Ferguson 10: Michael Brown Should Be Here

I’m a mother. I want to just talk about the boy who was headed to college; the contours of his life, not the brutality of his death. Had he ever fallen in love? What made him laugh every single time? What made him peace every single time?

And I’m a mother. Looking at truth as bravely as I can in the eye is my responsibility to my children. They have to know the details: the stunning expanse of the brilliance and beauty they are born fully possessing. They have to know the details: the grotesque misshapenness of the world they’re forced to grow in or not grow in.

Portrait of a killer, filters and all 

What I won’t do is repeat the breadth of vulgarities that was mainstream media’s coverage of a young dead Black man. I know in ways I wish I didn’t know where those words can take you, how those words can leave you.

But I will say that the way the New York Times covered Michael Brown in 2014 mirrored, in modern vernacular, the way they covered Black people in 1914.

I will say that the Times’ A-1, above-the-fold, side-by-side profiles of a teenager who was unarmed and shot dead and of the man who shot and killed him, led with the killer getting a commendation in 2013 when he busted a man for weed. The writers of his profile closed by choosing to characterize, not quote, the grandmother of the man who was arrested. They implied that she agreed with the white cop over her Black grandson. If there’s a Black grandma who would do that, I’ve never met her, seen her in a movie, read about her in a book.

Wilson’s gentle profile, just for running alongside a profile of Michael Brown, rightfully received a harsh round of criticism, led by Black people—especially because Brown did not get the same velvet gloves. Black people and fair people across the nation complained about the racist stereotypes woven in, the organization of the story, how it was framed and the choices: what to keep, what to edit out. Michael got boxing gloves.

But we should perhaps have paid attention to that Wilson profile because in making one party–in this case a Black teenager—sort of supernaturally monstrous, balance is really only achieved by making another party–in this case, a white, male cop—sort of otherworldly good, strong and protective. It’s an irritating cliche, the classic battle between good vs. evil, God and Satan.

Yet the blatant disingenuousness of it–like they didn’t even want to attempt fairness, like them saying they were fair was the same as actually being fair. They reported, for example, about Wilson’s 2013 commendation for busting a guy with weed and left out the other big event in his career that year. If anyone had dared tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth back in 2013, Michael Brown might be a college-educated, man of 28 today, living his best life.

Instead, he’s gone and the Times, right as the grand jury was sitting to consider charges against Wilson, conveniently ignored that in 2013–when Wilson was a couple of years out of the Jennings, Missouri, Police Department because every single officer had been fired over racism and corruption–arrested a man named Mike Arman, whose home he approached on some kind of made up violation about too many old cars.

Source: Erik McGregor / Getty

Wilson, who’d walked into policing through the corrupt, racist Jennings door he never complained about, loudly approached Arman, who was on his porch and afraid of the loud cop who was barking orders. He exercised his constitutionally protected right and began filming Wilson–and not secretly. It got him arrested that day, charged with “failure to comply” and weirdly, with “breaching regulations on pit bull dogs.”

The charges were dropped, and here’s the quick and dirty on why: Wilson lied. Arman got it on tape.

Call it hubris, white male supremacist privilege, police arrogance–whatever—Wilson, who knew he was being taped—still accused Arman of not only getting all up in his face with the cellphone camera, forcing the arrest, but threw in this: Arman’s pit bulls were threatening.

Except the video showed the former cop several feet away, yelling from down the garden pathway of the residence.

Just like we know Mike Brown was 150 feet from Wilson’s police vehicle when he was killed, not 20 as Wilson said in sworn testimony, adding that he’d put two bullets in the teen, making him runaway and then–like anyone who’d been shot twice and who also unarmed would do–run back to the cop with the Sig Sauer, charge him even, leaving the courageous but hapless cop no choice but to but to fire more more shots at the unstoppable Mr. Brown who’d by then been closing in. After that, somehow, someway and in the presence of the community who gathered at 12:02 that afternoon to see what was happening, Mike Brown’s body magically and invisibly floated away so that his body laid 150 feet from Wilson’s vehicle, not 20.

Police Lie.

Source: Orjan F. Ellingvag / Getty

Forgive me. I couldn’t hold the plot twist.

Police lie. They lie regularly. And those multiple threatening pit bulls from 2013? They turned out to be singular. They turned out to be one waddling, chubby bulldog.

Not a great look for a superhero. Far better is the image of him standing down multiple snarling beasts protecting one really bad actor. It’s too hard to resist. So hard in fact that pound for pound, he used the same trope to describe the interaction that left Mike Brown dead on Aug. 9 the following year.

And in the way few would challenge the threat of  pit bulls or the character of the man who would have such beasts, fewer still would question the description of a Black teenager—particularly one who weighed nearly 300 pounds and was 6-foot-5’ —as anything but a threat charging almost unstoppably forward, as an honest assessment. Indeed, an entire industry had built on that characterization.

Which is why in Ferguson, Missouri, 10 years ago today, that kind of racism coupled with Darren’s and the PD’s, took the life of Michael Brown Jr. in a ruthless, unforgiving 90 quick seconds.

In my terrible grief

A confession. I’ve never said this before today.

When my stepson Aundre was killed in another mean August, in another city not designed for Black people’s survival, I remember enduring the hateful comments of some.

Aundre, who was never violent with anyone, not once, also sold drugs, an occupation he told his mother, who I lovingly always called my co-wife, my beloved Mercedes, was about all he could do to make enough money to live. It’s useless to debate that. At 18, he’d done nearly a year in a jail in the Bronx for possession of an eighth of weed. He saw his future, his fate, tied to that time he spent in a cage.