Introduction

Abstract

Protesters as pallbearers carry the Mirror Casket in the Funeral Procession of Justice in front of the Ferguson policestation in the wake of the fatal police shooting of unarmed teenager Mike Brown Jr., Ferguson, Missouri, October10, 2014. The casket was acquired by the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) aspart of its history collection. (Zun Lee) Mirror Casket marks this contemporary moment, when the state has finally been compelled to acknowledge the link between its repressive apparatuses and racism. Smartphones and body cameras have become the looking glass compelling the recognition that black lives matter. And Mirror Casket demands more powerful and far-reaching forms of justice. We will have to reimagine policing and punishment and ultimately will have to remake our democracy. Protesters as pallbearers carry the Mirror Casket in the Funeral Procession of Justice in front of the Ferguson police station in the wake of the fatal police shooting of unarmed teenager Mike Brown Jr., Ferguson, Missouri, October 10, 2014. The casket was acquired by the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) as part of its history collection. (Zun Lee) We begin this AE forum on Black death and liberation by asking you to look at Mirror Casket.1 A collective of seven St. Louis “creatives” turned artist-activists (or “artivists”) created the casket in the aftermath of the fatal police shooting of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown Jr. on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. The casket was featured in the Funeral Procession of Justice, a public event during the Ferguson October protests that called for reflection and empathy after a memorial to Brown was destroyed in a “mysterious” fire (Vaugh 2014). The artivists covered the casket in mirror shards to challenge “viewers to look within and see their reflections as both whole and shattered, as both solution and problem, as both victim and aggressor.”2 Carried on the shoulders of protester-pallbearers from the Canfield Green apartments (where Brown was killed) to the Ferguson police station, the mirrored casket caught the (distorted) faces of residents, activists, artists, a diverse array of protesters and bystanders, and police officers. Drummers lead a protest line after former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley is acquitted of first-degree murder in the December 2011 shooting of Anthony Lamar Smith, St. Louis, September 16, 2017. (Eric Pan) This casket reminds us of another famous coffin—the glass-topped casket displaying 14-year-old Emmett Till's gruesomely disfigured and bloated body. In 1955, two white men bludgeoned and shot Till in the head for allegedly flirting with a white woman; they threw his body in the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi with a heavy cotton gin fan tied to his neck with wire.3 In displaying Emmett's body, Till's mother, Mamie, wanted the country to see the violence of anti-Blackness and white “justice.” Her decision to share her grief and despair would shape history. Till's murder became a catalyst for the civil rights movement. Fifty-nine years later, Michael Brown's dead body, lying for over four hours on the subdivision street in near 100-degree heat and humidity, became the rallying call for another phase in the Black liberation movement. By the time this forum reaches the public, it will have been six years since Brown's killing. It will come out in the midst of the deadly summer of 2020, in which two global pandemics violently converged on Black bodies and communities—anti-Black policing and Covid-19. Black death by asphyxiation will be the image seared into our memories of another torrid summer of Black death but also the continuing struggle for Black Lives. We were collective witnesses to George Floyd taking his final breath as Officer Derek Chauvin nonchalantly drove his knee into Floyd's neck for almost nine minutes on a street in Minneapolis. Chauvin's arrogant indifference and assumed white impunity as Floyd gasped “I can't breathe” (re)ignited protests in cities across the world. That hauntingly familiar plea, “I can't breathe,” pulled into that mass televised frame other struggles for breath—Eric Garner's, obviously, but also the disproportionate assault of Covid-19 on Black communities. These are the communities of low-wage “essential workers” and caregivers, toxic dumping, and air pollution, long histories of economic and infrastructural disinvestment, as well as overzealous, deadly white policing and surveillance. For many St. Louis activists, the 2020 protests were the resurgence of the 2014 Ferguson uprising. The uprising here had not ended after the global media left, but merely quieted with the turn to the homework of reflection, transformation, and building and maintaining lives and lifeways changed by more than 400 days of protests—the longest sustained resistance in the United States, longer than the Montgomery bus boycott of the 1950s (Boyles 2019, 154; Franks 2018). Ferguson had unexpectedly become ground zero for contemporary Black resistance in 2014. Many of the organizing strategies, direct actions, grassroots abolition and reparations platforms, and tracking systems of