On Mike Brown

When I heard about Mike Brown's death, I didn't care. I saw the headline and thought very little of it. Very little of it. Do you understand that? An 18 year-old man-child was killed and I barely batted an eyelash. It seems that hearing about black people being killed —by police, by neighborhood watchmen and other self-appointed vigilantes, by paranoid people, by other black people —has become so commonplace, it's no longer worth noticing. Kind've like mass shootings. It's all part of the American landscape now. And you know what? It sucks. It sucks to be in a place in our "evolution" where we barely blink at death any more. We make the required noises, but it doesn't affect us. These things don't shock us anymore, and they should.

Ferguson is what made me start paying attention to this one. The protests, the riots, the images of neighborhoods covered in thick clouds of tear gas, of a police force that more resembled a Michael Bay movie than any police I've ever seen in real life. This got my attention, and so I started paying attention. I paid attention to the news coverage, Twitter feeds, and to what my own Facefriends were saying. What I've seen has gotten to me, and prompted me to write this. I had to write this because all of these feelings were bubbling up and taking away my concentration, making me angry, making it hard for me to move on.

Facebook is not helping matters. I've always prided myself on the diversity of my Facefriends. We have a tendency to surround ourselves (or try to surround ourselves) with likeminded people. It starts with the kind of school we go to, right? Conservative Christians don't typically enroll in Oberlin or Hampshire, and the more liberal-minded of us are not about to matriculate into Liberty University or Brigham Young. So you amass a cohort of people who tend to believe the same things as you, and then you graduate and maybe you turn towards cities that reflect your thinking. And within the cities you migrate towards neighborhoods or nearby towns that are populated by others like you. Sometimes you even gravitate towards professions/businesses that are in keeping with your social and political leanings. I missed the boat on this last one. I went into tech, which is dominated by white guys, and a pretty large number of them have mostly turned out to be conservatives/tea partiers/libertarians because, well...white guys.

There are of course exceptions to absolutely everything I just said because the world isn't black and white and doesn't neatly divide itself. It's messy and the universe is a trickster and contrarian and is always waiting to prove you wrong.

My Facefriends reflect a social and political diversity that is difficult to reproduce in real life, especially real life with a toddler and a demanding job. This wasn't done on purpose. I friended people with whom I worked, people with whom I have never engaged in a political conversation. They know me, we chat and joke and get along, we friend each other online...and then you find out what they think about "things". Things like gun control and immigration and social services.

People like Mike Brown.

And I start to wonder if maintaining this diversity—which admittedly fuels my ego and makes me think I'm so enlightened and egalitarian—is worth the assault to my sensibilities. For every gun control rant that has a few salient and valid points that I can admit to, there are more posts that make me cringe, and comments from their friends that make me wonder who exactly I'm dealing with.

Yesterday one such Facefriend posted a photo of Mike Brown. It showed him sitting at a table, pointing a gun at the camera, a bottle of Hawaiian Punch on the table and what looks like the neck of a liquor bottle just out of frame. Behind him sits another black male, and smoke is curling around him. I'm not going to repost it here. My Facefriend captioned it with: Here's the image of Michael Brown that the news doesn't want you to see. I'm sure you can draw your own conclusions.

Oh boy.



I didn't jump in. I wanted clarification first, to not make assumptions. I responded, "So what does this tell us?" I wanted to know what relevance this photo had in regards to the shooting. His response:

Everything the media makes it out to not be. An officer would not shoot unless he/she had probable cause. Personally, and I'm far from racist, but the media is making it out to be a racial profiling issue more than an officer safety / public safety issue. Clearly he is not the "innocent kid who just wanted to go to college". There are all sorts of bad people in the world, and some young adults / teens get mixed up in the wrong crowd and make poor decisions and continue leading that life. Those are the people that need to be taken off the streets. Not everyone is innocent like the media wants to make Michael Brown out to be. It's actually pretty sad how the media can influence the population to swing one way or the other. Just like every other news story in the world. /rant

This is where I had to step back. One person commented "Oh yeah, he looks really innocent here".

You know what? Fuck you. I wasn't going to be this straightforward. I was going to couch this in some pretty-speak that I learned in college, but never mind all of that. A good old fashioned fuck you is in order. This dude is dead. His mother, family, and friends are grieving. He was about to graduate from high school. That in itself is a feat for some of these kids, and apparently he struggled to get there, but he did. The media is showing pictures of him in his cap and gown, in his tux getting ready to play saxophone for a school concert. Why is that so galling? Why does that fuel your energy to go looking for photos that depict the truth that you want to be, the stereotype that you expect? Is it so that you can legitimize Darren Wilson's actions? Is it so you can continue to feel secure that everything you believe is real?

Why are you so eager to reason someone's death away?

