p>
So long as we treat each mass shooting, each black death as an isolated tragedy, there’s nothing we can do. Things can change if we look for the patterns.
Ethan Zuckerman, Director, Center for Civic Media , Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.