Michael Wenger is an adjunct professor of sociology and a senior fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a research institution that concentrates on race issues.
Michael Brown, the young black man shot and killed Aug. 9 in Ferguson, Mo., is yet another on the long list of unarmed black men – including two others in the past month and a half – who have suffered similar fates at the hands of law enforcement.
Since mid-July, we’ve seen the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island by a police officer’s chokehold and the fatal shooting of Ezell Ford by two Los Angeles Police Department officers. This country has a long history of such events, going back to slavery and the thousands of lynchings during the Jim Crow era.
Yet, amid the outrage over the Brown killing, we must not lose focus of the bigger picture. Since the founding of our nation, society has displayed a deeply entrenched belief in a racial hierarchy. This hierarchy assumes the superiority of white Americans and devalues the lives of non-white Americans.
Despite popular opinion, those racial beliefs have not been erased by the emancipation of enslaved people, by the Civil Rights Movement or by the election of a president with African ancestry. Until the hierarchy has been dismantled, we will continue to witness such killings.
This racial hierarchy manifests itself in both conscious and unconscious ways. Consciously, it caused the brutal system of slavery and the era of Jim Crow racism that followed emancipation, as well as the purposeful exclusion of African Americans from Social Security and the GI Bill. Additionally, the enactment of government policies, both written and unwritten, has institutionalized residential segregation and resulted in the mass incarceration of young men of color.
The mitigation of some of these conscious manifestations has not ended the embedded and often subconscious belief in a racial hierarchy. For example, research and experience clearly show that school discipline is significantly harsher for students of color, hiring practices still substantially favor white men and “shooter bias” severely endangers black people.
Scholars have written extensively in recent years about implicit racial bias and the significant role it plays in these outcomes. Further, the Implicit Association Test, available online, demonstrates that even anti-racist activists can carry subconscious racial biases that affect their behaviors.
These biases are exacerbated by a range of institutional policies and practices: The disproportionate picturing on television newscasts of black people arrested for crimes compared to white people arrested for similar crimes, the continued disregard in American history and literature curricula for the contributions of non-whites to the building of this country and racial profiling that leads to the disproportionate engagement of black people with the criminal justice system.
Despite these setbacks, we have clearly made progress over the past 50 years – though the loved ones of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Ezell Ford, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Jonathan Farrell, Jordan Davis, Renisha McBride, Sean Bell and countless other victims might disagree.
Until we become fully aware of and deeply committed to undoing the embedded belief in a racial hierarchy that infects us all, there inevitably will be more Michael Browns.
