[While I don’t
consistently cover current events in this space, I do try when I can to connect
the histories, stories, and issues on which I focus to our contemporary moment.
But sometimes it’s important to
flip that script, and to contextualize some of those contemporary
connections. So this week, I’ll do that with five ongoing American stories. I’d
love to hear your thoughts, on them and on any other current stories!]
On two reasons
why the ongoing conflict in Missouri is nothing new—and one why it is.
In the spring
and summer of 1917, white residents of East St. Louis, Illinois repeatedly
rampaged through the city’s African American communities, attacking citizens,
burning homes to the ground, and generally brutalizing and terrorizing the city’s
African American population. The massacres (euphemistically dubbed “race riots” in
the national media, mostly in order to deflect the blame onto the boogeyman
of African American “rioters”) were one of many
such events in the late 19th and early 20th centuries;
from Wilmington
(NC) in 1898 to Tulsa
(OK) in 1921, and many others in between and after, again and again African
American communities were brutalized and terrorized by white mobs. I would
argue that we can’t begin to understand the events unfolding in a different
East St. Louis (location of the troubled community of Ferguson, Missouri) until
and unless we better remember these repeated massacres.
Earlier this
fall, a tree
was planted outside the U.S. Capitol in long-overdue remembrance of Emmett
Till, the young African American boy from Chicago who was brutally lynched in Mississippi
in August, 1955. Only a few days later, yet another unarmed
African American child was shot and killed—this one, Tamir Rice, was
playing with a BB gun when he was shot and killed by police responding to a 911
call warning of a black “man” with a “gun” (it seems to me that both of those
terms need the scare quotes). It’s nearly impossible to keep track of how many
young African American men (mostly) have been killed in the last year or two;
most by police, although of course there are the Trayvon
Martins and Jordan
Davis’s in the mix as well. So when the African American community in and
around Ferguson responds with outrage and anger to the killing of unarmed
teen Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson, it’s important to
remember that they are also responding to this much broader, decades-old and
still entirely ongoing history of repeated such killings, in- and outside of
the “law.”
Yet while
Ferguson is thus deeply and thoroughly contextualized in longstanding American
histories, I would also argue that it has the opportunity to represent
something new: a site of profound communal conversation about and activism in
response to those histories. I wrote earlier this fall about the role that
social media has played in such conversations and activisms, and would
reiterate that point here. But I’m also thinking, for another example, about this
wonderful post by my friend and Guest
Poster Robert Greene II at the U.S. Intellectual History blog. On the
streets, on social media, and in the blogosphere, among many other
interconnected sites and spaces, events like those in Ferguson are being connected
and contextualized, linked by a wide and deep variety of voices to any number of
salient histories
and stories, issues and ideas. Do such connections and conversations have
the ability to change things? We’ll see—but the question itself illustrates
this new side to familiar histories.
Last current
story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other current events you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment