Ferguson X: Michael Brown Should Be Here, Be 28 And Be Living His Best Life

N
inety seconds. That’s what Michael Brown was given on Aug. 9, 2014, 10 years ago today.

From the first second that his killer, former Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson, saw the unarmed 18-year-old, it took him just another 89 seconds for him to near empty his Sig Sauer into a kid too young to buy beer.

In a November 2014 interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, he said yup, he’d do it again. Wilson killed an unarmed teenager who was two days away from starting college and after thinking about it for three months, his conclusion was, essentially, it was a good day. A day he’d repeat if the opportunity presented itself. 

And no, afterwards, Wilson was not part of the 2% of police who are held accountable for killing people. 

Full disclosure

My intention is not to re-litigate this case, although I’m sure in parts it will sound that way. 

I’m a mother. I want to just talk about the boy who was headed to college; the contours of his life, not the brutality of his death. Had he ever fallen in love? What made him laugh every single time? What made him peace every single time?

And I’m a mother. Looking at truth as bravely as I can and directly into its eye is my responsibility to my children. They have to know the details: the stunning expanse of the brilliance and beauty they are born fully possessing. They have to know the details: the grotesque misshapenness of the world they’re forced to grow in or not grow in.

Portrait of a killer, filters and all 

What I won’t do is repeat the breadth of vulgarities that was mainstream media’s coverage of a young dead Black man. I know in ways I wish I didn’t know where those words can take you, how those words can leave you.

But I will say that the way the New York Times covered Michael Brown in 2014 mirrored, in modern vernacular, the way they covered Black people in 1914.

MORE: Reparations Are About More Than Slavery 

I will say that the Times’ A-1, above-the-fold, side-by-side profiles of a teenager who was unarmed and shot dead and of the man who shot and killed him, led with the killer getting a commendation in 2013 when he busted a man for weed. The writers of his profile closed by choosing to characterize, not quote, the grandmother of the man who was arrested. They implied that she agreed with the white cop over her Black grandson. If there’s a Black grandma who would do that, I’ve never met her, seen her in a movie, read about her in a book. 

Wilson’s gentle profile, just for running alongside a profile of Michael Brown, rightfully received a harsh round of criticism, led by Black people—especially because Brown did not get the same velvet gloves. Black people and fair people across the nation complained about the racist stereotypes woven in, the organization of the story, how it was framed and the choices: what to keep, what to edit out. Michael got boxing gloves.

But we should perhaps have paid attention to that Wilson profile because in making one party–in this case a Black teenager—sort of supernaturally monstrous, balance is really only achieved by making another party–in this case, a white, male cop—sort of otherworldly good, strong and protective. It’s an irritating cliche, the classic battle between good vs. evil, God and Satan. 

Yet the blatant disingenuousness of it–like they didn’t even want to attempt fairness, like them saying they were fair was the same as actually being fair. They reported, for example, about Wilson’s 2013 commendation for busting a guy with weed and left out the other big event in his career that year. If anyone had dared tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth back in 2013, Michael Brown might be a college-educated, man of 28 today, living his best life.

Instead, he’s gone and the Times, right as the grand jury was sitting to consider charges against Wilson, conveniently ignored that in 2013–when Wilson was a couple of years out of the Jennings, Missouri, Police Department because every single officer had been fired over racism and corruption–arrested a man named Mike Arman, whose home he approached on some kind of made up violation about too many old cars.

Wilson, who’d walked into policing through the corrupt, racist Jennings door he never complained about, loudly approached Arman, who was on his porch and afraid of the loud cop who was barking orders. He exercised his constitutionally protected right and began filming Wilson–and not secretly. It got him arrested that day, charged with “failure to comply” and weirdly, with “breaching regulations on pit bull dogs.” 

The charges were dropped, and here’s the quick and dirty on why: Wilson lied. Arman got it on tape.

Call it hubris, white male supremacist privilege, police arrogance–whatever—Wilson, who knew he was being taped—still accused Arman of not only getting all up in his face with the cellphone camera, forcing the arrest, but threw in this: Arman’s pit bulls were threatening.

Except the video showed the former cop several feet away, yelling from down the garden pathway of the residence. 

Just like we know Mike Brown was 150 feet from Wilson’s police vehicle when he was killed, not 20 as Wilson said in sworn testimony, adding that he’d put two bullets in the teen, making him runaway and then–like anyone who’d been shot twice and who also unarmed would do–run back to the cop with the Sig Sauer, charge him even, leaving the courageous but hapless cop no choice but to but to fire more more shots at the unstoppable Mr. Brown who’d by then been closing in. After that, somehow, someway and in the presence of the community who gathered at 12:02 that afternoon to see what was happening, Mike Brown’s body magically and invisibly floated away so that his body laid 150 feet from Wilson’s vehicle, not 20.

Police Lie.

Forgive me. I couldn’t hold the plot twist.

Police lie. They lie regularly. And those multiple threatening pit bulls from 2013? They turned out to be singular. They turned out to be one waddling, chubby bulldog.

Not a great look for a superhero. Far better is the image of him standing down multiple snarling beasts protecting one really bad actor. It’s too hard to resist. So hard in fact that pound for pound, he used the same trope to describe the interaction that left Mike Brown dead on Aug. 9 the following year.

And in the way few would challenge the threat of  pit bulls or the character of the man who would have such beasts, fewer still would question the description of a Black teenager—particularly one who weighed nearly 300 pounds and was 6-foot-5’ —as anything but a threat charging almost unstoppably forward, as an honest assessment. Indeed, an entire industry had built on that characterization.

Which is why in Ferguson, Missouri, 10 years ago today, that kind of racism coupled with Darren’s and the PD’s, took the life of Michael Brown Jr. in a ruthless, unforgiving 90 quick seconds.

