Selma's long shadow
America’s conversation about race has, like all of our public conversations, come to consist largely of a running commentary on viral spectacles. Recent weeks have been rife with them—the Oklahoma University SAE video chant and the dreadful scene of the double shooting of police in Ferguson; the awesome images of a sitting and a former president crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, heading a massive multiracial and multigenerational crowd; the face of University of Virginia student Martese Johnson, bloodied by Alcohol Board of Control officers.
These spectacles, because they are shareable and abstracted from any context, polarize instantly. (I don’t have the heart to look for them, but I would guess that some TownHall commenters are already insisting Martese Johnson must have been violently resisting arrest.) Less shareable, though probably more important, was the Justice Department’s 102-page report on its investigation of the Ferguson law enforcement system. The report’s shocking conclusions were enough to prompt some conservative writers to point out how scandalous to constitutional rights this situation was—and to chide their ideological allies for not taking its findings more seriously. “No conservative on earth should feel comfortable with the way the Ferguson PD has been operating for years, even according to their own documents,” says Leon Wolf at RedState.
This rare moment of ideological line-crossing only serves to highlight something deeply discouraging about the report itself, however. President Obama’s speech in Selma touched stirringly on the gains in social and political equality that have been made in the 50 years since the marchers there pushed the Voting Rights Act forward, bringing large-scale African American participation in elections to some places it hadn’t been seen since the terrorist-aided Redeemers brought Reconstruction to an end in 1877. And yet, Obama insisted—alluding specifically to the Ferguson report—“this nation’s racial history casts its long shadow upon us.”
