...but I live in Ferguson and I'm White. Antonio was interviewed on local station KMOX and when asked if he condemned the violence that saw many minority-owned business looted and the local Quik Trip burned to the ground, (which incidentally nearly caused the death of the two young men of color who were working there) he kept repeating that this has been building up for years, decades and this (looting and violence) wasn't going to end and would continue. When the interviewer kept pressing, Antonio would not explicitly condemn the violence and went so far to say that the White community needed to be terrorized so that they would put pressure on the 'White Power Structure' to make changes demanded by the Black community. I heard this myself and had to pull the car over because I couldn't believe that an elected official would say something so inflammatory in such a strained situation.
Ferguson is a Working Class suburb. We can't run off to our summer cottages or off to Europe, okay? We can't leave our mortgages and our property, so we're going to defend our homes and families, and we don't take threats like that laying down. You can type on your keyboard in some coffe shop in Seattle or Ames, Iowa and pontificate all you want, but we. live. here.
Those militarized police are there to intimidate, so what? Aren't those videos of looters destroying businesses (including the city's beloved animal hospital) intimidating? Wasn't Antonio French's sly assertion meant to intimidate? How are we, who live here, as opposed to you from all over the world supposed to feel? Those cops are there to make sure there is a cordon sanitare, not to form a praetorian guard around the rich Whites, because there are none here. It's to keep more Black kids from getting themselves killed by armed Working Class White people. Don't kid yourself about that.
Please post any story of a kinder, gentler approach that a police force used in a similar situation. The Germans? The Italians? The Japanese? Russians? Chinese? Anybody?
Personally, I say take the police completely out of the equation and bring in the National Guard. Make sure there are plenty of Black soldiers and give the command to a Black officer. Bring in the Bradley fighting vehicles. Set up check points, look for weapons by anybody, White or Black driving through, and if they aren't legit, arrest them. We don't need Barney Fife in combat fatigues, here.
I'm sorry about Mike Brown's death, but violence against neighbors is not the way to go about it, especially when those neighbors are armed and not very sympathetic to the idea that violence and looting is merely a different expression of the First Amendment and the right to assemble, another assertion I've been hearing.
As for Antonio French, he's a despicable POS trying to get his street cred up for the next election.
One more thing: Why is it when riots happen in any other city, you hear about the LA riots, the Detroit riots, the NYC riots, hell even the Des Moines or Tulsa riots, but here in St. Louis, it's the Ferguson riots? A town of less than forty thousand? The media has done our town a terrible disservice and people like Antonio (who is from the city of St. Louis, not Ferguson!) need to be exposed as the race baiters they are. When the inevitable happens and another Black kid gets killed at 1:30 in the morning trying to follow Antonio French's advice about terrorizing the White Community by breaking out car windows and robbing garages, the blood will be on his hands.
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