LP's final NS column for a year. Rather painfully late to the topic of Ferguson. Still lacking any self-awareness:
"I am struggling to hear the radio report over the industrial roar of an espresso machine and the smooth jazz drifting in through speakers. I am sitting in a hipster café in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The girl at the next table over from me has no idea where Ferguson is, or what is happening there, despite the battle for her country’s soul going on 1,200 miles away in the Midwest. She was unaware, until I brought it up in conversation, that on 9 August, an unarmed African-American teenager had been shot and killed by police. Outside, on a balmy, late-summer morning in a mainly white university town, with no police on the streets, life goes on as normal. Please repeat – this is America."
http://www.newstatesman.com/world-a...oot-unarmed-black-man-six-times-and-then-call
Then we move onto London...
"In Britain, we’ve seen this already. Almost exactly three years before the Ferguson protests broke out, the Metropolitan Police shot and killed an unarmed man, Mark Duggan, in Tottenham, north London. Peaceful demonstrations turned into several days of pandemonium as young people came out to loot shops and fight the police. Thousands of arrests were made and the government was hours away from sending in the army.
The protests in Ferguson are different in many ways from the 2011 English riots but there are also disturbing similarities: in August 2011, the official story was that the civil disorder had nothing to do with “real” politics, nothing to do with racist policing and repression. It was – in the words of the Home Secretary – “pure criminality”. It had nothing to do with class, or austerity, or the racial prejudice baked into both of those axes of oppression. Law enforcement was justified in making mass arrests and using extreme force to bring the situation under control – the only response to civil breakdown, then as now, was to bring in the big guns. And, as with the situation in Ferguson, everything hung on the character of the deceased."
Interesting how she frames the London protest as looting and fighting the police. She then labels it a "riot" before qualifying her remarks with a sentence about austerity and police racism.
Also "fighting the police" de-legitimises how the police first murdered Mark Duggan (which she correctly highlighted) and then a 16-year-old protester outside Tottenham Police Station is attacked, after around 100 people peacefully protested and were largely ignored by the police shortly after the shooting. Years of institutional police racism, stop and search, harassment is reduced to a sentence. Yes, it's not about London, she's trying to make a broader point about U.S. society, using her days of experience in a country, with a complex history of race problems.
