The Sunday Times: America must mend its marriage before thoughts turn to divorce

November 22, 2015
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Journalism
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Robert Cohen, St. Louis Post-Dispatch/AP

A quick way of assessing the emotional dysfunction of a family is seeing how often its members resort to “blamestorming”. The term (an American invention) refers to meetings at which everyone complains while offloading all responsibility on to someone else. The US is in the middle of a giant blamestorm right now over race, crime and policing.

Depending on which side you’re on, the police are either wilfully murdering black males or are the victims of social persecution. Meanwhile, after reaching historic lows, the crime rate is increasing again: murders are up 19% in Chicago, 33% in New Orleans, 56% in Baltimore and 60% in St Louis over the past year.

Some experts say the two issues are linked, calling the phenomenon the “Ferguson effect”, after the uproar in Ferguson, Missouri, following the fatal police shooting last year of an African-American man named Michael Brown. Continue reading…

The Sunday Times: The friction making Baltimore burn is not race but class

May 3, 2015
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Journalism
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Photo: Skitter Photo

The riots in Ferguson, Missouri, last year were provoked by racism. No rational person could argue otherwise after a black man was shot dead by a white police officer. The facts speak for themselves. This small suburb adjacent to the port city of St Louis has only 21,000 residents, two-‐thirds of whom are black. Yet its officials are almost without exception white — from the 94% white police force to the white mayor, the white police chief and almost all-‐white city council.

In Ferguson’s case, at least, one answer to the institutional imbalance is relatively easy to see: encourage more people to vote in local elections and they will have more say in the outcome. A mere 6% of black voters took part in the 2013 local elections. It stands to reason, if more people within the community are involved in its decision-making processes there is a greater chance that the right kind of change will happen from within.

The Sunday Times: Ferguson is burning as Mississippi did. In 50 years we haven’t learnt

November 30, 2014
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Journalism
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Photo: Katleen Vanacker

The slaughter of innocents cries out for justice. That is precisely what happened on Monday, when a terrible race crime finally received closure. Although the murder must never be forgotten, Americans can now feel some satisfaction that the proper recognition has taken place. As President Barack Obama said: “We must continue to fight for the ideals of equality and justice for which they gave their lives.”

No, I have not lost my mind. All this did happen. But, as you may have guessed, I am not referring to the announcement in Ferguson, Missouri, that no charges would be brought against the white policeman who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager. I’m talking about an event that took place 50 years ago in Neshoba County, Mississippi, when three civil rights workers — two white and one black, named Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney — were killed by the Ku Klux Klan. At the White House the three men were posthumously given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in America.

The reason I’m linking Ferguson with Mississippi Burning (as the event is known) is not the piquancy of having the two events on the same day — although it cannot be ignored — but that there is a clarity that comes with historical perspective.