Visibility and invisibility cornerstone the telling narratives of Michael Brown and Darren Wilson, deceased youth and now former police officer, fated to deadly encounter and its reverberations through mature Obama Time, that high mix of jarring wealth disparities, palliative reform and sclerotic government, once exuberant and now attenuated hope.
Michael Brown aspired to the visibility of fame. “That’s all he ever wanted! It’s amazing because he was just talking about this the other day,” a loved one recalled to reporters. “ ‘I want to be famous. I want to do this, I want to do that.’ It’s sad that this had to happen for him to be famous,” she remarked. Brown’s trap rap advertises his desires: wealth, women, prowess.
{mosads}“The face that he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there…,” Officer Wilson told the grand jury of his invisibility. So terrifying was Officer Wilson’s sense of Brown’s overpowering Hulk Hogan strength, he discharged a fatal shot at Brown’s head. “When it went into him the demeanor on his face went blank, the aggression was gone…the threat was stopped,” Wilson told the grand jury of all too visible adversary.
Brown and Wilson resonate Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. “I am an invisible man,” the novel’s African-American narrator relays. “No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me…. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me.”
What a stunning turn of events. A white police officer employs invisibility as rationale for deadly force now. When Invisible Man was published in the late forties, invisibility afflicted Afro-Americans as a legacy of slavery and expression of racial prejudice.
Visibility and invisibility shape protest and commentary following a grand jury yielding no indictment. “No one sees us. Our voices don’t count” recur in African-American comments in broadcast and print interviews. Any number of Wilson proponents came to his defense to counter what they see as biased journalism.
Oligarchic wealth and mass inequality animate the dynamics. Over the last two years, earnings for residents of Ferguson, Missouri fell by a third when adjusted for low inflation amid higher than average unemployment and widespread poverty. So few are acquiring any wealth all are virtually invisible. During the interval, the wealthiest Americans, wholly invisible but for those cultivating celebrity, command average annual wealth ranging from $7M to $370M and acquired 90% of income increases as pitiable wealth gains and wage stagnation afflict vast numbers of invisible citizens.
In such white hot optics, the Reverend Al Sharpton consolidates thought leader authority as Obama Time Hearst and Pulitzer. Few sway media and mass as effectively or enjoy comparably well placed confidence. For all the purported influence of broadcast, cable and social media networks, Sharpton distinctly commands an affiliation organization and participation network, too, to channel information and mobilize action, at once visible and invisible hands shaping public opinion and inflecting public policy.
As legal equality and equal opportunity have redressed segregation and mitigated discrimination since publication of Invisible Man, unproblematic determinations of right and wrong remain no less timeless: it is outrageous an unarmed 18 year old is dead for allegedly stealing cigarillos and walking in a street. Yet, lethal confrontation yields accounts of taunting and striking a police officer, grabbing his fire arm and threatening his life. An exculpating grand jury, allowing no trial and cross examination, simply tossed match and gasoline lighting combustible tinder contained by martial force.
White House initiatives for better policing standards and practices and greater transparency with body cameras express narrowly tailored institutional correctives.
Change is taking place. The President’s My Brother’s Keeper program offers individual pathways to education and careers. Department of Justice pattern of practice settlements with municipal police forces reining in excessive force represent institutional vehicles.
Perhaps President Obama and Congress will surprise everyone by working together to generate egalitarian wealth creation now civil unrest may emerge as a visible expression of Obama Time. So doing could lead to continuing control of the legislative branch for now dominant Republicans.
Donahue comments on institutions and communications and is adjunct professor, Department of History, Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersey.