How Mike Brown’s death exposes US race inequality

2012 was a year for Kings. It marked 50 years since Dr Martin Luther King was jailed for demonstrating against America’s Jim Crow racial segregation laws and 20 years since Rodney King was beaten by four police officers whose subsequent acquittal sparked rioting and a state of emergency in downtown Los Angeles.

With Barack Obama’s re-election to the White House, 2012 was a year of cathartic remembrance of how much progress had been made in “post-racial” America.

Now in 2014, the Ferguson riots in response to the killing by police officers of a black teenager, 18 year old Mike Brown (pictured above), has returned America’s increasing racial inequalities to the spotlight.

As street battles began in Missouri, the United Nation’s Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination heard evidence on state racism from the families of slain black teenagers, including Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed 17-year-old shot dead in 2012 by George Zimmerman.

Violence and discrimination

The delegation to the UN has focused on two concerns that have a long history in the US: police violence and racial discrimination in the American justice system.

Reliable and up-to-date statistics on deaths by policemen are a cause of concern, but the most recent figures on “justifiable homicide” reported to the FBI found a white police officer killed a black person almost twice a week between 2005-2012.

However, even these figures are certain to be a huge underestimate because the numbers are made up of volunteered figures from just 750 out of 17,000 law enforcement agencies.

According to these same figures, 18 per cent of the African Americans killed in that period were under 21, compared to just 8.7 per cent for whites.

To further underline how striking these inequalities are, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People presented statistics for Oakland, California in the four years prior to Barack Obama’s historic election in 2008, which show that of the 47 officers involved in shootings, all 37 victims were black.

There have been four high-profile deaths of unarmed African American men within the last four weeks, including that of Eric Garner, which was captured on film and shared on social media. No officer has been charged.

Cause of protest

The indifference or inaction of the justice system to black deaths has been a cause of protest. According to research by Washington-based think tank, the Urban Institute, that is focused on the application of the “stand your ground” (SYG) laws. The institute found that shootings under SYG were most likely to be justified if the shooter was white and the victim black.

The list of unarmed African Americans killed by police officers during President Obama’s tenure also includes several females, including seven-year-old Aiyana Jones in 2010 and Rekia Boyd in 2013.

Fifty years on from the civil rights act of King and Kennedy, many on social media are asking why the pictures of Ferguson in 2014 look so similar to the pictures of protest that led to 1964 act.