See the author's contribution to Society & Space here: Theorizing Violence and the Dialectics of Landscape Memorialization: A Case Study of Greensboro, North Carolina

As we type these words Ferguson, Missouri is burning. Almost a month after the local Ferguson Police Department killed Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, members of the Ferguson community demand justice.  While the situation in Ferguson is complex, we nonetheless want to draw attention to the ways the violent death of Michael Brown and the subsequent community uprising is indicative of the work that violence accomplishes within our present neoliberal and racialized condition in the United States.  More specifically we highlight how the broader media focus on the “rioting” and “looting” in the aftermath of the police shooting deflects attention from the actually existing structures of violence that permit such killings.  This deflection is indicative of the ongoing legacies of traditional (mis)understandings of violence.

Ferguson Day 6, Photo 44, taken by Loavesofbread and uploaded to commons.wikimedia.org.

Violence has a geography and for this reason, geography lies at the center of discussions of violence (Tyner and Inwood, 2014; Blomley, 2003). Within the United States a myriad of taken for granted assumptions about identity, place, power, and memory undergird the nation’s psyche.  These normative interpretations intersect with a particular kind of geographic formulation that places persons of color in general, but black men most specifically, at the center of the violent structures of the nation. (This has led prominent anti-racist activists to refer not the United States of America, but the United States of AmeriKKKa.) This is central to understanding the way the supposed “randomness” and “unfortunate circumstances” of Michael Brown’s death are neither random nor a mere circumstance.  Take for instance the report from the Malcolm X Grassroots Foundation (2012) that notes that every 28 hours police, security guards, and vigilantes take a black life in the US. This reality is not only the result of the particular kind of geographic configuration that had taken root in the United States of America, but is the perpetuation of a four-hundred plus year legacy that hasdevalued and denaturalized black life.

“Ferguson, Day 4, Photo 42” by Loavesofbread

Tragically, and especially for the residents of Ferguson, the context surrounding the murder of Brown captures this reality perfectly.  The roots of Ferguson’s development lie with the burgeoning industrialization that occurred during World War II as thousands of African Americans moved to St. Louis to find work in the manufacturing plants that pumped out bombs, bullets and tanks during the war.  As these new residents moved in, the more established white residents moved out to bedroom communities that surrounded the area.  Later, as the overt vestiges of segregation began to fall, and as African Americans moved out to the suburbs, whites once again moved, but this time to communities farther on the periphery. Together with deindustrialization and the movement of manufacturing jobs overseas, communities such as Ferguson were left to pick up the pieces of hyper-segregated communities and a concomitant lack of economic opportunities.

According to the 2010 US Census Bureau, the St. Louis metropolitan area is one of the most segregated places in the United States (Logan and Stults, 2011).  Coupled with an urban geography where zoning laws continue to prevent low-income families from moving to “job-rich parts of the region,” St. Louis also has some of the highest concentrations of poverty in the nation (Drier and Swanstrom, 2014).  Additionally, as Ferguson’s tax base has shrunk, the city has increasingly turned to court costs to make up the difference.  According to the ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis public defender group, Ferguson collected $2.6 million in court costs and fines in FY 2013-2014.  This represents their second-biggest source of income for the city. When one includes the added weight of segregated services (the city government is almost wholly white), we are left to wonder how questions of economics, race, and militarism and the fundamental links with structural violence, poverty, and social difference remain under scrutinized (Loyd, 2014).  For rarely if ever do any of these broader structures of violence register on the politically-infused, media-driven agenda. A legacy of racism, prejudice, intolerance, and discrimination pales in comparison to the vivid video footage of rampaging ‘Blacks’ or—in the now-infamous words of a local Ferguson police officer—‘animals’.

But this of course is exactly the reality that traditional and largely unquestioned understandings of violence accomplishes. By disaggregating the world into discrete and unrelated entities, common-sense understandings and metrics of violence—those which are immediately amenable to statistical analysis and GIS—tend to maintain that violence has some kind of essential equality that transcends time and space and has some kind of natural existence.  Violence in this sense appears to be a simple concept: “it is the act of doing harm, injury, or desecration through physical force” (Mitchell, 1996: 156).  This leaves the broader social and spatial structures which produce violence in the first place largely free from examination.  Instead, there is a focus on the actions of individuals (the police officer who took the life, Michael Brown and his ‘lawless’ ways) rather than on the society which gave rise to the violence in the first place.  Potentially most problematically, these distinctions create a dichotomy in which the direct violence of Michael Brown’s death can be attributed to the actions of an individual police officer, whereas the structural violence of an underserved community is not only separated from the death of Brown, but is seen to be the result of processes and structures which deny the agency of those involved, as though the choices which produced Ferguson in the first place are somehow inconsequential to the events themselves.  This not only perpetuates broader misunderstandings of violence, but is patently misleading.

