Introduction
2020; Wiley; Volume: 47; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/amet.12884
ISSN1548-1425
Autores Tópico(s)Public Spaces through Art
ResumoProtesters as pallbearers carry the Mirror Casket in the Funeral Procession of Justice in front of the Ferguson policestation in the wake of the fatal police shooting of unarmed teenager Mike Brown Jr., Ferguson, Missouri, October10, 2014. The casket was acquired by the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) aspart of its history collection. (Zun Lee) Mirror Casket marks this contemporary moment, when the state has finally been compelled to acknowledge the link between its repressive apparatuses and racism. Smartphones and body cameras have become the looking glass compelling the recognition that black lives matter. And Mirror Casket demands more powerful and far-reaching forms of justice. We will have to reimagine policing and punishment and ultimately will have to remake our democracy. Protesters as pallbearers carry the Mirror Casket in the Funeral Procession of Justice in front of the Ferguson police station in the wake of the fatal police shooting of unarmed teenager Mike Brown Jr., Ferguson, Missouri, October 10, 2014. The casket was acquired by the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) as part of its history collection. (Zun Lee) We begin this AE forum on Black death and liberation by asking you to look at Mirror Casket.1 A collective of seven St. Louis "creatives" turned artist-activists (or "artivists") created the casket in the aftermath of the fatal police shooting of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown Jr. on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. The casket was featured in the Funeral Procession of Justice, a public event during the Ferguson October protests that called for reflection and empathy after a memorial to Brown was destroyed in a "mysterious" fire (Vaugh 2014). The artivists covered the casket in mirror shards to challenge "viewers to look within and see their reflections as both whole and shattered, as both solution and problem, as both victim and aggressor."2 Carried on the shoulders of protester-pallbearers from the Canfield Green apartments (where Brown was killed) to the Ferguson police station, the mirrored casket caught the (distorted) faces of residents, activists, artists, a diverse array of protesters and bystanders, and police officers. Drummers lead a protest line after former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley is acquitted of first-degree murder in the December 2011 shooting of Anthony Lamar Smith, St. Louis, September 16, 2017. (Eric Pan) This casket reminds us of another famous coffin—the glass-topped casket displaying 14-year-old Emmett Till's gruesomely disfigured and bloated body. In 1955, two white men bludgeoned and shot Till in the head for allegedly flirting with a white woman; they threw his body in the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi with a heavy cotton gin fan tied to his neck with wire.3 In displaying Emmett's body, Till's mother, Mamie, wanted the country to see the violence of anti-Blackness and white "justice." Her decision to share her grief and despair would shape history. Till's murder became a catalyst for the civil rights movement. Fifty-nine years later, Michael Brown's dead body, lying for over four hours on the subdivision street in near 100-degree heat and humidity, became the rallying call for another phase in the Black liberation movement. By the time this forum reaches the public, it will have been six years since Brown's killing. It will come out in the midst of the deadly summer of 2020, in which two global pandemics violently converged on Black bodies and communities—anti-Black policing and Covid-19. Black death by asphyxiation will be the image seared into our memories of another torrid summer of Black death but also the continuing struggle for Black Lives. We were collective witnesses to George Floyd taking his final breath as Officer Derek Chauvin nonchalantly drove his knee into Floyd's neck for almost nine minutes on a street in Minneapolis. Chauvin's arrogant indifference and assumed white impunity as Floyd gasped "I can't breathe" (re)ignited protests in cities across the world. That hauntingly familiar plea, "I can't breathe," pulled into that mass televised frame other struggles for breath—Eric Garner's, obviously, but also the disproportionate assault of Covid-19 on Black communities. These are the communities of low-wage "essential workers" and caregivers, toxic dumping, and air pollution, long histories of economic and infrastructural disinvestment, as well as overzealous, deadly white policing and surveillance. For many St. Louis activists, the 2020 protests were the resurgence of the 2014 Ferguson uprising. The uprising here had not ended after the global media left, but merely quieted with the turn to the homework of reflection, transformation, and building and maintaining lives and lifeways changed by more