I expected the backlash, in a very general sense. It's the same old thing every time. Black person gets killed in a way that strikes people as wrong, that has the distinct odor of racial motivation, that just seems unjust. It's never long before a certain segment of our population starts scouring the web for "incriminating" pictures. For what? To dehumanize the victims. Well sure this happened; look at this picture. They were clearly a thug. These folks may as well have come out and said the victims deserved it, and good riddance. This guy pretty much did:

There are a lot of unknowns, but when a pictures like this shows up, it starts to put things in prospective. He clearly isn't the righteous kid that the news media is making him out to be. Clearly he is trying to be a thug in this picture, and I'd be almost certain he doesn't have a LTC or that he purchased that firearm legally considering he was only 18.

...I'd rather keep potential threats off the streets for when my kids need to fend from themselves.

"Potential threats". That's some Minority Report shit right there.

I did some searching myself and found more than a few conservative sites that were more than happy to show the same few pictures of him throwing up what appear to be gang signs, or just trying to look hard. I'd argue that they are just as guilty of trying to sham the public into a certain perception as my Facefriend accuses the folks who post the "positive" images are. How about some context? That's a major missing component. What if we learn that Brown did indeed belong to a gang at some point but had since turned things around, including graduating? How does that affect your narrative?  Probably wouldn't be so eager to share those if it didn't point people in the direction of "he was a thug and deserved it".

Beyond that though: so what? Last I checked, not having a squeaky clean image or even not living a good life wasn't sufficient cause to be shot by a police officer. I shoplifted when I was in high school and got into fist fights. If I got killed would you focus on that? "Clearly she was no innocent because look at her past?" Was Mike Brown actively involved in some criminal activity at the time of the incident? Was he armed? Because those are two very important questions, and some pictures of him contorting his fingers or holding a gun have no bearing on the incident in question. He wasn't holding a gun that day.

You know what else strikes me about those pictures? The complete lack of any understanding of black culture, which for young people is easily synonymous with hip-hop culture, and the ease with which white people attempt to demonize it and use its expressions as a means of persecuting us. Young black men snarl at the camera. They sneer at it. They flip it off. They're emulating their idols, the hip-hop artists whose music they listen to, whose lives they aspire to. Some white people (and out of touch bougie black people who rant and ridicule...seriously, just...gah!) think that this is just cause. If you didn't present this way, these things wouldn't happen. They can't separate the image from reality. It's much easier to believe a simplified, black and white (no pun intended) depiction. We won't talk about the double standard here in that rock music traditionally glorifies less-than-ideal behavior (boozing, drugging, fornicating and all that) and a kind of "fuck you" attitude (yeah, they flipped off cameras too) that white kids have emulated, but no one is having any trouble separating those two things.

Mike Brown had pictures where he looked "thuggish"; he also had pictures where he was simply having a meal out with his fam, or holding a little girl in his arms and smiling. Which was the real Mike Brown? How about both? And how about that's okay and not to be used as en excuse?

You know what else? It may come out later that he did tussle with that officer. Hell, the police department is slowly starting to let information trickle out...days after the fact, which I won't lie, has my spider sense tingling. Why wait so long? Why are they disseminating it in such dribs and drabs? If your case was so clear cut, why didn't you provide answers immediately, like when such answers could have staved off the unrest? Why do we still not know how many times he was shot, and where? I digress. It may come out that he did engage that officer in a stupid, dangerous way. He may have been involved in a robbery. It still doesn't change the fact that he was unarmed when he was shot. And it doesn't change the racism behind attempts to show him as a thug in order to legitimize the killing.

Here's the thing, and really it's what fuels me on this. I may have rambled all this way for this last paragraph, but here it is: I have a brother. A younger brother. He's currently in jail, serving time for traffic violations and drugs. He is Mike Brown. He didn't graduate high school. He embraced the thug life and it wasn't something that me, my sisters, or my mother supported or wanted for him, but it's what happened. He's had run-ins with the police. If something happened to him, if he were to be gunned down...people like my Facefriend would find the pics of him laying out hundred dollar bills on a table, smoking a cigar or blunt or whatever, scowling at the camera, and they'd say, "Right, he looks really innocent". They'd find out about his criminal record and they'd diminish his life, the complexity of his humanity, down to a stereotype and say that if he hadn't looked like that/lived like that, this might not have happened. They'll manage to neatly ignore the fact that he was a loving son who looked out for his mother, hung out with his nephews and played with them and bought them things, that he had a good heart and sense of humor and was actually a nice guy, because then they'd have to, I don't know...think. Question. Move beyond the simplicity of their perception of black people, perhaps rethink their definitions of bad and good.

I'm worn out by this. I just needed to get it off my chest. And maybe it's time I pruned some people off my Facefriend list.  Depending on what we ultimately learn (or accept as truth) about this whole incident, things could get ugly.