Ferguson Burning: Race and the Law in America

In this photo from the AP, Lesley McSpadden, the mother of slain 18 year-old Michael Brown, drops rose petals at the scene where her son was killed by a police officer. This is only the latest example of  racial tensions have always run deep when it comes to the law in America.

In this photo from the AP, Lesley McSpadden, the mother of slain 18 year-old Michael Brown, drops rose petals at the scene where her son was killed by a police officer. This is only the latest example of racial tensions have always run deep when it comes to the law in America.

To say that the application of the law in America is highly racialized is an understatement. In the eyes of many Americans, blackness is the unofficial color of criminality, and black men have long been stereotyped as a criminal class epitomized today by the image of what sociologist Kelly Welch calls the “young Black male as a violent and menacing street thug” that’s gonna come and kill whitey!! Indeed, the interconnection between race and crime in American culture is so historically ingrained — so culturally potent — that every time white police officers shoot a black man, the resulting fallout threatens to unleash a powder keg of racial anxieties that literally stretch back to the colonial era.

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(Still) Fear of a Black Planet

Racial Propaganda Cartoon, Demonstrating White Fear of "Negro Rule," North Carolina, 1900.

Racial Propaganda Cartoon, Demonstrating White Fear of “Negro Rule,” North Carolina, 1900.

In American history, everything is about race. Even when an issue has nothing to do with race, Americans of certain stripes will find a way to make it about race. A case in point is the August 16, 2013 murder of Australian national Christopher Lane by three teenagers in Duncan, Oklahoma. An outraged Australian press seized on the incident to criticize the widespread availability of guns in the United States, which allegedly resulted in a cold-blooded slaying by three kids who were “bored and didn’t have anything to do.” Meanwhile, as Adam Serwer observes, the various American right-wing media propaganda outlets, who specialize in stoking a completely fabricated persecution complex among the country’s privileged, white, Ralph Kramden clones seized on Australian reports that erroneously identified the three suspects as black to claim that Lane was gunned down by blacks specifically because he was white.

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