The protests were fueled not just by the shooting itself — as bad as it was, with multiple eyewitnesses claiming it was essentially unprovoked — but by the entire official response afterward, from leaving Brown’s body rotting in the street for hours, to not naming the officer involved and not having an incident report on the shooting, to the heavily militarized response to nonviolent protestors, to the leaking of secret grand jury testimony and videos impugning Brown’s character, to a longtime local prosecutor notorious for pro-police sensibilities.
At every turn, Ferguson’s official response was to protect an officer widely thought to have committed murder and to all but explicitly proclaim that black lives didn’t matter. And, as the nation learned, the city itself — majority black but run by white politicians and businesspeople — turned out to be funded by a classic example of institutional racism.
Poor, local black residents were routinely harassed by police, charged and fined over petty crimes and fined further for court costs, and that revenue has provided the largest part of a city budget that doesn’t significantly tax local, often white-owned businesses.
It’s literally a 21st-century plantation economy. Local protestors in Missouri were dogged enough in protesting and drawing attention to the situation that it became a national tipping point, resonating with all the victims of unaccountable police departments and racist local economies around the country. That is what people across the United States and around the world were protesting.
Same issues here
Seattle has been among the most active of those cities, and not just because, as local establishment pundits would have it, we have a class of permanent protestors willing to take the streets over any damn thing.
This is different: It’s not just the usual suspects. Students from at least four local high schools have staged walkouts. The largest response, the day after the grand jury decision, was a march from the Central Area to the federal courthouse downtown sponsored by the NAACP and local black clergy.
And the persistence of protests — disturbing the holiday shopping experience to the anguish of many — is also unusual.
The persistence of the protests isn’t just a response to an outrageous example of institutional racism 2,000 miles away. Seattle’s own problems with these issues are an unavoidable subtext. King County has, in the 40 years of its current inquests system, found the use of lethal force by a law enforcement officer to be justified in every single case, spanning nearly 200 cases and some truly egregious ones (like John T. Williams’ shooting in 2010, a far less ambiguous example of an unprovoked use of lethal force than the Michael Brown case).
Seattle is “dealing” with police reforms now only after a federal investigation and lawsuit that dragged on for years because of the adamant resistance of the Seattle Police Department (SPD), City Council and two successive mayors (Greg Nickels and Mike McGinn). There’s still enormous resistance within SPD to these reforms. Still, no misbehaving SPD officer has been held criminally accountable in a shooting.
It’s not just law enforcement, either. Seattle — with its vast tracts of lily-white neighborhoods north of the Lake Washington ship canal — remains one of the most geographically segregated major cities in the country. And the recent influx of jobs and wealth — spurred by public policies guaranteed to force many working poor to move to less-expensive suburbs — has caused a disproportionate exodus of people of color. As Seattle gets richer, it is also getting whiter. Seattle’s leaders seem mostly pleased with the demographic changes and oblivious to the racial aspect of it.
The lesson to learn
The entire official system in Ferguson is racist and rotten to the core. But white Seattle liberals have a bad habit, on issues of race, of evincing a smug superiority that makes acknowledging and dealing with our own serious problems much more difficult.
The blatant racism involved in a plantation economy like Ferguson is easy to condemn. But as appalling as that sort of systemic racism is, on average the people who oversee it are a lot more honest about their bigotries than white Seattleites are.
Seattle in 2014 is a city giddy with building cranes erecting new market-rate housing that is remaking Seattle into a wealthier, whiter city, while poorer immigrants and minorities are forced to the suburbs, helped along by a police department with serious issues around race. We can’t work to undo white privilege — let alone white supremacism — until we acknowledge that it exists. That’s the lesson of Ferguson; Seattle would do well to learn it.
GEOV PARRISH is cofounder of Eat the State! He also reviews news of the week on “Mind Over Matters” on KEXP 90.3 FM. To comment on this column, write to MPTimes@nwlink.com.