Ferguson has grown quieter since last summer, when the tensions surrounding Michael Brown’s death led first to peaceful protests, then erupted in riots.
The events are well known: On Aug. 9, Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Brown. The next day, the crowd at a candlelight vigil became violent, sparking a period of unrest that led to nearly $5 million in property damage and one man’s death. On Aug. 25, Brown’s father asked for a respite on the day of his son’s funeral: “All I want tomorrow is peace while we lay our son to rest. Please, that’s all I ask.” For a time, the city listened.
Then on Nov. 24, after 25 days of deliberation, a grand jury chose not to press charges against Wilson. The riots continued, revitalized by the perceived injustice of the decision. But as snow fell three days later, the rioters dispersed from streets now coated in powder, and the violence, for the most part, stopped. The silence that has since fallen over Ferguson, Missouri has not been peaceful, but tense and sullen.
In the midst of the crisis, most explanations of Ferguson sought to blame either Brown or Wilson. Some saw a racist white man who stalked and murdered a black man; others, a cop who did his job and shot a criminal. But the search for guilt focuses on the immediate actions, intentions, and events leading directly to the clash, and so it hinders true understanding.
Because conflict never happens in a vacuum, grasping it depends upon the context in which two agents clash. Laws, norms, institutions, and other social pressures all define a community and influence how the people within it think and live. These pressures give us our language and accents, teach us how to dress, and tell us whether to dream of becoming a doctor or just graduating high school. People aren’t simple cogs in the grinding machinery of society, but they do grow, learn, and act within its context.
And the context for many inner-city African-Americans, like Brown, makes attainment of the goods of American society almost insurmountably difficult. The barriers are legion: Incarceration rates, poverty, failing schools, crime, drug use, teen pregnancy, and so on. We’ve heard the statistics. Each barrier exacerbates the others, and in aggregate they endanger life, restrict liberty, and thwart the pursuit of happiness.
This culture surrounded and smothered Brown in helpless, hopeless alienation. The decisions he made — to rob a gas station and charge a cop — happened against the backdrop of this hopelessness, and against this backdrop the confrontation becomes tragic. Because tragedy should be averted when possible, Ferguson calls not simply for reflection, but for reflection that inspires reform.
Some of this has already begun. According to the Washington Post, 13 states have introduced laws that require body cameras for some police officers. These measures should improve relationships between officers and the communities they serve.
But these reforms, though good, fail to address the systemic, cultural difficulties that plague many inner-city communities. Citizens and legislators should confront and reformulate or eliminate the policies that contribute to the malaise: The War on Drugs, welfare, school systems, sentencing practices, family law, the lottery, the racial makeup of police forces, zoning, tax codes, and more.
States should begin with the obvious injustices. For example, they should repeal their lotteries — those insidious, regressive taxes that masquerade in the sheep’s clothing of “funding for education” — to the last. As it stands, the persistence of lotteries speaks to the immense disconnect between politics and principle for legislators across the ideological spectrum, from bleeding-heart liberals to voodoo trickle-downers.
Rather than mouthing clichéd and often-partisan justifications for long-tolerated dysfunction, we should insist that leaders look honestly at issues and test them against the principled question: Does this policy encourage every citizen’s full participation in the goods of society?
Until then, the silence in Ferguson will remain a façade of peace masking the tension between the near-hopeless and the rest of society. A snowfall might force the calm of a stalemate, but it will not be true peace. In this sense, “no justice, no peace” is not a threat of further violence, but the expression of a truth: Without the resolutions of the systemic injustices that hinder full participation in the goods of society, any peace will be illusory, and even that will inevitably deteriorate.
