“America Is Not For Black People”

This excellent article by Greg Howard is worth bruiting. Howard argues that what happened in Ferguson, Missouri “is about so many second-order issues—systemic racism, the militarization of police work, and how citizens can redress grievances, among other things…”

He further maintains that:

[A]rguing whether Brown was a good kid or not is functionally arguing over whether he specifically deserved to die, a way of acknowledging that some black men ought to be executed. … To even acknowledge this line of debate is to start a larger argument about the worth, the very personhood, of a black man in America. It’s to engage in a cost-benefit analysis, weigh probabilities, and gauge the precise odds that Brown’s life was worth nothing against the threat he posed to the life of the man who killed him. It’s to deny that there are structural reasons why Brown was shot dead while James Eagan Holmes—who on July 20, 2012, walked into a movie theater and fired rounds into an audience, killing 12 and wounding 70 more—was taken alive.”

You can read all of this thought-provoking article here.