than 400 days of protests—the longest sustained resistance in the United States, longer than the Montgomery bus boycott of the 1950s (Boyles 2019, 154; Franks 2018). Ferguson had unexpectedly become ground zero for contemporary Black resistance in 2014. Many of the organizing strategies, direct actions, grassroots abolition and reparations platforms, and tracking systems of killings by police in the United States that we see today were birthed, refined, and debated here. The #Ferguson social media movement brought those liberation efforts to similarly minded communities globally (Bonilla and Rosa 2015). As this forum reflects on @Ferguson, we hope to shed light on the ongoing protests for Black Lives and liberation from centuries of white supremacy and "the alibis in which it has been cloaked," alibis that have "been built into the material fabric of daily life" in St. Louis (W. Johnson 2020, 10). Michael Brown Sr. places roses along Canfield Drive before the start of a moment of silence on the third anniversary of the death of his son Mike Brown, Ferguson, August 9, 2017. (Carolina Hidalgo / St. Louis Public Radio) We—forum editors Shanti Parikh and Jong Bum Kwon—joined the Ferguson protests, direct actions, and memorials, as well as the protests that have taken place after subsequent acts of racialized policing and violence. The months of street protests and demonstrations were met with openly racist condemnations of Black youth, as well as brutality and military-style tactics on the part of the police, tactics deemed excessive, discriminatory, arbitrary, and unconstitutional (IACHR 2018, 72–75; Reilly 2015). We joined these actions not as ethnographers or leaders but as outraged residents (or "observant participants") inspired by the bold leadership and determination of the younger generation's fight for justice. In our various roles as educators and practitioners, as parents and board members, we have also participated in and observed the many efforts to heal, to come together as a region, to motivate police and criminal justice reform, to rectify centuries of racial inequity, and to celebrate Black life and brilliance. Like many in the region, we have been frustrated and angered by the slow and fitful process that followed the uprising and the Department of Justice's investigation of the Ferguson police department, which found that the department's practices and those of the municipal courts "both reflect and exacerbate existing racial bias" (DOJ 2015a, 2). We have tired of the countless excuses, empty gestures, and willful denials, of the victim blaming, of liberal pacifications that "change is slow," and of patronizing advice to "act respectably." We have grown weary of the many public conversations, trainings, and reports on "racial (in)equity" that avoid publicly naming white supremacy and anti-Blackness, as if this would offend too many.4 In a Pulitzer Prize–winning photo, Edward Crawford throws a tear gas canister away from protesters while holding a bag of chips, Ferguson, August 13, 2014. (Robert Cohen / St. Louis Post-Dispatch / Polaris) We've been similarly disheartened by how the mainstream media dealt with Brown's killing and the uprising. The global media and photojournalists left as soon as the spectacle of protest and riot police waned, and the reporting of protests often repeated age-old racial tropes of Black thuggery, violence, and irrationality. Categorizing protesters as either "outside agitators" or "legitimate protesters" performed familiar acts of rhetorical violence and disciplinary politics of respectability, dividing the movement and fueling competition for authority. Academics, including anthropologists, also approached the uprising in disappointing ways. Researchers from around the country parachuted in to conduct surveys and interviews, gathering valuable data in what Gina Athena Ulysse and Kenneth Guest call in their afterword to this forum a "market-driven" academic process (Ulysse and Guest 2020, 198). What does it mean for a discipline to want to be relevant? More specifically for anthropology, what is its responsibility to immediate (temporal and spatial) social suffering and injustice? How have we been complicit in the reproduction of systems and institutions of oppression? What has been done to answer the long-standing calls to decolonize (Harrison 1980) our ethnographic practice and institution? We present this forum as a response to artivists' and activist anthropologists' challenge to confront the stubborn persistence of racial terror and policing Blackness as they are entangled with white supremacy. We've worked with artivists, practitioners, and academics to coproduce this aesthetic and intellectual intervention. We now turn the coffin toward the region and anthropology. What will return our gaze when we face our fractured reflections, look upon this artwork, this construction of Black death and defiance, and its generative and incomplete afterlives? We shift from #Ferguson to @Ferguson in this forum. @Ferguson privileges