The USA, Segregation, Ferguson and Michael Brown

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Quote:

Kimberlé Crenshaw: I think what's most important about perhaps Ferguson is to recognise that that comes from a second period after the initial segregation, so after African-Americans moved to the north and there was a civil rights movement and there was some degree of movement on the part of African-Americans moving into the suburbs, things became re-segregated again as white people fled areas where African-Americans had moved into. So you have cities and subdivisions like Ferguson and other towns across the country that are majority African-American, they are working class and poor, and much of the resource that supports government is through fines and through heavy policing that many of the citizens of Ferguson talk about. So this is a period of re-segregation, it's a period of a largely white police force, an almost exclusively white police force, containing in a militarised way a population of African-Americans. Policeman [archival]: I want no man at any time alone. We want security, no horsing around. As we get out of those trucks I want fixed bayonets as we dismount. Journalist [archival]: Sirens, fire engines, ambulances, police cars, burglar alarms…absolutely incredible scenes. A small army in policeman, most of them carrying shotguns, National Guardsmen riding jeeps with 30-calibre machine guns… Heather Thompson: Police have so often been proxy for the white community. From the perspective of African-American history this has always been the case, but it is also true that in the post-civil rights era, so after many gains were made by the civil rights era there has been a real backlash to that. And one of the ways in which that has manifested itself is an escalation of policing again of particularly black spaces.

Interesting story. I don't know how much of the claims that are made are correct, but they would explain the large scale rioting.







Audio and a transcript are available.

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