Introduction: Disposable Lives

The news of the day (old news, but raw as a fresh wound) is that Black American life is disposable from the point of view of policing, sentencing, economic policy, and countless terrifying forms of disregard. There is a vivid performance of innocence, but there’s no actual innocence left. The moral ledger remains so far in the negative that we can’t even get started on the question of reparations (Teju Cole, “Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin’s ‘Stranger in the Village’”).

The dead body of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, an African American, lies in a street of Ferguson, Missouri. Blood streams; two shots to the head ended his life.² Police tape off the area, but Brown’s body remains exposed for four hours to the heat of summer. Even after he is covered up, blood is still visible to the horrified onlookers, mostly Black Americans. Brown was killed by police officer Darren Wilson who was subsequently placed on paid administrative leave.

The events of August 9^th are a gruesome spectacle—the horrific death of a Black teenager and the slap on the wrist of the police officer responsible for killing him. The handling of Brown’s body and the response to the police officer is clear, says committee-woman Patricia Baynes of Ferguson, Missouri: “we can do this to you any day, any time, in broad daylight, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”³ Here we see the disposability of Black lives legally protected, what Dora Apel refers to in her essay below as “modern legalized lynching.”⁴ Ropes and trees are no longer the implements of public horror—guns, badges, and urban streets will do just fine.

Brown’s death, although tragic, is a mainstay of American history; it is also commonplace that the very institutions responsible for protecting and serving the citizenry, which includes Black Americans, have often been at the helm of such brutality. Consider some past and recent events, many of which remain hidden from the public’s eye: Kimani Gray, unarmed sixteen-year-old teen killed by New York City police officers in 2013; Kendrec McDade, unarmed nineteen-year-old college student killed by a Pasadena police officer in 2012; Steven Eugene Washington, unarmed twenty-seven-year-old autistic man, killed by two Los Angeles gang-enforcement officers. Add to these some of the more famous cases: John Crawford; Eric Garner; Oscar Grant.⁵ Such events leave one to wonder, as James Baldwin once did, what is one’s role in this country as a Black person?

That Black Americans can legitimately ask this question in 2014—even in light of the fact that a Black person occupies the highest office in the land—throws into sharp relief that they continue to be devalued in American society and that that devaluation undercuts any allegiance and respect otherwise owed to the polity. This disturbing but all-too-familiar undercurrent of American life—the norm of Black devaluation—belies the nation’s presumed success. Allegiance and respect in any civic community is based on reciprocity—the idea of a mutual exchange for mutual benefit. Where Blacks are concerned the exchange has historically been one-sided—a fact that continues to dog the integrity of democratic life. Or, and I shudder to think the thought, this fact may very well signal the health of American democracy, as Tommy Curry will shortly maintain.⁶

Two ideas mingle together in Ferguson, Missouri: the absence of reciprocity where Blacks are concerned and the disposability of Black lives.

To live in a democratic society is always to endure at the hands of those over whom you have no control.⁷ Elections come and go and with them winners and losers. Public policies benefit some rather than others. Judicial decisions often have disparate outcomes on the population. The general logic, however, of living in a democratic community is that one’s status as a loser is never permanent—that election, policy, or judicial outcomes are open to being revisited and revised. This general logic mitigates the lack of control we have over our fellows; it guards against...