the work of being still here—surviving, confronting, caring, and engaging in social change in a place we call home. Our use of @Ferguson recognizes the role of hashtag movements in creating community beyond localities and bolstering efforts of local activism by transcending home-grown cultures of oppression. But our project here takes @Ferguson into the pages of an anthropology journal to return to localized ethnographic engagements with the ways people, lifeways, and collectivities are woven into specific historical and geopolitical structures. Our concern here is Brown's death, the Ferguson uprising, and their afterlives. "Afterlives," to be sure, are not just about bereavement and survival; as the forum's contributors show, they are also about the politics of living and the possibilities of liberation that emerge from struggle, as well as deliberate acts of disruption. If the structures of white supremacy are maintained by anti-Blackness and disposability, as we argue in our essay later in this forum (Parikh and Kwon 2020a), Black rebellion is a politics of life and freedom. For those of us who've remained here, @Ferguson, after the global spotlight dimmed, we've been collectively reflecting on what it is to live in the afterlife of Black death and rebellion. We reflect on why it took the fatal police shooting of Brown to "rip the blinders off," as our coproducers demanded, and how to sustain radical transformation given people's everyday needs and the state's project of protecting white life and symbols of white supremacy through anti-Black racial terror and death. We reflect on the political and ethical work entailed in how we grieve and console, remember and forget, and become responsible for the dead and for the living. @Ferguson signals our responsibility and obligation to continue the fight for liberation started by the young leaders of the Ferguson uprising. It means fighting for reparations for past and current anti-Black exploitations and abuses. It adheres to the ethics of radical honesty—a collective commitment to antiracist projects and activism while recognizing that (white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied) privilege in the US has long come at the expense of the Other's life. @Ferguson remembers the uprising as public grieving. Grievability, as Butler (2004) observes, defines shared humanity; those whom we may not grieve, by forgetting, erasure, or ignorance, are devalued and excluded from community. Public grieving, therefore, constitutes a life made grievable and therefore a life recognized as worthy. The protesters did not simply shout "Black Lives Matter" but showed Michael Brown's life, and by extension all Black lives, to be noteworthy, valued, and celebrated. @Ferguson proclaims a "right to city" (Lefebvre 1996) as "a right to change ourselves by changing the city" (Harvey 2008, 23), as the Ferguson activists did by transforming spaces of Black death into places of living through public protest art and disruptions (closing down highways, interrupting public events, staging "die-ins"). It discomforted white heteropatriarchy through the visibility of Black queer youth. The protests revealed to the world at large, watching enthralled, Black refusal of social death. What did white viewers and bystanders see? What were they afraid of? Protesters were where they didn't belong, on the streets, on highways, in white neighborhoods, in white malls, at white schools. They broke social decorum, middle-class white norms, as they shouted and chanted and marched and danced. The protesters, in other words, were lively in expressing movement, anger, desire, hope, and care. @Ferguson challenges simple understandings of young Black protesters and their trajectory. Often their motivations were explained away with the ambivalent comment "They had nothing to lose." On the one hand, it can be read as praise for their passion, commitment, sacrifice. On the other, it essentializes Black youth, defining them in terms of deprivation, resurfacing notions of a culture of poverty. Either way, they are denied complexity. The dichotomy—protests of passion or of deprivation—misses the impassioned commitment that emerged from and during their challenges to intentional structures of deprivation. The anti-Blackness of the region may have constrained their lives, but their deep attachments to place and social relationships (to kin, intimate partners, and institutions) are complexly entangled—between and across racial and class lines—and these attachments sustained them throughout the uprising and in the afterlife. @Ferguson acknowledges that they've made lives, as students, daughters, sons, neighbors, some with dreams to leave and seek fortunes elsewhere, and others to stay and continue to build their lives and their communities. They had so much to lose—and not simply "chains." Our expectations, cloaked in praise and wonder, often stifle them. Is it not unjust to expect these young Black warriors to change the world for us when we've given them