Even when there’s a man lay dead on the pavement, nobody wants impartiality. Not where race and murder is concerned. The New York Times observed this mantra of mainstream reporting when profiling the late Mike Brown. A lurid epitaph – ‘no angel’ – for a defenceless youth, with no criminal record, shot six times by a police officer. The NYT has since apologized for its ‘blunder’, but any display of regret is irrelevant. A family and a community have been scarred; the justification craved by the vicious and ignorant has been provided, and the assailment of black culture endures.
Whilst the scenes on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, could well have been mistaken for a contemporary re-telling of “Bull” Connor’s brutal repression of Civil Rights activists in 1960’s Alabama, much commentary has hung upon the character of the deceased. Brown has been portrayed as a violent criminal and a habitual drug-user who had taken to writing ‘vulgar’ Rap lyrics. Fox News perpetuated these contrived descriptions by claiming that Brown was ‘high on drugs’ when he was killed – the salient fact that he was unarmed was almost entirely ignored. The focus, instead, was on molding a public perception of Brown which slotted neatly into the typical stereotype of a dead-black-youth. Bombardment of the US public with depictions of black immorality and violence, in both film and print media, goes back to the early 1980’s. After the emergence (in the consciousness of America’s white population) of the nation’s underclass as a social ill, the systematic demonization of black youths started. The dark ghettos, devoid of hope, left behind in the post-industrial cities, were vilified by muckraking reporters for the monstrous black minority that were trapped within. The exploitative elites blamed black inner-city problems on federal welfare dependency, and the right-wing media happily continued to launder racial propaganda. In a situation like Ferguson where people are scared and angry and demanding answers, public reaction can be reversed if only it can be persuaded that the victim, in any way, deserved to die. Following the Tottenham riot, in 2011, Mark Duggan was described as a thug and a gangster. Whilst the police execute the man, the press set about annihilating his reputation. In the immediate aftermath of the London Riots, whilst appearing on BBC2’s Newsnight, David Starkey – after smugly harping back to Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech – declared that “the problem is that the whites have become black”. For right-wingers, like Starkey, it was easier to attach the pandemonium to a “nihilistic” black subculture. Racist bile of this sort only compounds disaffection and alienation and fury. What are these young people to do? The spread of ignorance – by right-wing news – means that they are continually lambasted for reacting against a twisted system. When bricks were thrown through windows and bottles hurled at riot police on those frenzied August nights in 2011, politicians, and conservative hacks alike, were petrified of asking the necessary questions. Was it really “pure criminality” by a bunch of yobs with hatred in their hearts, as David Cameron put it, or was it a reflection of the upper echelons of society? That economic elite which relentlessly perpetuates and consolidates its own personal wealth, whilst imposing austerity measures on the poorest. Those kids who looted and destroyed, what example did they have – what was the world that they saw outside? They saw feral politicians cheating their expenses and feral bankers ransacking the public purse, mugging a generation of any aspirations it may have dared to hold. But none of that mattered. No. It was those black kids – or those white kids acting black – refusing to obey ‘British values’. When things go wrong, when a cop murders a teenager, when the marginalized and bullied lash out, people get scared. The state’s answer is to blame the victim. To continually scapegoat the same group of people; to not allow black culture to be understood, to make it frightening and alien to a morally outraged public. The race card is kept in the oppressor’s top-pocket – ready to be deployed whenever things get serious. By Ben Breach
