A single death can be understood as a collective threat.

[kpete]

In the days after 9/11, it was common to hear people say that it was the first time Americans had really experienced terrorism on their own soil. Those sentiments were historically wrong, and willfully put aside acts that were organized on a large scale, had a political goal, and were committed with the specific intention of being nightmarishly memorable. The death cult that was lynching furnished this country with such spectacles for a half century. (The tallies vary, but, by some estimates, there were thirty-three hundred lynchings in the decades between the end of Reconstruction and the civil-rights era.) We know intuitively, not abstractly, about terrorism’s theatrical intent. The sight of Michael Brown, sprawled on Canfield Drive for four hours in the August sun, dead at the hands of an officer who was unnamed for a week, recalled that memory. It had the effect of reminding that crowd of spontaneous mourners of their own refuted humanity. A single death can be understood as a collective threat. The media didn’t whip up these concerns among the black population; history did that.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/world-ferguson?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=twitter&mbid=social_twittermichael

[el_bryanto]

1. That is accurate

White People don't want to see the context of Brown's death. They see it, somehow, as completely disconnected from the other acts of police brutality towards black people across the United States. They refuse to see the forest, believing that each tree is separate and unique from all other trees.

On the other hand evidence of black criminality, even minor, is immediately connected with what whites perceive to be a whole black culture of criminality and thuggishness.

Whites don't think the killing of Michael Brown connects to any other event, but they certainly see the "looting" afterwards as connected.

Bryant

[malaise]

2. Good read

Thanks