Grave of the Communist Workers Party Five who were gunned down by Ku Klux Klan and Nazis on 3 November 1979 (see also http://www.greensborotrc.org/). Despite popular rhetoric to the contrary, the US has a long history of racial and class violence. The way we remember those struggles has political ramifications for contemporary struggles around justice. Photo: Joshua Inwood.

This prompts us to ask a fundamental question that has remained largely outside of the broader discussion about Ferguson and the legacy of racism which it represents. When the blood has been cleansed from the streets of Ferguson, and the mobile news-vans have relocated to the next sensationalistic story, how will the ‘violence’ of Brown’s death be remembered?  We ‘know’ that violence occurred, and because of that violence, Ferguson will join the litany of other ‘landscapes of racialized violence’: Watts, Rosewood, Greensboro, Tulsa….

But the act of remembrance is political, and so too is the contestation over the meaning of violence.  Commemoration has never been simply the stale celebration of the past, but it is part of the process of giving voice to (or silencing) the histories of certain social groups over others.  Important to the structures of American violence has been the way that painful memories of past trauma and discrimination are so easily forgotten along with social and spatial processes that created them, thus robbing us of the opportunity to articulate a socially just future (Alderman and Inwood, 2013).  Ongoing marches, teach-ins, and social media activism are active in their refusal to forget Michael Brown’s legacy and their unwillingness to simply accept simplistic portrayals of the violence in Ferguson.

In closing, as we analyze the Ferguson case in the future, it is not sufficient to say simply that ‘violence’ happened or that Michael Brown was killed; rather, it is necessary to broaden our empirical analysis of the violence to consider how and why certain potential sites or even whole communities are (or are not) realized as sites of memorialization.  In other words, how we come to remember Ferguson will directly impact whether institutional amnesia about the city’s legacy of structural violence will be maintained or challenged.  Will the concrete shooting of Brown remain as an isolated event? Conversely, will it be remembered as unfolding from racist and classist practices that envelop Ferguson? In this respect, if we are unwilling to question the structures of violence at work in and through Ferguson, the case of Michael Brown runs the great risk of being the site of a compounded atrocity in terms of an unrealized and unjust moment of memorialization.  The “real violence” of Ferguson does not come from the black community, but from the media and government leaders who will refuse to come to terms with and publicly name the violent social and economic inequalities that are regularly inflicted upon black life and which makes the killing of a young black man look so natural in America. 

References

Alderman DH, JFJ Inwood (2013) Landscapes of memory and socially justice futures. In: N Johnson, R Schein, J Winders (eds) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography. West Sussex: Wiley, pp 186-197.

Blomley N (2003) Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, The Survey, and the Grid. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93: 121-141.

Dreier P and T Swanstrom (2014) Suburban Ghettos Like Ferguson are Ticking Time Bombs. Progressive America Rising, http://www.progressivesforobama.net/?p=477.

Logan J and B Stults (2011) The Persistence of Segregation in the Metropolis: New Findings From the 2010 Census. Census Brief Prepared for Project US 2010. Available at: http://www.s4.brown.edu/us2010/Data/Report/report2.pdf.

Loyd J (2014)  Health Rights are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963–1978. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (2012) Every 36 Hours: Report on Extrajudicial Killing of Black People. Available at: http://mxgm.org/report-on-the-extrajudicial-killings-of-120-black-people/.

Mitchell D (1996) Political Violence, Order, and the Legal Construction of Public Space: Power and the Public Forum Doctrine. Urban Geography 17: 152-178.

Tyner JA, JFJ Inwood, and DH Alderman (forthcoming) Theorizing violence and the dialectics of landscape memorialization: a case study of Greensboro, North Carolina. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

Tyner JA and JFJ Inwood (2014) Violence as Fetish: Geography, Marxism and Dialectics. Progress in Human Geography.

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