Ferguson

One social and mainstream media trend with respect to the Ferguson shooting and subsequent ruling that sticks out for me as especially despicable is the widely held view that black Americans need to "appropriately" seek justice.

As I sit here in Philadelphia, a city so divided by race- on public transit, in every commercial space I've entered, on the streets, within neighbourhoods- that I still sometimes look at Obama with awe, I wonder how did a black presidency ever come to pass? Watching Obama sputter out incoherent thoughts filled with messages of passivity and patience and faith in law, in the American justice system and its foundations!, I'm reminded how the scenario of a black president presiding over a fundamentally anti-black, white supremacist state works out. He speaks something understood to be reason to the madness labelled and leeched upon by american journalists as rioters, the looters, the ones 'destroying their city', the ones who do not care about the rule of law, think they are above the law, the ones who have not learned the art of peaceful protest, who do not have justifiable anger, those young "thugs" taking advantage of a tense moment in the nation's history. How dare these "agitators" ruin a good moment for the nation to reflect on the state of policing within "those troubled communities" and make matters more complicated and even perhaps justify some heavy-handedness by police officers- the kind the american government and media have historically been reluctant to report on/admit to, to indict, unless of course such an event happened 50 years ago and was followed up with a procession of freedom loving events and moving footage of representatives whose poetry on freedom and the american dream could be co-opted for countless inspirational posters and big budget hollywood films.Tonight,  Obama dropped lines about understanding that there are still "problems (ostensibly with the actions of police) and communities of color aren't just making these problems up," and then buried these thoughts in sea of contradictory, conciliatory discursive moves that confirmed to white america that such race-based problems are not "the norm." What one was left with after listening to a man repeatedly subject to accusations that he was not a true American citizen was some vague notion that a reaction of anger with respect to ANOTHER black man killed by a white cop was only acceptable if "channeled" (a favoured term in this speech) "constructively". The only cues we get as to what constructive channeling would be were Obama's throw away references to Attorney General Holder's recent work and a necessary respect for the infallible concept of the "rule of law" and the sometimes flawed but mostly heroic wielders of its dignity- police officers. I sought out the transcript on his speech tonight, because listening to it live was difficult to follow. So random and vague was his language and so bored and staid was his delivery (a delivery that I've come to associate with most of his speeches on the delivery of American justice in the domestic and international realms - a delivery quintessentially Obama-esque) that I needed to re-read his words to make some sense of what I had just heard. Upon reading the transcript, my confusion was confirmed as justified. The speech was indeed incoherent, save the one important thread that is predominant during these moments of injustice in america- be patient, respect the law, things are pretty good here so avoid actions that violate our mostly fair status quo. The transcript can be found here.
These are my rambly two cents on the topic right now.
My god what a sad yet predictable result to an awful tragedy, suffered by those too familiar with tragedies at the hands of police and with the sad results produced when a fundamentally flawed justice system is given the exclusive right to clean up.