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Ferguson and the importance of stories
By lynmiller-lachmann on 2014-09-07 22:42:59
Like many around the world, I viewed the events in Ferguson, Missouri with a combination of dismay and horror. The
shooting by a white police officer of an unarmed African-American teenager on the cusp of attending college led to angry
demonstrations and the kind of police response one would find in a military dictatorship. After police assaulted and arrested
several journalists and a Missouri state senator, the Melbourne, Australia-based photographer “legojacker,” who uses the
popular toy to explore human rights issues, posted a haunting image on Instagram. His commentary and the ensuing
discussion reached thousands of his followers across the world. To quote a chant from another police riot—the one that
occurred during the 1968 Democratic Convention—“The whole world is watching.” And while we in the United States tend
to forget things quickly, people elsewhere, from different cultural traditions and with different perspectives on a certain
superpower, are less likely to do so. Nor should we forget; Michael Brown is hardly the first unarmed black teen to lose his
life in this way. I have already written in this space about Trayvon Martin. And before Trayvon Martin, there was Oscar
Grant. In addition, the militarization of local police forces threatens to undermine the very foundations of our democracy, as
police grow more powerful and remote from their communities, and individuals are silenced by fear.
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For me, the images from Ferguson resembled some of the PowerPoint slides that I present
when I speak about my novel Gringolandia—photos of peaceful demonstrators confronted by tear gas and water cannons,
children being arrested and taken away in armored vehicles, and streets patrolled by men with tanks and full army gear. My
friend and fellow young adult author Trent Reedy was equally stunned and horrified, not because the scenes paralleled the
images related to a historical novel taking place under Chile’s former military dictatorship (which came to power this week,
41 years ago), but because his recently published dystopian thriller set in the near future, Divided We Fall, imagines the
United States under military occupation following the young soldier protagonist’s accidental shooting of an unarmed
civilian. A military veteran of Afghanistan (his own experiences formed the basis of his debut novel, Words in the Dust), he
said he never thought his work of speculative fiction would turn out to be so close to reality. Another participant in our
online discussion was Kekla Magoon, a fellow student from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Kekla wrote about the police and
the Black Panthers in Chicago in 1968 in her award-winning novel The Rock and the River, and its companion, Fire in the
Streets, portrays the chaos and violence during the Democratic Convention. Her forthcoming novel, due in stores and on
library shelves next month, is How It Went Down, a contemporary novel for teen and adult readers about a black teenager
killed by a white man. Inspired by the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, How It Went Down describes the events from the
perspectives of multiple witnesses and lets the reader figure out the truth. The two perspectives that do not appear are those
of the black victim, who is no longer alive, and the white shooter, who refuses to speak out of fear of self-incrimination.
Much of Kekla’s writing has addressed the violence growing out of racism. Her stories
don’t end with neat resolutions, and she doesn’t have easy answers. Rather, she sheds light through her nuanced portrayals
of past and present realities through the eyes of characters with whom readers can empathize. In my essay on the film
Fruitvale Station, | talked about how seeing the world from Oscar Grant’s eyes can help viewers go beyond the black-and-
white, and often stereotyped, versions that appeared in the mass media. Oscar Grant, like Trayvon Martin and Michael
Brown, was a complex human being, a work in progress like young people everywhere, a person with hopes, dreams, gifts,
and a story to tell. Telling this story—whether it belongs to a real person or a fictional character based on real people—can
change how we look at these events in fundamental ways, so that we come to understand each other’s humanity and make
out choices based on that understanding. That is why storytellers and artists belong in the conversation—to bring more peace
and light into the world.
