|
Top headlines
Lead story
Among the names of unarmed Black men killed by police, none is more prominent than Michael Brown.
Nearly 10 years ago, Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed Brown after the 18-year-old refused to stop walking in the middle of a busy street.
Brown’s death, followed by a Missouri grand jury’s decision to not indict Wilson on charges of murder, triggered months of protests and demands for nationwide police reforms. Wilson said his actions were in self-defense.
But as scholars Seanna Leath and Sheretta T. Butler-Barnes of Washington University in St. Louis have learned through their research on racist violence in Black communities, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Nearly 10 years after Brown’s killing and less than 90 miles away from Ferguson, Sonya Massey, an unarmed, 36-year-old Black woman, was shot and killed on July 6, 2024, by one of the police officers who had responded to her emergency call for help. She had called police to investigate a mysterious sound near her home.
“Massey and Brown were not exceptions to the norm – but, rather, representative of the everyday racism that pervades American society,” Leath and Butler-Barnes write. “Developing ways to cope is often a necessary reality of living in the United States.”
[ The Conversation has no ads or paywalls, because of support from our readers. ]
|