killings by police in the United States that we see today were birthed, refined, and debated here. The #Ferguson social media movement brought those liberation efforts to similarly minded communities globally (Bonilla and Rosa 2015). As this forum reflects on @Ferguson, we hope to shed light on the ongoing protests for Black Lives and liberation from centuries of white supremacy and “the alibis in which it has been cloaked,” alibis that have “been built into the material fabric of daily life” in St. Louis (W. Johnson 2020, 10). Michael Brown Sr. places roses along Canfield Drive before the start of a moment of silence on the third anniversary of the death of his son Mike Brown, Ferguson, August 9, 2017. (Carolina Hidalgo / St. Louis Public Radio) We—forum editors Shanti Parikh and Jong Bum Kwon—joined the Ferguson protests, direct actions, and memorials, as well as the protests that have taken place after subsequent acts of racialized policing and violence. The months of street protests and demonstrations were met with openly racist condemnations of Black youth, as well as brutality and military-style tactics on the part of the police, tactics deemed excessive, discriminatory, arbitrary, and unconstitutional (IACHR 2018, 72–75; Reilly 2015). We joined these actions not as ethnographers or leaders but as outraged residents (or “observant participants”) inspired by the bold leadership and determination of the younger generation's fight for justice. In our various roles as educators and practitioners, as parents and board members, we have also participated in and observed the many efforts to heal, to come together as a region, to motivate police and criminal justice reform, to rectify centuries of racial inequity, and to celebrate Black life and brilliance. Like many in the region, we have been frustrated and angered by the slow and fitful process that followed the uprising and the Department of Justice's investigation of the Ferguson police department, which found that the department's practices and those of the municipal courts “both reflect and exacerbate existing racial bias” (DOJ 2015a, 2). We have tired of the countless excuses, empty gestures, and willful denials, of the victim blaming, of liberal pacifications that “change is slow,” and of patronizing advice to “act respectably.” We have grown weary of the many public conversations, trainings, and reports on “racial (in)equity” that avoid publicly naming white supremacy and anti-Blackness, as if this would offend too many.4 In a Pulitzer Prize–winning photo, Edward Crawford throws a tear gas canister away from protesters while holding a bag of chips, Ferguson, August 13, 2014. (Robert Cohen / St. Louis Post-Dispatch / Polaris) We've been similarly disheartened by how the mainstream media dealt with Brown's killing and the uprising. The global media and photojournalists left as soon as the spectacle of protest and riot police waned, and the reporting of protests often repeated age-old racial tropes of Black thuggery, violence, and irrationality. Categorizing protesters as either “outside agitators” or “legitimate protesters” performed familiar acts of rhetorical violence and disciplinary politics of respectability, dividing the movement and fueling competition for authority. Academics, including anthropologists, also approached the uprising in disappointing ways. Researchers from around the country parachuted in to conduct surveys and interviews, gathering valuable data in what Gina Athena Ulysse and Kenneth Guest call in their afterword to this forum a “market-driven” academic process (Ulysse and Guest 2020, 198). What does it mean for a discipline to want to be relevant? More specifically for anthropology, what is its responsibility to immediate (temporal and spatial) social suffering and injustice? How have we been complicit in the reproduction of systems and institutions of oppression? What has been done to answer the long-standing calls to decolonize (Harrison 1980) our ethnographic practice and institution? We present this forum as a response to artivists' and activist anthropologists' challenge to confront the stubborn persistence of racial terror and policing Blackness as they are entangled with white supremacy. We've worked with artivists, practitioners, and academics to coproduce this aesthetic and intellectual intervention. We now turn the coffin toward the region and anthropology. What will return our gaze when we face our fractured reflections, look upon this artwork, this construction of Black death and defiance, and its generative and incomplete afterlives? We shift from #Ferguson to @Ferguson in this forum. @Ferguson privileges the work of being still here—surviving, confronting, caring, and engaging in social change in a place we call home. Our use of @Ferguson recognizes the role of hashtag movements in creating community beyond localities and bolstering efforts of local activism by transcending home-grown cultures of oppression. But our project here takes @Ferguson into the pages of an anthropology journal to return to localized ethnographic engagements with the ways people, lifeways, and collectivities are woven into specific historical and geopolitical structures. 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