so little? In talking with activists, we have heard some leaders express their desire to live a normal life, to go to school, earn a degree, get a "good job," buy a house, and live well. Their ambitions are often mundane. Would our expectations allow them to live well, to cast off the mask of something "heroic" or "revolutionary"? Are these terms not simply the obverse face of the criminal, rioter, looter? @Ferguson is continued Black death. The end of the Ferguson uprising and encounters with militarized police did not signal an end to danger. Six Black activists have died in the years since the uprising began: two were found in torched cars; three died in alleged suicides; and one from a possible drug overdose. One was Edward Crawford Jr.; a photograph of him throwing a teargas canister back at the police became an iconic image of resistance. There's considerable suspicion within the community about these deaths; and others have attested to experiences of harassment, intimidation, death threats. There is "hopelessness" among many young activists (Associated Press 2019). The emotional and physical consequences of their activism have yet to be fully examined. What is clear is that structural support, such as affordable health insurance and access to mental health counseling, remain lacking in a state that did not expand Medicaid coverage. The conspicuous deaths may suggest something insidious, but the everyday dying in the city corroborates the legacy of white treachery and contemporary complicity. @Ferguson is our intent to disabuse those who want to see "Ferguson" as a symbol of Black disorder, of the Obama administration's bias against white law enforcement, and of the stereotypical "ghetto." Even self-identified "woke" folk, in their fervor for racial justice, ignore that Ferguson is also home for its residents. Kwon recalls that at a student-faculty dialogue convened a couple of days into the protests, a young Black man, who lives in Ferguson, just a few blocks from the Canfield Green apartments, rose up in anger to proclaim: "Don't call this 'Ferguson.' I grew there, I live there, it's not what you think." His objection was not to the references to Ferguson but to how his hometown had, in the popular imaginary, become the symbol of all that must be fixed in urban Black America. @Ferguson recognizes the victories set into motion by the Ferguson uprising. Brown's death and the Ferguson rebellion sparked change, albeit slow. The young leaders motivated people to form or join discussion groups, huddles, and events dedicated to discussions of whiteness, racial injustice, discrimination, abolition, and reparations (Davis 2005; Vitale 2017). Flocking to these groups was made more urgent after Trump's election and the visibility and vitality of white nationalism. One victory is the lawsuits and the new attention paid to police use of excessive force and constitutional violations of protesters' and journalists' right to assemble and free speech (Mann 2015; Rivas 2020). There has also been an effort to reform police departments and the justice system, with a particular focus on dismantling of the extractive petty fine system, which generates sizable revenue for Ferguson and other municipalities and which has trapped Black residents in the court system (Parikh and Kwon 2020a). Class-action lawsuits have been filed against the city of Ferguson regarding overpolicing and the exploitative court fees and warrants, and they are working their way through the judicial system (Harris 2020), but there has been no real change in statistics yet. @Ferguson celebrates the post-Ferguson multiracial energy around the wave of Black candidates and elected officials, some of whom were involved in Ferguson activism, including Bruce "Superman" Franks, Rasheen Aldridge, and Ferguson Mayor Ella Jones, elected in 2020 as the first Black and female mayor of the town. The electorate appeared ready to support radical transformation of the criminal justice system. Wesley Bell impressively unseated Robert McCulloch, the 28-year county prosecutor who oversaw the case against Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Brown. And Kim Gardner became the first African American elected as the chief prosecutor for St. Louis city in 2017. Both Bell and Gardner faced hostile and fearful majority-white police unions and prosecutors, and Gardner has been under regular attack from conservative officials and groups. The overwhelmingly Republican Missouri legislature has been effectively gerrymandering the state's electoral districts and employing other tactics of voter suppression. @Ferguson also witnesses the transformation of young activists' demands for radical change into the neoliberal "racial equity" framework, a framework widely adopted by regional and national commissions, foundations, agencies, and other community-serving entities. The equity framework has mobilized ordinary citizens with little if any experience in working for racial justice; moreover, the formulation of equity masks the