salon | “Is this performance art, at this time, about what it looks like to
be out of touch with one’s constituents?” MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry
asked a panel of guests on her Sunday program.
“They’re so out of
touch,” public radio host Marc Steiner responded. “I mean police
brutality and racist attacks against black citizens and people of color
are universal in this country. But these folks are so out of
touch, they don’t even know how to fake it…. The governor can’t do it.
None of them can do it.”
“They’ve never had to,” author Jelani
Cobb pointed out. And he’s right—as numerous people have pointed out
recently. Ferguson is supermajority black, but its police force is
overwhelmingly white, as is its city council. While some—most notably
the renowned MonkeyCage blog—have elucidated the structural forces at
work, producing very low black voter turnout in the local, non-partisan,
off-year elections (widespread “reforms” of the Progressive Era, during
which voter participation fell significantly), Cobb’s recent reporting for the New Yorker took a more critical angle.
First,
he took note of the role of felony Missouri’s felon-disfranchisement
laws. One local explained, “If you’re a student in one of the black
schools here and you get into a fight you’ll probably get arrested and
charged with assault. We have kids here who are barred from voting
before they’re even old enough to register.” Next, he pointed out that
blacks were actually losing ground in terms of political leadership:
Ferguson had, instead, recently seen two highly visible African-American public officials lose their jobs. Two weeks before Brown was shot, Charles Dooley, an African-American who has served as St. Louis County Executive for a decade, lost a bitter primary election to Steve Stenger, a white county councilman, in a race that, whatever the merits of the candidates, was seen as racially divisive. Stenger lobbed allegations of financial mismanagement and incompetence, and worse. Bob McCulloch, the county prosecutor appeared in an ad for Stenger, associating Dooley with corruption; McCulloch would also be responsible for determining whether to charge Darren Wilson. In December, the largely white Ferguson-Florissant school board fired Art McCoy, the superintendent, who is African-American.
As reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, McCoy’s firing was as shrouded in secrecy
as Michael Brown’s killing. Nor was McCulloch’s racial animosity in
electioneering anomalous either. Back in 2006, Missouri was ground zero in the GOP’s spurious voter fraud allegations which lay at the heart of the U.S. Attorneys firing scandal. Perhaps most notably,
just five days before the election, Bradley Schlozman, then interim
U.S. attorney in Kansas City, announced indictments against four
voter-registration workers—a move contradicting the DOJ’s own guidelines
that such actions “”must await the end of the election.” In short,
Republican politics in Missouri have not simply relied on passive racial
resentments, rather, they have actively stirred them up. Such behavior
only makes sense in a framework of racial isolation, and hostility.
With
all that in mind, it’s easy to follow Cobb’s continuing line of thought
on the “Melissa Harris-Perry Show,” as he said, “Being there, the
impression you get is that these people remind you of those southern
towns in the 1960s who had no idea how their actions looked on
television. The television was the thing that made segregation
untenable. Because the rest of the world could see and say, ‘This looks
barbaric.’”
“ I don’t think that the people here have any sense of
how this looks in the broader spectrum, and talking to people in the
community about that, and they say, ‘Well, they’ve never had to. If they
have control over the power system here, the structure here, who are
they accountable to?’ So they’ve never even had to go through the
pantomime of accountability before.”
