if a riot is the voice of the unheard, a beheading is __________________?

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.”