“We live in a post-racial society,” declared a triumphant Obama soon after winning the elections that handed him over the keys to the White House. Very few, and pretty much unheard, were the dissenting voices at the time (one of the most lucid, that of Mumia Abu Jamal, was broadcasted from death row...). Six years later and we can safely assume that no such pronouncement will be uttered any time soon by the president or any other American official for that matter. The killing of Michael Brown at the hands of Darren Wilson has once again brought to the fore the tragic relevance of racism in contemporary America.

The death of black youths at the hands of white policemen is a tragic recurrence in American society, it is by no means a new phenomenon, far from it. Relations between black communities and the local police forces have always been rather violent and oppressive, and things have not changed under the Obama administration. Not only that, but the same people that have taken to the streets these past weeks following the murder of Michael Brown are those who had voted and campaigned for Barack Obama. To look at how African-American activists have dealt with police oppression at the time of the civil rights movement and after might help put the current situation in context as well as focusing on its revealing peculiarities.

As it has been noted elsewhere and on multiple occasions, the Ferguson police is 95 percent white in a town of 25,000 people where 60 percent of them are black. Among Martin Luther King's many battles was always the one in favor of having more black recruits joining the police following the assumption that the law (which the police supposedly defends and implements regardless of race, gender, class and creed) was fundamentally “just.”

More radical forms of black activism that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement questioned the very foundations of the society they were fighting against. The Black Panthers (a Marxist and not a black nationalist organization) argued that the police was just the armed wing of a racist state and that filling its ranks with people of color wouldn't have changed the repressive and racist nature of the authorities they emanated from.

The difference between the moderate positions of the civil rights movement and those of the Black Panthers is not in the role of the police, which both of them regard as racially biased, but in the nature of the law. For Martin Luther King the law was an intrinsically just and righteous institution that needed to include more blacks, for the Panthers the law was nothing but the racist emanation of a repressive and exploitative government (against which one should rebel).

The decision of a Grand Jury not to indict Darren Wilson in fact is not the blatant demonstration of how deeply racist American society continues to be but it is also symptomatic of its increasing domestic militarization. It is not so much the law that needs to be protected and implemented but order. In spite of the racially charged relationship between the police and the black community, order seems to be the government priority. If the police was officially condemned for its racial bias, hence its immunity put into question, order could be much harder to maintain.

The powers responsible for the absolution of police brutality seem to be more concerned about social order than they are about the law, and the police acts accordingly; above the law. When police forces and their actions no longer correspond to the rule of law, democracy is no longer functioning or even existing. What is at stake in Ferguson is not only the racial relations of contemporary American society but also the relation between democracy and order. Is the latter above the former? Is the police to be defended and treated differently from ordinary citizens so that order can prevail?

The response of tens of thousands of young Americans first to the Ferguson killing and later to the death of Eric Garner point to a growing awareness that elected leaders, despite their ostensible affiliations, are fundamentally united in maintaining the status quo. Institutional politics, the protesters seem to understand, cannot and will not be the answer to the endless repression that black communities keep facing and that an impoverished middle class is likely to start feeling too. Black youths have been killed in the past too but only now has a significant and brave portion of American society reacted to a situation they understand to be well beyond the realm of racial relations. Anyone taking to the streets of America today knows for a fact that freedom is just an empty word far removed from the reality they are facing. A reality that for all its tragedy has for once united black and white youths, aware that the solution to their problems will not come from the White House this time.

The writer is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/giovannivimercati.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.

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