From <em>Plessy</em> to Ferguson

Abstract

��� T he killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, and the callous and cruel ofWcial responses to it repeat what by now has come to be a familiar pattern of events. Like Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tanisha Anderson, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Amadou Diallo, and countless others, Michael Brown was an unarmed black person killed by a police ofWcer sworn to protect and serve the public. In each of these cases, authorities moved quickly to hide evidence and exonerate the killers. Media outlets rushed to blame the victim and smear his or her reputation. Protestors were dismissed as people playing the race card. We can be saddened or angered by this process, but we should not be surprised. In our society, white vanity is more highly valued than black humanity. Residential segregation orders urban geography. It promotes opportunity hoarding and asset accumulation for whites while conWning aggrieved communities of color to impoverished, underresourced, and criminogenic neighborhoods. This system subsidizes whites, offering them unfair gains and unjust enrichments while saddling communities of color with artiWcial, arbitrary, and irrational obstacles to asset accumulation. Yet whites view themselves as innocent and unaccountable for a system that is rigged in their behalf. They attribute the social skewing of opportunities and life chances along racial lines to the allegedly deWcient character and behavior of blacks. Neighborhoods created by white Xight become suffused with white fright, and that fear is used to justify the taking of black lives. Phobic fantasies of demonized monstrous black criminality stand at the center of the national political imaginary. They fuel a seemingly insatiable sadism ever in search of a story, relentlessly blaming and shaming people for their own oppression and dismissing the testimony of the aggrieved even before they speak. White ofWcers who kill black