It has been a long two weeks since the killing of Mike Brown. Folks are tired, weary from the responsibility that telling the tale the city of Ferguson brings. You can hear it in the gravelly, battered voices of the activists in the street. You can see it in the tired, intense eyes of those who have been the faces of this story.
I too have been tired – drained even. But my exhaustion set in not because cause there is so much to say about how we have arrived at this horrible place. My exhaustion stems from the rush to “solution” in an attempt to hurry the “heal.”
Now that it seems the protesters are occupying the streets of Ferguson differently, we are starting to hear more observations and theories about how the Ferguson African-American community finds itself in such a racially lopsided political position. Why is there only one elected African-American council member? Why was a conservative, possibly Republican, historically illiterate, racially ignorant, white mayor able to run unopposed in a majority black city?
And so it began.
From the highest elected officials in Missouri to children not even old enough to vote, black voices, white voices – voices united in one common African-American beat down – “if African Americans in Ferguson had voted in the last election this may not have happened – things might have been different.” “Y’all should have voted.”
Why? Why has this statement been allowed to go unchallenged?
As an African American, I should not have to register to vote or vote in order to expect to be treated as a human being. No other community is told “well, you should have voted” when a member of the community is killed. No other community has to shoulder this horrendous burden. No other community has to sustain such an ugly hit.
African Americans should be able to live without deadly consequences, irrespective of the color of political leadership. And if we are not able to live without race-raged bullets directed at our children, the fault is with the person or institution that is pulling the trigger.
In America, African-American voter turnout cannot be made the blame when a white mayor and a white police chief choose lawless police to patrol a largely African American community. The guilt, the punishment and the responsibility for their crime goes on their political backs not ours.