violence of white supremacy, leaves standing the very systems built to oppress, and easily becomes a charity project of white humanitarian "goodwill." The movement for reform, here and elsewhere, has been met with a hardening of white supremacy and Black criminalization among some. @Ferguson is a struggle with forgetting. In August 2019, the five-year anniversary month, we noticed that the St. Louis region remained eerily quiet. The people who did memorialize did so actively; commemorative events were staged, stories were shared, and relatives and friends were consoled. But the events were confined and fragmented. Tef Poe, rapper and vocal Ferguson activist, remarked that there seems to be a "taboo" about speaking openly about Ferguson in St. Louis but not elsewhere around the world (St. Louis on the Air 2019, 5:35–56). The memory of Mike Brown's killing and the Ferguson uprising are present, but they are spoken about among smaller trusted groups. As anthropologists have observed in the aftermaths of genocide in places such as Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Peru, as well as with regard to the Holocaust, the decisive nature of remembering, restoring, and finding truth is often heavier than keeping the terror a public secret. The public silence surrounding the police killing of Michael Brown signifies multiple affective registers: A fear of recalling the "evidence" surrounding the fatal shooting. A sense of hopelessness. An unacknowledged comfort in the status quo and routines of white comfort. At left: A Facebook post by Jeff Roorda, business manager for the St. Louis Police Officers' Association, which has a majority-white membership. The post wishes Wilson a "Happy Alive Day." At right: Roorda's post is shared on August 9, 2019, by Officer Heather Taylor, president of the Ethical Society of Police, which has a predominantly African American membership. "To post this on the 5th Anniversary of Mike Brown's death," Taylor comments, "is racist and cowardly." (Screenshot) @Ferguson is a cry to remember. But remembering is a political act. Whereas some commemorated the day with tributes to Brown and protest leaders, others remembered the day as a victory of police authority. The head of the St. Louis Police Officers' Association, Jeff Roorda, posted on Facebook a picture of Darren Wilson with the caption "Happy Alive Day, Darren!" Roorda's post and the "likes" it garnered highlight the unapologetic entanglement of white supremacy and anti-Blackness that is still here. White supremacy and anti-Blackness hide behind two social facts in the US: First, policies permit the use of deadly police force in the name of self-defense or flight of a suspect. Second, contemporary Blackness cannot be untethered from its enslaved past in which Black bodies were to be feared, controlled, and contained. @Ferguson is also directed toward anthropology. This AE forum is a renewed challenge to us and to our discipline to fulfill the promise of decolonization and liberation. In this forum we propose doing so through a coproduction with local artivists in the processes of knowledge creation and representation. It is an invitation to be relevant and accountable to the people @Ferguson and at innumerable other "Fergusons" in the US and across the globe. This forum emerged from the plenary series "Troubling Ferguson and Beyond" at the 2019 annual spring meeting of the American Ethnological Society (AES), jointly hosted in St. Louis with the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists (ALLA) and the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA). The five-year anniversary of Brown's murder and the Ferguson uprising offered a fitting springboard for discussions about not only racialized violence and community responses but also the ethics of our disciplinary practices among the people with whom we work, or "interlocutors." The Ferguson plenary series aimed to "trouble"—to unsettle, disrupt, disturb—not only understandings of this now-mythical place called "Ferguson" but also anthropology. We sought to challenge ourselves to think about how to do ethnography and theorize death and violence when people in our various ethnographic settings are engaged in the daily work of the afterlife (of terror, trauma, death, domination, collectivity). In so doing, our plenaries included activists, practitioners, and scholars, all of whom shared the same platform to theorize about their worlds. It set the tone for the meeting. We wanted to move past interlocutors as informants and engage with their knowledge as coproducers. From the first Ferguson plenary, there were signs that this meeting would not be business as usual, as Gina Athena Ulysse and Kenneth Guest reflect in their afterword to this forum (Ulysse and Guest 2020). Folx refused to defer to academic normativity—social status hierarchies; staid, middle-class propriety; intellectual chauvinism. People expressed joy at the prominence of Black, brown, and indigenous bodies and voices. Some described the conference