This is a TL;DR kind of post – Fair warning.

The failure by the grand jury to indict the officer responsible for the murder of an unarmed man is a travesty in the worst way. Before we get into the racial aspect of this event, before we get into the class aspect, before we begin to untangle the actions of a martial order in order to maintain the status quo, let us acknowledge the simple fact that one person, volitionally, took the life of another – snuffed out any potential that person held because he could not view the other as a human being.

Let us begin by acknowledging that the act of Officer Darren Wilson is an act of state. By him being a police officer, he acts for the authority and the will of the state because his sole job is to uphold law and order. In that, his personal prejudices and his judgment then becomes that of the system which employs him as its agent. Mr. Wilson’s “split second” decision that left six shots in a man with no weapon of his own reflects the general disregard of the state towards its citizens. In many cities across the country officers are taught to treat every person they encounter with suspicion, with the belief that the person with whom s/he is interacting is a potential threat regardless of the interaction. This heightened level of distrust makes it difficult for the officers to assess real threats accurately as everyone, in his/her eyes, is a suspect – a potential wrongdoer or criminal just by existing.

Let us compound that general sense of mistrust, and look at the rates of arrests or stop and frisks that occur in less affluent or impoverished neighborhoods. One will make the argument that in these communities there are higher rates of crimes – more violence, higher rates of thefts, more drug use, etc. Yes, there are higher crime rates in places where people have less money, but, generally, people are not more or less dangerous because the area is impoverished. If we look at the reports of violent crimes over the last few years, St. Louis has ranked in the upper echelon of murders per capita – most of those murders gang and drug related – but that is not to say that one will be shot purely by walking down the street, or that one has to forever look over one’s shoulder because there is a constant threat. Officers, however, who patrol these areas do that. They add to their general mistrust a layer of judgment for those who live in less affluent neighborhoods. Stop and frisks are more likely because of some assumption that the person, merely by his/her living within a particular area, is “up to no good.” The officer has a much freer range to harass and accuse because, generally, the individual doesn’t know his rights.

Let us, now, add on to those two aspects the issue of race. The simplest version of this is that by being part of an “other” class, officers, who are usually not of that same grouping, view that person as a greater threat. By Michael Brown being black, and not just black, but a big strapping chocolate John Henry kind of black man, he’s the biggest threat without being armed. He’s Bigger Thomas, a product of and reinforcement of a general fear created by a society that uses that fear to continue to keep the “other” in its place. There are hundreds (probably thousands) of scholarly papers written on how we create prejudices, how we internalize them, and how black men and women are most commonly viewed as “lesser than” or criminal or overly sexed ad nauseam. What was illustrated with this instance, with this young man, is that he was immediately called a criminal. That the rest of the world assumed that he must have done something because the belief is that we have reached a point in society where we are colorblind because we have a black president, and we are afraid to admit that having one black friend does not mean we’re not racist. The one black friend that people have “is not like other black people,” and the “other black people” don’t have the potential to be President Obama. That is what happens in cases like this. Michael Brown was a threat and easily murdered because, to Officer Wilson, he didn’t have the potential to be anything greater than the circumstances of that moment. What the officer saw, and what most people would see, purely based on pigmentation, was, at best, a future employee at a retail shop, and, at worst, everything that the media portrayed him to be – a brutish man who just robbed a liquor store. The truth is he did not rob anyone. The truth is his reputation was peaceful. The truth is that he died because we as a society have great difficulty unpacking all of our historical baggage and confronting the fact that a state actor didn’t see the potential of an individual, and only saw something that needed to be snuffed out. I am sure that Officer Wilson will tell you that he isn’t racist, but I bet he’ll tell you some stories about “those people.”

For those who have/are burning and pillaging, although I do not condone your actions, I understand. I understand the rage and the disappointment and the longing. The rage that even in the face of unquestioning evidence on a national stage a blind eye is turned to the victimizing of a group. The disappointment and disillusionment because in this exhibition you are still not recognized as full citizens because somehow being a part of this group, this otherness, this unique identity that is entrenched in a long storied narrative of abuse and subjugation, you are confronted with only obstacles to existing on an even playing field. The longing for the day when the promises this nation made to you are fulfilled: a simple acceptance as a part of the collective and not a threat to it. And, in that rage, and longing, and suffering, there has to be a point of release or you implode, and that release is a violent explosion but that moment of incendiary expression will last for just that moment. It’s just enough so that we, as a society, do not self destruct. Just enough rage is released so that we do not take to the streets. Just enough escapes to impede revolution. To those who admonish these violent actors, how can one expect someone who had an act of violence committed against him/her, who followed the system and was not delivered justice, to act better than the person who harmed him/her? Why must the community that bears the burden of injustice be held to a higher standard of law and order than those who are empowered to enforce those laws?

What is most mournful about this situation is not the narrative that it tells of the continuing systemic and systematic oppression of a particular class of people, or that this will not end. What is most depressing in this situation is that we will forget. One day, in the near future, after countless BuzzFeed articles about celebrity activities, and CNN/FoxNews reports about infighting in Congress, and some other scare about Ebola and foreign wars and immigration is that we won’t remember Michael Brown. He will be relegated to the same position of Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, or Oscar Grant – a sometimes remembered rallying cry for the next time something like this happens. And, when it does happen, when the next young unarmed black male is shot and killed and someone brings it to the forefront of the media’s attention on a slow news cycle day or when we decide we need a distraction, we will act shocked and appalled at the travesty of “police brutality” and then we will judge the victim as a criminal and we will let the officer go and we will forget that person’s name too. That’s the real tragedy in all of this – that this isn’t new; it’s a continuing series of the same acts of oppression that we choose, as a society, to ignore or forget.