Friday, August 29, 2014

Cooper Sterling - Occidental Observer - Ferguson: Media Images in the Service of White Dispossession - "This is typical. The media have focused on every conceivable and inconceivable aspect of this incident ... except for the elephant in the room: why are Blacks seemingly less cooperative, more prone to sudden bursts of violence, and more likely to resist social norms of conventional behavior?" (Andrea Mitchell still hasn't retired? Who KNEW?)

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Ferguson: Media Images in the Service of White Dispossession


“Look, folks, policing is done this way. You may like to live in Santa Monica and have your little wine party in the backyard and drive your Jaguar and do your little barbecue…. Know that the reason you are allowed to do that in the safety of your community is because police Officers go out and they clean up the streets and deal with all the scum that you don’t want to know about….”
—Stacey Koon [former LAPD Sergeant in charge of the Rodney King incident]
Quoted in Lou Cannon, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD, 430
The two-week spectacle in Ferguson, Missouri, which culminated in the packed funeral of 18-year-old Michael Brown, produced a cascade of predictable volatility. Brown, an unarmed Black male, died August 9, 2014, after Darren Wilson, a White police officer, fired multiple rounds at the 6’4”, 292-pound amateur rapper known as “Big Mike.” (According to the New York Times, “[Brown] collaborated on songs that included lyrics such as ‘My favorite part is when the bodies hit the ground.’”)
As more details emerge, the sequence of events that prompted the shooting offers a plausible explanation for the skewed original narrative of an unarmed Black male targeted by a White police officer. Several eyewitnesses alleged that Brown was cooperative, had his hands up, and was shot from behind.
However, others tell a quite different story. According to forensic reports, Brown was shot from the front, not from behind. The pattern and number of rounds fired suggests that the officer attempted to stop Brown by wounding him. ...


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