Trying to Make Sense of a Senseless Tragedy

Nothing I have seen in recent memory is more heartbreaking than watching Michael Brown’s mother overcome with the realization that her son will not be getting any justice. Brown’s untimely death is the kind of tragedy that leaves you without words, and the kind that makes you sure any words you can find—to say, to post on Facebook, to tweet, to Instagram—will not be enough.

How do we start to make sense of this senseless tragedy? In the aftermath of the grand jury’s decision, people have looked to the details of the case—of which there are many—in order to process the implications of Michael Brown’s death and the lack of an indictment for Darren Wilson. But focusing on the technicalities of a grand jury proceeding masks the hard and fast truth underlying events in Ferguson. Here’s what happened, plain and simple: Another unarmed black teenager was shot by a white police officer.

The minutia of the evidence presented by the county prosecutor Robert McCulloch, I think, is irrelevant to our understanding of Brown’s significance in American society. Lost in the mountains of papers and photographs is the basic fact of Brown’s human value. Nobody in his or her right mind would suggest that Brown deserved the fate Officer Wilson handed him. Brown was slain, and no amount of political or legal maneuvering will change that simple, tragic fact.

Questions about the truth of Officer Wilson’s claim that he felt his life was in danger, or the nature of the altercation he and Brown had in his car, lead us down a path that does not ask or answer any of the right questions. This is what we should be asking: What is the nature and purpose of a system that has taken and continues to take the lives countless black men? That question, along with the terrifying fact that black men are 21 times more likely to be fatally shot by the police than white men, is impossible to answer or comprehend.

And the impossibility of comprehension runs rife throughout Brown’s case. Consciously or unconsciously, people everywhere are trying to reconcile Brown’s death with the ideals of American democracy. But Brown’s death wasn’t an unfortunate consequence of impartial law; it was the result of a police system that sees black lives as collateral damage, and blacks as somewhere below the status of full human beings.

Many shirk from confronting the reality that the odds are stacked against people of color in this country. If we acknowledge that the system failed Brown, and every other unarmed black male shot down by our police officers, then we must acknowledge that the system is broken. And a broken system for black men is a broken system for everyone, no matter the color of your skin. Accepting the compromised state of the democratic ideals about equality and non-discrimination we hold so dear is deeply disturbing. It shatters our faith in everything on which our country was founded. But it’s also the truth.

Let’s not forget: Brown’s teachers described him as a “gentle giant.” He graduated from high school just eight days before his premature death. Put yourselves in the shoes of Lesley McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother, for just one moment. That feeling is what this system has wrought.

Black lives do matter. And until the American justice system holds that truth to be self-evident, the democracy we are living in is no democracy at all.

Nick F. Barber ’17, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Mather House.