Samain Moving Moon
Ferguson. A situation where any decision would have been met with anger and disappointment. I don’t pretend to know the facts well enough to evaluate the grand jury’s decision. It is clear however that the black community, after a recent string of publicized police related deaths, will question the conclusions.
Look at this from the perspective of Ferguson’s black community. An unarmed teen-ager is shot down in the street by a white police officer. The government and most of the police force is white. There have been high visibility instances this year of other police related killings of black people. Too, this sort of violence, violence sanctioned by those in power is not a new thing, not at all.
Considering the inherent violence in the enslavement, sale and servitude of Africans early in our history, a violence only ended by a great spasm of violence, and even then not truly ended but substituted for by Jim Crow laws, the Klan and structural racism, it is important to understand that the situation looks very different from within the black community. The assumption there is not on behalf of the police, or the benevolence of the government, rather it is fed by what Billie Holliday called Strange fruit. And understandably so from my vantage point.
