Unrest continues in Ferguson, Missouri, and now the state's governor has called out the National Guard to allegedly regain calm in the strife ridden city. Meanwhile, autopsy reports indicate that the unarmed 18 year old whose death has triggered the unrest was shot 6 times. The situation has prompted one writer to describe the events in Ferguson as a race war where majority black communities are governed by anti-black white minorities. The circumstances are not unique to Ferguson, although events there are causing focus on the phenomenon. Here are highlights from The Daily Beast:
As we watch Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson bumble his way through press conferences, let’s take a couple steps back and think about how this two-thirds African American town has retained such a nearly complete all-white power structure. It is partly, as Slate noted, a question of voting power, as whites are more entrenched and vote in greater numbers. But there’s a larger story here about race in America that involves the transformation of inner-ring suburbs over the last 30 years, and the response to that transformation, which have combined to create tensions that often rage in the suburban areas that surround our major cities. These tensions are almost wholly about race. Even more specifically, they are often about criminal justice, in ways that we may see play out in St. Louis County when the day arrives that Officer Darren Wilson goes on trial.
This story begins with white flight, which is well known—as blacks moved up to cities in the North from farms in the South at an astonishing rate in the 1950s and 60s, they moved into inner-city neighborhoods, and the whites moved out. But then, in the 1980s, blacks, along with Hispanics and Asians, started moving out into the ’burbs, too. Affirmative action and public-sector unionization (say what you will about them!) lifted millions of African Americas into the middle class, and they could now afford a car and a garage to put it in.
The “typical white” today lives in a neighborhood that is 75 percent white (that figure was 88 percent 30 years ago). The “typical black” lives in a neighborhood that’s 45 percent black, 35 percent white, 15 percent Hispanic, and 4 percent Asian. But segregation scores in many big cities remain high.
[E]ven as black people pushed their way out into the suburbs, they typically haven’t done so in large enough numbers to gain real political power. This means that while the political power in many cities is in black hands today, whites still tend to run things in the counties within which those cities rest. Thus, one sub-story of the last 20 or so years in America has been a quiet but constant power struggle between municipal and county governments over who has what authority.
Now let’s get to the matter at hand in Ferguson: criminal justice. The specific issue is this that juries in the United States are drawn from county-wide population pools. This means, as the criminologist William Stuntz has observed, that people from large counties with exurbs and farms are often sitting in judgment of urban kids. Stuntz was a conservative, but an apostate who came to believe that the American criminal-justice system was pretty much hopelessly racist.
. . . . black kids on trial were far less likely to get a jury that had any understanding of what their lives were like.So let’s flip that in this case. Will a St. Louis County jury be likely to look sympathetically upon Michael Brown? Quite unlike the two-thirds black Ferguson, the county is 70 percent white. . . . . if William Stuntz were still alive, I have a sense of which outcome he’d be predicting.
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