My thoughts about Ferguson

The aftermath of the Ferguson shooting as well as the recent Grand Jury verdict on the case have made it as far as the German news media, and this compelled me to write down my own thoughts on this issue.

A Nation in Fear

The United States, a very high percentage of armed people. Anyone around you might be armed, and thus anyone around you might be a threat to your life.

And "I was afraid for my own life" is a legitimate reason for lethal self-defence. And since, in the United States, there is almost always a reason to feel threatened like that by a stranger, it becomes disturbingly easy to justify shooting shooting said stranger in a manner that will satisfy the average jury. This, of course, includes the police - who are far more likely to shoot for kill in the USA than elsewhere in the developed world. In all of 2013, German police officers shot 42 bullets at other people, killing eight. In the USA - a country with only four times the people of Germany - police officers killed 45 people in January 2013 alone.

So shooting others is easy to justify. And it becomes especially easy if said stranger is a member of an ethnic group which is portrayed as especially "violent" and "prone to crime" by the prevailing media narratives.

Echoes of Trayvon Martin

If the shooting of Martin Brown had been an isolated incident - if it had been a single aberration - there wouldn't have been so many protests. But there are ample precedents.

It may be instructive to go back to the shooting of Trayvon Martin. The "mistake" of Trayvon Martin was walking around a neighborhood where a local thought he didn't belong. That was enough to cause his death.

His second mistake may have been that he didn't carry a gun of his own. After all, he was provably stalked by an armed stranger - and that, according to the logic established above, would have been enough to make him fear for his life and establish a legitimate case for lethal self-defense. It wouldn't even matter if - as George Zimmerman claims - that Trayvon Martin threw the first punch during their altercation. As long as he had sufficient reason to be afraid of his life - and who wouldn't, if stalked by an armed stranger? - he would have been amply justified in using any force necessary to stop Zimmerman from posing a threat to him.

Though it remains an open question if the jury would have seen it the same way, or indeed the police wouldn't have simply shot him at the scene. But he didn't have a gun while Zimmerman did, so Zimmerman shot him, survived, and got free.

And immediately afterwards a campaign began to vilify Trayvon Martin - painting him as a "violent thug" instead of a normal teenager who had every reason to be afraid of his life - while Zimmerman was lauded as a "hero" by too many people - standing up for the right to shoot black teenagers who look "suspicious".

Young black people apparently can't win. As long as the narrative portraying them as "violent" and "dangerous" persists, they remain targets that can be shot nearly at will. If they try to look as unthreatening as possible - playing out "respectability politics" - they need to constantly watch their steps and live under constant fear about "stepping out of line", to a far greater degree than white people do. And the other alternative - arming themselves so that they can better defend themselves - looks rather dubious, since that would only play into the "blacks as violent thugs" narrative and is thus far more likely to get them killed. In fact, considering recent cases where carrying toy guns was enough for black men to be shot, carrying actual weapons looks like an invitation to suicide-by-cop.

Police - The Face of Oppression

Which brings us to the next point - law enforcement. I've seen people claim that if Michael Brown and other young black people in similar situations had acted just like the police wanted them to, nothing would have happened to them.

I find that dubious. Maybe they wouldn't have been killed, but it is still very possible that something bad could have happened to them with no fault on their part. It needs to be remembered that the police in Ferguson - and too many other places like it - does not act as the "friendly neighborhood cop", always willing to assist ordinary citizens. Instead, there is plenty of evidence that they were simply the biggest extortion racket around, preying upon the community's poorest members because those had the least access to legal counsel.

How long would you be willing to remain quiet in the face of oppression? Ask that yourself, before you condemn the protesters of Ferguson.

And while Ferguson might be an extreme case, it is hardly the only one. Systematic abuse of, for example, forfeiture laws is disturbingly common. Not all police departments in the United States are rotten, but in many the rot sits deeply. They are the oppressors in many cases, and it is the poorest who have noticed it first - and that includes much of black America.

And as long as it remains easy to justify shooting others, and as long as black people continue to be portrayed as a threat to others, the killings will continue.

What is to be done?

Frankly, I do not know if it is even possible to fix this. Guns are too prolific and too much a part of American life to eliminate the constant fear of violence, and harsher gun control laws probably wouldn't change anything - just like with Prohibition, it would only drive the guns underground instead of removing them.

And the narrative of black Americans as dangerous will continue as long as poverty affects black Americans disproportionally - after all, it is always useful for the upper classes when the middle classes have a lower class to look down to, and fear.

So this narrative will only end if there is a long-term, concentrated movement to lift black America out of poverty - but that will require fixing housing discrimination, unequal school funding, job discrimination and so many other forms of structural discrimination that even stricter gun control seems less of a long shot in comparison.

So no, I don't have any ideas for how to fix this, except to keep on talking about it. What are your thoughts?