In my terrible grief

A confession. I’ve never said this before today. 

When my stepson Aundre was killed in another mean August, in another city not designed for Black people’s survival, I remember enduring the hateful comments of some. 

Aundre, who was never violent with anyone, not once, also sold drugs, an occupation he told his mother, who I lovingly always called my co-wife, my beloved Mercedes, was about all he could do to make enough money to live. It’s useless to debate that. At 18, he’d done nearly a year in a jail in the Bronx for possession of an eighth of weed. He saw his future, his fate, tied to that time he spent in a cage. 

We couldn’t shake him out of it though, we tried. We tried so hard. But Aundre, our Aundre, he got out of jail, I said once to Mercedes, but part of him never really came home. In Clinton’s America in 1999, when there was no coverage of prisons on the front pages of newspapers. No one culling of the stats–the U.S.’s 5% of the world population and 25% of the prison population, no New Jim Crow, and no place weed could be legally used recreationally except on white college campuses where the police never went making it de facto if not de juris, legal.

The world had changed its perspective a lot by 2015, the year Aundre was shot point-blank in the head by someone he thought was a friend. Even still, there were people who actually said to me, well he was in the game, so this was kind of coming.

In my terrible grief, I couldn’t respond then. Not out loud. Then and also now, I’ve mostly held it in tight. If I let all the grieving show, what else would there be to see? But it doesn’t mean that I thought but never said to anyone: Are you stupid? You think most drug selling is all Pacino and Scarface? Most were like Aundre: trying to make ends meet, no guns, no fights. 

I wanted to say think of the way we know white weed sellers are portrayed in movies and on TV–kind of silly, kind of mellow, kind of goofy. Just kind. And completely nonviolent. That was Aundre, but I knew there’d be no mass saying of his name. 

He wasn’t a good enough victim.

Which brings me, finally, to this horrible confession: Knowing the world wouldn’t see Aundre, I fought as hard as I could, wrote, counseled, protested for Mike Brown, they would see Tamir Rice, shot dead by a cop in under 60 seconds on a Cleveland playground just three months after Michael was killed. I looked selfless, I think. The emerging veteran organizer present to support the next generation. But honestly, though I don’t think I was fully conscious of it then, a big part of me did everything during that period because I hoped that in saying their names one day the world would say Aundre’s. It was selfish but I couldn’t stop it from coursing through me. 

Best I could do was not say it out loud, not crowd the good victim space up. Making the turn into this year, I’ve worked hard to expel that selfishness and worked, for better and surely for worse, at staying grounded on what I really want. One of the things on that not so long list, was to be using different notes, another kind of sax, to write about this life, this world 10 years on, about how much change we bled and sweated into place. Because we did. We shifted a narrative but still have to shift the bodies, our neighbors, our cousins, our girls from back in the day who snuck around with using our mothers’ lipstick in secret, sneaking a taste from our parents’ bars and the liquor cabinets, pretending scotch tasted good.

It seemed like it would happen in 2014 and happen fast the summer and fall that Ferguson rose up, called the world to rise up, called the world to hear us when we said hands up, don’t shoot! We’re unarmed civilians.

But most of all, then like now, I wanted everyone to be alive again. I wanted Tamir Rice to be alive. Laquan McDonald. Breonna Taylor. Rekia Boyd. I wanted them alive. I wanted George Floyd alive. I wanted Trayvon Martin back. I wanted Sonya Massey back. I wanted Erica Garner back and in the arms of her father. And Philando Castile and Alton Sterling and Sandra Bland and 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, killed by cops while she slept in her bed, back. 

I wanted my Aundre back. I wanted my daughter’s brother back. I wanted Mercedes’ baby back. I wanted it and wanted it, and I want it right this second.

Aug. 9, 2024

My mother was an elegant, courageous, clear-headed mid-western woman of unusual grace, accomplishment, talent and wisdom. She taught me to create a world of my own while never losing sight of the world that still existed. I don’t want to but I have to end this with the facts of this world in the hope that laid bare, we will continue to work tirelessly to conjure the world we imagine.

Armed white men are more likely to be taken alive than unarmed Black men. 

Dylan Roof even got the lunch of his choice–Burger King–after being arrested for slaughtering nine congregants who’d welcomed, unknowingly, a young Neo-Nazi into their sacred space, the historic church, Mother Emanuel in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015.

James Eagan Holmes set off tear gas to keep people disoriented and trapped inside an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater where he summarily shot and killed 12 people and injured a total of 70 in what was, in 2012, the deadliest shooting by a single gunman in the history of the state. But they made sure that despite all that ammo and tear gas, they took that 24-year-old white man alive. He’s still alive.

Before Michael Brown Jr. and after, Black people have been killed by police at more than twice the rate of white people. 

Since Michael Brown Jr. was killed 10 years ago today, at least 2,367 other Black people have been killed by police, which is like saying one person dead every other weekday and one on the weekend.

When I sat down to write this yesterday evening, I called my colleague and friend, Tory Russell, the lead organizer of the protests in Ferguson. A football coach, when he arrived on the scene that terrible August day after one message and another and another and then they never stopped, Michael Brown’s body had already been left splayed on the ground for at least three hours. 

“There was blood everywhere,” Tory said. He said another hour went by before they finally removed Mike’s body from the street where it laid on display “like a lynching,” Tory said. Just like that. We pause, hold the great awfulness of that truth before we say another word. What is there to say?  I ask him how he’s is holding up in the hours before the ninth.

You know, he tells me.

Crying and working. Crying and working.

SEE ALSO:

Sonya Massey’s Baby Cousin Terrill Is the 4-Year-Old Black Boy Killed By Illinois Cops In March

Police Brutality Video Shows Florida Cops Beat Black Teen, Put Knee On His Neck In Violent Arrest

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