A Man in Ferguson Defends the Looting

You ain’t got to kill him. He ain’t got no gun in his hands. Why’d you kill him? You say Trayvon had a hoodie on, you ain’t know what’s going on with him. Well, he ain’t got no hoodie on and his hands was up when you shot him. So what’s your excuse?

Put this on an intro to the next Kanye album. I don’t know why (out of the approximately one million reasons, in particular) I’m so inflamed by all this Ferguson stuff. I remember one night two summers ago when I was staying around St. Louis thinking about accepting a grad school offer at Wash U. Around three in the morning a car full of my friends saw a black girl get pulled into another car, assaulted violently by multiple men, and then shoved out at an intersection once the men saw they were being watched. My friends held the girl and called the police for her and the police refused to come. It was a bad neighborhood, the police said; they didn’t cover it. They took the girl back to her house and the police still wouldn’t come because it was still a bad neighborhood and the girl was afraid to talk to them directly on the phone.

The police in Ferguson have still not released the name of the officer who shot Mike Brown. There’s video of police blowing tear gas onto residential property and throwing a 6-months-pregnant woman on her stomach onto the ground. In the meantime, Anonymous (who threatened to release information about the Ferguson police chief’s daughter and thankfully recanted) has leaked a photo of a Confederate flag in the police chief’s home, and the whole town’s been declared a no-fly zone, keeping press helicopters conveniently out of the picture.

I mean, I am not defending this position, but I’d be a fucking looter too. [Fox2Now, via]