Ferguson, Gaza, Iraq. An outline on the official narrative in “post-racial” America

by CEDRIC J. ROBINSON and ELIZABETH P. ROBINSON

The killing in Ferguson, Missouri of Michael Brown by a policeman is an ordinary event in the United States.  On average over the past seven years, at least two Black men are killed every week by the police.  This analysis is based on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's database which itself is an incomplete compilation of reports to that agency (for example the whole of Florida is absent). The actual number of such killings is certainly higher. Since the death of the unarmed Brown can hardly be taken as exceptional, what accounts for the extraordinary attention it continues to garner from the national and international media?

Public outrage is one factor; the obscene display of a militarized police force, and the official refusals to reveal the circumstances were others.  But none of these was unprecedented.  More significant were the weeks before the Ferguson events when the same media publicized the official Israeli rationalizations for the horrific civilian deaths in Gaza.  The Israeli State's stagecraft was transparent from the early days when CNN's Wolf Blitzer was transferred to Tel Aviv days before the ground invasion of Gaza was launched.  Shadowing the Israeli public relations office, Blitzer and his colleagues from the other cable news organizations and networks leapt from one justification to another as the pictures and video from Gaza undermined the official narratives.  First it was the three murdered Israeli teenagers; then it was the "rockets".  And as the collective punishment against the innocents mounted, it became the tunnels, then the annihilation of Hamas, and eventually Hamas's alleged rejection of cease-fires. But another narrative was germinating from the attacks on UN refugee centers based in schools, the destruction of mosques and hospitals, and the disproportion of the bodies of women and children to militants. Anti-war demonstrations were organized all over the world while the US corporate media dutifully reported what the White House, the Congress, and the State Department fed them.  Those US government entities were simply ventriloquizing the Israeli State’s claim of a  "right to defend itself." 

Palestinians had no such entitlement and even their right to survive was trumped by tanks, drones, fighter planes, naval bombardments, and helicopters. The very notions of an Israeli occupation and blockade, though illegal in international law, were absent from their narratives.  The Gazan tunnels were reduced to conduits for smuggling Gaza fighters into Israel with no mention of the closure of all borders including by sea by the Israeli government and its Egyptian allies.  That the only means of bringing goods necessary for human survival was via those tunnels was never entertained. And then there were the casualties; the vastly greater numbers of civilians, of women, children, the elderly were minimized or covered with the fig leaf of Israeli unsupported claims of Hamas’s use of 'human shields'. In the midst of these constructions, it is not surprising that the virtual gaming world saw the emergence of games entitled 'Bomb Gaza' or 'Whack a Hamas'.

For weeks the images coming from Gaza exposed the lie of Israeli ‘defensive’ actions. And the official numbers coming from the United Nations further undermined the constructions of the US and Israeli states and their corporate stenographers: 2104 Gazans killed, 1462 civilians, 495 of them children; homes of over 100,000 people destroyed. These realities along with courageous, impassioned condemnations from people like Henry Siegman (former director of the American Jewish Congress) and counter narratives from independent media made the official narratives untenable.

The first attempt to retrieve some semblance of concern for human life in the American Administration and within the councils of its media sycophants was the plight of the Yazidis in Iraq.  That venture faltered on the shoals of a warmongering unpalatable to the vast majority of the American public and the transparent idiocy of US Middle East policy.  The appearance of concern for the Yazidis was too sudden, too obviously an attempt to rationalize a new military adventure.  Though the threat of genocide had been mounting for some time, too little time had been set aside to prepare the American public for another Iraqi intervention.  And the toll of similar precipitous actions was picking up.  Under two successive American presidents, military operations had brought indescribable devastation to Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.  It was in this context that the outrage about the killing of Michael Brown began bubbling up from the social media.

The Ferguson story incited a more heroic and noble moment of American journalism, the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s and 1970s.  Here was a familiar, manageable and seductive narrative which blew away all the ambiguities and contradictions which bedeviled contemporary America. In the past, racial oppression had been overt, publicly paraded and advocated in schools, housing, employment, health services, electoral politics, and every other facet of American life.  Now, it is submerged in a "post racial" nation where reversing the freedom movement's achievements is masqueraded in race projects like the war on drugs which disproportionally impact communities of color.  Contemporary reporters adhere to the frame of reactionary politics, solemnly pronouncing the most absurd claims.  Once you have feasted on WMDs in Iraq, it is no stretch really to seriously entertain the notion that the immigrant children from Central America are a terrorist threat.

Ferguson is about poverty and the lengths to which the State and its local tributaries have gone to control the poor.  Militarization of the police (some $9 billion of Pentagon-originated equipment in the past 20 years) and mass surveillance (e.g "stop and frisk" programs) are just two kinds of evidence.  Inequality is increasing, consequently more severe policing is required and when reporters naively interfere (as some did in Ferguson) they will be harassed.

A recent Wall Street Journal investigation indicated that a quarter of a billion people had been arrested in the US in the past 20 years and 77.7 million individuals currently occupy the FBI criminal data base.  To be sure, black and brown people are most frequently targeted, but race and racism are merely covers for class.  As the country continues to become more divided economically with the wealthiest 1% controlling more than a third of the wealth, mass surveillance and punishment infect the whole social organism.