For months, Ferguson, Missouri, made headlines following officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of an unarmed Michael Brown as the nation waited for a decision as to whether Wilson would be indicted.
How can we account for the fact that there is racial divide within the community of Ferguson’s police and it people? There is bound to be racial tension in a town where the police force is predominately white, defending the law in a mostly black town.
Under those conditions there will always be issues. Systemically there needs to be a change. We don’t live there. But we sure have our opinions about what the living person says is his truth and what the dead person can no longer say. Even the witnesses are divided. Everyone is going to believe exactly what they want to believe. But the reality is none of our opinions matter.
We have been discussing issues of racism for decades. Institutionalized racial discrimination was largely banned and is perceived as socially unacceptable and morally repugnant. But yet we still see resistance. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”
It’s not difficult to agree with President Obama: “We are a nation built on the rule of law, and so we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make,” Obama said late Monday night. “There are Americans who agree with it and there are Americans who are deeply disappointed, even angry. It’s an understandable reaction. But I join Michael’s parents in asking anyone who protests this decision to do so peacefully.”
Perhaps the people in Ferguson will also recognize the need to provide resources and incentives for proposed changes to succeed and recognize the value of team building by actively including all points of view, and a combination of establishing higher goals and implementing practices that achieve greater results.
If policies, procedures and goals change without the organizational change that is needed to support them, no change can result. It took the civil rights movement to set the stage for equal opportunity. But the movement itself didn’t produce the needed changes. A new set of laws and sanctions are needed to get organizations to comply and continued resistance is daunting and damaging.
“It means working to train officials so that law enforcement conducts itself in a way that is fair to everybody. It means enlisting the community actively on what should be everybody’s goal, and that is to prevent crime,” Obama said.
Rioting and looting has not and will not solve the underlying issues in Ferguson, but there doesn’t seem to be any plans to change things so that it never happens again.
Winonna Saari was an intern with The Herald in 2012. Her articles included “Echoes of Blue and Gray” about the Civil War veterans buried at Everett’s Evergreen Cemetery. The Everett resident recently graduated from Seattle Pacific University with a bachelor’s degree in communications and is looking for work as a journalist.
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