buzzfeed | Over at the Prime Time Beauty & Barber Shop, a social hub in the
black part of town, folks see it differently. “They treat us like
criminals,” said barber Branden Turner, who’s worked at the shop for a
few years. They described officers routinely waiting for customers to
leave so they could give them traffic tickets, search for drugs, or ask
them for identification so they could run a background check.
“Everyone knows the statistics,” said Turner, referring to the now well-known figures showing a disproportionate amount of traffic stops and arrests for blacks.
“Ask anybody from the city,” he said, meaning St. Louis. “Don’t nobody
come in from the city because they know this is one of the most racist
places there is.”
In this city of about 21,000 people, the
national spotlight has forced residents to grapple with dueling
narratives of their relationship to each other and to their government.
It’s a tale of two cities that happen to exist in one town: Ferguson.
More largely, it’s a tale of two Americas, black and white, that seem to
exist in totally different realities and have sharply divergent views
on race.
Many black locals welcome the unflattering attention, hoping it might
lead to change in a city where whites are only 29% of the population
but five of the six city council members, six of the seven school board
members, and — as repeated ad nauseam this week — 50 of the 53 police
officers.
“We’re tired of being bullied,” said Jayson Ross, a 25-year-old native who has been a regular presence at the nightly protests.
Those
demonstrations weren’t just a reaction to the killing of 18-year-old
Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. They were also a
fiery response to years of grievances that were routinely ignored by
most of Ferguson’s white residents and by its predominantly white
government. It’s the same pent-up fury that sparked protests in small
towns made infamous by previous race-related controversies that went
national: Sanford, Fla.; Jena, La.; and Jasper, Texas, notable among
them.
Regardless of the geographic region, the community response
follows a predictable script: White residents almost always find
themselves surprised by the simmering discontent of their black
neighbors. And why wouldn’t they be? They usually live in a different
part of town, no longer segregated by law but by history, custom, and
sometimes policy. What’s more, the police and other arms of government
treat them with respect. Many white residents don’t think there’s much
racial discontent because they just don’t see it.