as exciting, "unique," "decolonized," "an anthropology that didn't leave anyone behind." Even white participants remarked about the refreshing decentering of whiteness—in which whiteness was simply a colonially constructed racial category, rather than the standard of what it means to properly perform expertise and respectability. We are not arguing that the collaboration of anthropology sections or the participation of local practitioners and activists was necessarily wholly new; nor are we claiming that the meeting had a sustained impact on altering hierarchical academic structures (such as citation practices and mentorship politics) that position Black, brown, and indigenous scholars at the bottom. At that particular moment, however, the unabashed, visible, and widespread refusal to play to the politics of respectability or shift discursive registers in making one's argument provided insight into an ethnographic future—a liberation—that could be. This decentering of our disciplinary traditions at the 2019 spring meeting, the ushering in of other epistemologies and arrangements, ignited an unexpected and overwhelming sense of solidarity among meeting attendees. This multigenre forum seeks to extend the ethos of the conference. To this end, we invited local artists and activists to share with us their own thinking. Our partnership with artivists wasn't planned from the outset. Rather, it took shape over the course of several months as we participated in five-year anniversary events and other conversations in our region. In these events, we listened, engaged, participated, reflected, and were sometimes invited to speak. As we began collecting narratives and discussing the impact of the 2014 events with artivists, the classic snowball effect took place. Other artivists who were part of the wider Ferguson Art Build artivist collective (Vega 2020), most of whom we already knew, were suggested to us. We became, in a sense, "observant participants." Two things became obvious during our seven months of planning and research for this forum. First, artivists and ethnographers are both interested in nuances of how everyday life connects to historical and structural conditions. Second, we produce knowledge and social critique in similar ways. Artists are "para-ethnographers" (Holmes and Marcus 2008), having cultivated their own kinds of ethnographic sensibilities and critical faculties. The artivists in this forum, as elsewhere, do not need anthropologists to render their work legible and meaningful. They are coproducers of this forum. Coproduction, to be clear, is not merely a gesture toward collaboration. The conditions of contemporary fieldwork have changed, and our understandings of collaboration in turn must change with them. The researcher-informant relationship, which has long been problematized by feminists and scholars of color (e.g., Behar 1993; Davis and Craven 2016; McClaurin 2001; Restrep and Escobar 2005; Simpson and Smith 2014; Wynter 2003), has drawn renewed theorization. Ethnography as a practice is increasingly advanced by critically reflexive and assertive local collaborators and interlocutors (Hale 2006; Juris et al. 2013; Speed 2006). In public anthropology, in activist or militant scholarship, anthropologists strive to collaborate with others to create spaces where topic, methodology, and theorization can be surrendered from the anthropologists' control. That being said, we also cannot ignore the politics of publishing in which the academic researcher has more power in the final curation, and in which the value or payoff of such coproductions might be greater for academic careers. We gathered to learn from the region's para-ethnographers and took their lead choosing different kinds of work, establishing the role of the artwork in the forum, and selecting themes. The art they have produced represents their own ethnographic engagement with Ferguson and its afterlives. They sat with different communities, answered their communities, and offered their own analysis, interpretation, and representation of the afterlives. What you are about to encounter takes the shape of an assembly, a gathering of voices and ways of representing and seeing that stand firmly in a particular here and now. We include a variety of genres to reflect the multiple intellectual and creative modes of engagement with the St. Louis region and its history—from pictures taken by protesters, graffiti, protest art, interviews, quotations and observations from social media, and essays by youth, in addition to more traditional academic analyses. Our intention is to invoke different affective registers engendered by death and liberation. We invite readers to sit with the art of being in a place. This forum departs from anthropological conventions of theorizing and writing about a place, situation, and people. Anthropologists today have inherited certain deeply inculcated habits: we tend to elevate our own epistemological labor above t
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