It’s been nearly a week since Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and it seems that all of us – his family, community and nation – are still searching for answers.
We’ve looked to the police, who, until Friday, refused to identify Darren Wilson, the officer implicated in the shooting, by name.
We’ve looked to witnesses, who have contradicted reports by police that Brown was aggressive with the officer and maintained that his hands were up in the air when he was shot.
We’ve looked to the news, which, in the past six days, has offered countless interpretations of the incident and the ensuing protests in Ferguson, where police in riot gear fired tear gas at crowds on Wednesday night before tactics were changed Thursday.
I, along with many others, am looking up.
Even as someone who’s used to overconsuming media about any big news, the barrage of columns, editorials and articles about Michael Brown’s senseless death and the rage of his community in its aftermath have overwhelmed me. Writing interpretive stories – that is, not reporting the news but talking about what we can take from it – is done in large part to make sense of events that are complicated or confusing, to try to bring some sense of order and clarity to situations that lack it.
After days of reading and attempting, over and over again, to write something of my own, I’m starting from scratch. I have come to the rather painful conclusion that there is nothing illuminating to say. The death of Michael Brown defies explanation.
After all, how many times can we read or write the painfully obvious truths that this death, like so many tragic and senseless deaths before, has brought to the fore once again?
The lives of black and brown people matter. It cannot possibly be easier for a police officer to shoot an unarmed black man running away from his cruiser than simply to chase him, to detain him, to do anything but kill him. Something is very, very wrong about a town where the majority of residents are black, and yet the majority of police officers and government officials are white – a town where the police force is inherently detached from the community it’s serving. This has happened before. This is going to happen again. And – because I know this will somehow make a difference to some people – no, it does not matter, not even a little bit, whether Brown stole a pack of Swisher Sweets cigars from a convenience store before he was shot by a police officer in the middle of the street, in broad daylight, with his hands above his head.
There are only so many times anyone can read those things in publication after publication before realizing that we should not even have to say them. We’ve said them before, so many times. Can’t we take them for granted by now?
After six days, I am not looking to anyone for answers about what happened.
After six days, I am looking up.