AN AFRICAN AMERICAN REFLECTS ON THE FERGUSON, MISSOURI TRAGEDY FROM HIS PERSPECTIVE AS A NATIVE MISSOURIAN!

AN AFRICAN AMERICAN REFLECTS ON

THE FERGUSON, MISSOURI TRAGEDY

FROM HIS PERSPECTIVE AS A NATIVE MISSOURIAN!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 20, 2014

A READER WRITES:

Dear Dr. Fisher:

I often reflect on how far we have come in my relatively young lifetime of 62 years.  My life has been lived at the bridge point between segregation of the early 1950's to integration into the 1970's.  I was fortunate that the Lord in his wisdom gave me St. Joseph, Missouri as a hometown to grow up in and I appreciate it now more than ever.

The data points you mention are important, but there are other factors at work in Ferguson, Missouri, and many other communities in our good old USA.  

I'd like to suggest these other data points are just as important, especially in terms of community leadership, the courage to extend a hand, and the opportunity and willingness to let go of the easy, and the known for the risk of higher levels of success.

I reflect on my youth and smile at the direction I was provided by my parents in regards to right and wrong regardless of your color. 

In St. Joseph, Missouri, there was African-American and white leadership.  That leadership knew that to work for change it needed to be done in a step wise manner in order to grow and prosper.

 

Even in the 1960's, St. Joseph, Missouri had African American police officers and detectives, people of both races who lived and worked in the community they all called home. 

Police Chiefs had their ways, but they also knew that there were good candidates of African American descent to become police officers, detectives and police auto mechanics (my dad being one).  It was folks of this caliber that had the inclination and the willingness to take risks and leave their comfort zones for the promise of a better tomorrow. 

I grew up with white kids whose dads were on the police force and worked with mine.  It is in those one-on-one relationships that stereotypes are challenged, broken down and destroyed by friendship, truth and courage to challenge the status quo in both the white and black communities.

I knew the police officers, outside their uniforms, without their guns and nightsticks and knew they did not represent a threat to me as an African American man or as a human being.  Sadly, I can't speak for today's African American youth who haven't had the same opportunities of my youth and experience.

Can you say that is the case in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014?

Has Ferguson, Missouri ever been or will it ever be changed by the community leadership on both sides of the street?

Ferguson did not just get the way that it is today.  I don't live there and can only guess that is the case because I, like you can only process what I read, hear or see from the ever present media watchdogs.  And dogs they are, with no end of appetite to feed the beast to sell more newspapers, ads and give us more of what we seem to want.....blood, hatred, death, guns, sex all at the click of a computer mouse or a touch of a smartphone screen. 

I finally stopped subscribing to newspapers because the only news was the same blood and guts!  I found myself questioning the motives of everyone and that is really a sad statement coming from me.

1968!

Yes, we are stuck there and will likely continue to stay stuck until and unless we finally turn off the television, stop listening to the hate news, the rant of cable TV, and walk across the street to get to know our neighbor. 

And yes, it would be a positive step to see young African Americans being offered the opportunity to join the police force to serve, protect, and save their community, and be constructive participants of that community’s future, instead of being its victims.

 

How many more Michael Browns?

My prayers for the future, at least where I hope my efforts are making an impact, is to help children, young people and their families chart a different course so as not to end up stuck in 1968.

 

I pray for peace and justice be done for Ferguson, Missouri, and the many more like communities across this nation.  We cannot afford to continue on this path of self-destruction.

We need to choose the other less traveled road.  We need people like you, like Mark Twain, Peggy Juda, Jack Capps, Chuck Holm and others who are willing to question the status quo, whether it be your and Chuck Holm’s hometown of Clinton, Iowa, or the hometown of Mark Twain’s of Hannibal, Missouri, or San Francisco, California.

Thanks for being one of those people making a difference who see the "good in people" beyond the color of their skin. 

My Mom always said there are good people in this world and you just need to keep looking until you find them.  Thanks for the advice, Mom!  You were right.

Always,

Buddy

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dear Buddy,

Thank you for taking the trouble to collect your thoughts and reflect on your perspective to the benefit of us all.  We as a race, the human race, are in a strange place these days, indicating it needs much more than good will but a powerful complement of good action, as evil will persists.

In this morning’s The Tampa Bay Times, it was reported freelance journalist, James Foley, an Irish American, was beheaded by the ISSI (“Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”), a terrorist group that has been allowed to fester and metastasize across the Middle East, and beyond.  

This has not been an accident, just as the boil that erupted into the death of Michael Brown in the community of Ferguson, Missouri was not an accident, or the looting and burning and violence that followed an accident.

 

These are man made developments largely from neglect, passivity, omission and exploitation.  

It is an old picture like the portrait of Dorian Gray rotting in the attic of our collective denial, where an army appears out of the night to explain away the situation not stopping to acknowledge or confess its passive complicity in the event.  Bad things always have a back story.

The back story of ISSI played out a century ago when Great Britain and France after World War One used their colonial powers to draw up an arbitrary and self-serving map of the Middle East that had little in common with the culture, tradition, history and expectations of the peoples affected. 

This was compounded after World War Two with the Allies, including the United States, imposing their collective will in a most egregious fashion on these same peoples.  The politics of oil dominated, which demonstrated no interest or foresight on how this might play out in one hundred years into the future.  Now, we know.  We are part of that future.

When I was young, I worked on this world stage, and experienced some of these deceits and charades, especially when I was embedded in Afrikaner South Africa in 1968 during apartheid.  What I saw there I had seen in less obvious ways in South America and the Middle East during those years. 

A community, a country, an ideology, indeed, a world ultimately pays for its implicit and explicit delinquencies, eventually.

 

We get better one person at a time, and everyone is a leader or no one is.  

The operational word implicit in your remarks is “connection,” connecting to your neighbor by walking across the street and getting to know him and her dissolves the myths that separate you.

 

You had a good relationship with police because they knew you as a person.  

The comedian Will Rogers is quoted as saying, “I never met a man I didn’t like.”  I’ve always had trouble with that saying.  A more meaningful expression to my mind is, “I never met a man I understood that I didn’t like.”  You've got to walk across the street to establish that understanding.

In an earlier missive, I mentioned the dulling of our consciences and consciousness with Facebook and other social media including cable and network news.  I suspect this is now being played out before our eyes as media’s gratuitous nature is apparent, at least to a few of us, but yet not felt by most of us.  I'm told it is harmless, mere self-indulgent diversion.  I only hope I am wrong.

  

Your opening remarks had a spiritual temper to them.  My sense is that one hundred years hence, when historians assess the 20^th and 21^st centuries, special note will be made of the decline of organized religion in people’s lives, and consequential impact on our collective stability and civility.

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