Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Crowd at Opening
Injustice Becomes Law
Fuck the Police
Not One More Life
Demonized
Justice 4 the Black
Community
Niggod
R.I.P. Michael Brown
No Justice, No Peace
On the March 1
Stop Police Brutality
On the March 2
On the Courthouse
Steps
Crowd Photographing
the Speakers
Human Speaker
Pedestal
Our Lives Matter
Peace through
Revolution
Film the Police
White Solidarity with
Black Power
No Justice …
Resistance Becomes a
Duty
Emmett & Amadou …
I’m not going to
write a sober, “objective” news story about the situation in Ferguson, Missouri
or the demonstration I witnessed in downtown San Diego November 25 protesting
the decision of the grand jury in Ferguson not to indict police officer Darren
Wilson for the fatal shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Black man Michael Brown
last August. Frankly, I was saddened but not surprised that Wilson wasn’t
indicted. What would have been the point? Not long ago, a Florida jury
acquitted George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin after a reluctant
district attorney was pressured into prosecuting — and Zimmerman wasn’t even a
sworn police officer but a neighborhood watch wanna-be.
Six days before
the protest I’d been at a meeting co-sponsored by Activist San Diego (ASD) and
its community radio station, KNSJ 89.1 FM, on whether the police are just doing
their jobs or going too far. The panel consisted of three retired law-enforcement
officers — all white males — and three police critics. But it was ASD executive
director and board member Martin Eder who summed up the perception that
underlay the events in Ferguson, both Darren Wilson’s actions and the Black
community’s response to them. African-Americans and other U.S. people of color,
Eder said, see the police as an occupying force with “the ethic of controlling
the streets and shooting first and asking questions later. Racialized justice
has been the norm, not the exception.”
This perception
on the part of law enforcement seems to rule the day whenever police officers
and people of color confront each other. From New York City’s thankfully
abandoned official “stop-and-frisk” policy that basically regarded every young
man of color on the city’s streets as a criminal with the affirmative duty to
prove he wasn’t (a reversal of the “presumption of innocence” on which our
criminal justice system is supposedly based) to the myriad anecdotes about
people being stopped for “driving while Black” or “driving while brown,” to the
bizarre arrest of Harvard professor, PBS show host and Presidential friend
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for breaking into his own house, it’s clear there’s an
institutional bias in U.S. law enforcement that regards that “protect and
serve” stuff as reserved to white people. For people of color, the police don’t
protect and serve: they contain and control.
And this
institutional bias remains no matter how many people of color get appointed or
elected to office. The U.S. can elect an African-American President, and the
police perception of themselves as occupiers in the communities of color
continues. San Diego appointed a Latino police chief, David Bejarano, and the
number of officer-involved shootings in the communities of color actually went up. (He’s since been replaced by a white man, who in
turn was replaced by a white woman.) The U.S. police seem stuck in this social
role — with the approval of the older, whiter portion of the American
population that actually votes — regardless of how many paper advances are made
in civil rights and human rights for marginalized populations.
So I wasn’t
surprised that Darren Wilson got to “walk” after killing a young Black man.
Indeed, Wilson’s self-justification that Brown “looked like a demon” when he
shot him is one of the most chilling aspects of the case. So is the defense
offered by Wilson’s attorney that he was just following standard police
procedures when he brought down and summarily executed Michael Brown for the
“crime” of walking on the street instead of the sidewalk. Wilson probably was following standard police procedures — and that’s
precisely the problem.
I also wasn’t
surprised that what passes for a Left in San Diego County wasn’t able to mount
a powerful, unified demonstration against the grand jury’s cop-loving cop-out.
While protesters in other cities trooped out to the streets the night of
Monday, November 24 — the day the grand jury’s decision was announced — leading
to some unintentionally funny coverage in the mainstream media where hundreds
of people were visible on the footage but the commentators solemnly informed us
there were only “dozens” of participants — the San Diego organizers decided to
wait until the following day. What’s more, they announced two separate
demonstrations, one in City Heights and one downtown, while UCSD students
staged a third, unannounced one and actually briefly blocked Interstate 5.
I chose to go to
the downtown protest, partly because it was easier to get to and partly because
it seemed likely to be more interesting. I didn’t see the protest flyer and I
got there about 20 minutes late, so I’m not sure who all the organizers were,
but the main impetus seemed to come from the African People’s Socialist Party
and a white subsidiary organization called the Uhuru Solidarity Movement
(“uhuru” means “freedom” in Swahili), along with the Raza Educators’
Association. The speakers from these groups were heavy on rhetoric attacking
President Obama, calling for revolution and denouncing the calls from everyone
from Obama to Michael Brown’s parents asking that the demonstrations stay
“nonviolent.”
But it wasn’t
the sort of event you go to for the speakers. What impressed me most about it
was the irrepressible energy of the crowd, the way they were willing to march
on the sidewalks in a helter-skelter route around several downtown blocks. At
times it seemed even the march leaders didn’t know where the march was going to
go next, which was a good thing. What’s more, I was pleased to be at a march where
there was virtually no one there I actually knew — and goodness knows, it’s
easy enough to be depressed by the small size of the San Diego Left and wonder
if we’re all just the same 12 people at each demonstration. I was impressed by
the commitment, the energy and the power of this crowd.
On November 25
there was not much more that needed to be said about the events in Ferguson —
but there was a need to say it anyway, especially in an action dominated by
people of color saying they’re fed up with being contained and controlled by
the police (and the corporate-dominated economic and political system of which
the police and the U.S. military are the enforcement arms). What was said by
the people with the bullhorns and the P.A. was less important than the statement
the crowd made simply by being there and saying, “Enough Is Enough.” It was a
powerful, energetic evening, and I was proud to be there and be a part of it.
