When I first heard about Mike Brown’s death in August of 2014, I can’t say that I had too many strong emotions. Hearing about Mike Brown being killed was like hearing about the other thousands of other black males I’ve heard about or seen gunned down in Chicago. “Niggas die everyday” perfectly described my sentiments about the death of black men at the hands of law enforcement, other black men, or whoever, and in hindsight it feels absolutely abysmal to think that I so shallowly valued the lives of humans that look like me and so many people that I loved. Obviously there were many different reasons for my almost callous indifference to black lives, nonetheless the product remains the same. I saw on social media that people were upset and, again, I cynically thought that this would fade away like all other uproars and America would go back to embracing the status quo – obviously I was wrong…-ish.
I sat at home and watched as Ferguson gathered more and more national attention, and for some reason I just couldn’t shake my cynicism. I’d known plenty of people that had been shot or at a bare minimum harassed by the police, and for the life of me I couldn’t understand why this guy’s murder drew so much ire – then it hit me. (white) America wasn’t aghast that Mike Brown’s death, America was aghast that the State would respond so severely to protests. On one hand I was annoyed at that my pessimism was slightly correct, but I was even angrier that there were assault riffles being pointed at black people to protect “business interests.” I don’t know what happened to me, but something changed between August 13, 2014 and August 20, 2014. Maybe I realized that I’d been internalizing so much trauma and systemic racism that I didn’t value black lives, maybe I had some sort of savior complex and thought that I had to go down and help save the day, maybe I just wanted to meet Anderson Cooper (which I did), I knew that I had to get involved somehow. Luckily for me, I went to college about five miles due south of where Mike Brown was killed and I was VP of my college’s Association of Black Students (ABS).
The Executive Board ended up deciding to take a backseat role in Ferguson for a number of reasons, but I still wanted to be involved. I ended up convincing a friend of mine to give me a ride up to join the protests in Ferguson (I knew at a bare minimum I use my loud voice to lead a chant), and protest is what people were doing. There had to be between 500-1000 people marching up and down a 6 block street (Ferguson isn’t that big) with an additional 200 people there for support, 50 journalists, and 150 armed officers. I think most people forget that Mike Brown’s murder and subsequent protests isn’t what caused international eyes to this small suburb in Missouri, it was the fact there were tanks and untrained policemen in military style gear on American streets. The nation born after Vietnam had never seen anything quite like it, and neither did I. I was president of Chicago’s NAACP Youth Chapter, and a contributor to a few Occupy protests in high school, but I’ve never seen such a large and intentionally domineering display for force by the State in my life. I’d never seen an assault riffle until one was pointed at me that day. I’d never seen a tank/mechanized vehicle until one was in my way. I’d never experienced tear gas until these protests. That day and subsequent days in August 2013 made me reanalyze who and what I thought I was in America.
Prior to that day when I saw what America was willing to do to us, I suppose I was at in some dualistic space where I thought that I was both resigned to the mercy of institutionalized racism while concurrently able to pull myself up through my accomplishments. This isn’t to say that I ascribed to respectability politics nor should this state that I hadn’t seen or experienced numerous acts of state inflected violence against black people, but I think that day in Ferguson tied it all together for me. I was ready to fight for my people, even if it meant my life and I saw the same fire in many of my peers over the coming months. America and especially black America changed by Mike Brown’s death, and I was as well.
