FERGUSON - Why we protest.

http://www.alternet.org/ferguson-goddamn-no-indictment-darren-wilson-no-surprise-why-we-protest

"I’ve been dreaming of death. Seeing pictures of death. Seeing pictures of bloody sheets hanging on clotheslines."
Just days before Michael Brown and his brown body encountered a white police officer and a gun in Ferguson, Missouri, the 18-year-old child said that to his stepmother.  She told the world of this foreshadowing during Brown’s funeral two months ago, as anger turned to tears, and this small community ignited a wave of protests and activism that would continue for more than 100 days – and will begin anew, starting right now.
In the months since, all of the leaks and all of the tweets warning that there would be no indictment for Darren Wilson – that instead there would be black “violence” and a perpetual  “state of emergency” – have served as constructed preparations to manage our disappointment, for the big reveal that our criminal justice system was still as broken as it ever was. And now that  the grand jury’s decision has arrived in the form of a smirking white prosecutor, all of the agony of that wait has culminated in nothing more than the sum of our grim expectations, to ignite cynicism and an old rage.
Today, Mike Brown is still dead, and  Darren Wilson has not been indicted for his murder. And who among us can say anything but: “I am not surprised”?

The 12 citizens on the Ferguson jury may have heard more  “than any other grand jury has heard about any other case in living memory”, but the state owns the space, and the state does not own us. Wilson may have testified – he may have said he  “feared for my life” – but the state has refused to listen to the testimony of a young black man with his hands in the air. The story cannot end here.
A non-indictment is no absolution of guilt, but are you not angry? Are you not sick of being unsurprised?

Fifty-three years ago, James Baldwin aptly observed that devastating truth. Fifty-three years later, the sustained rage restarts every 28 hours, because  every 28 hours an African American is killed by law enforcement, or a security guard, or a “vigilante” claiming self-defence – or all three at once. 

The African American body is still the bellwether of the health, the promise and the problems of the American democratic experiment. The message that the Missouri grand jury has now sent to young African Americans – from Ferguson to my classroom and  the rest of the world – is that black lives do not matter, that your rights and your personhood are secondary to an uneasy and negative peace, that the police have more power over your body than you do yourself.