Panel discusses the death of Michael Brown

Lanre Akinsiku, Joseph Margulies and Travis Gosa
Dave Burbank/University Photography
From left, Lanre Akinsiku, Joseph Margulies and Travis Gosa speak at a Sept. 10 campus panel on the death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

A police officer, a gun and a boy: These are some of the facts of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Aug. 9. Add more facts, and a clearer picture emerges: an unarmed black teenager, a white officer, a loaded gun with a finger on the trigger. In the weeks following the shooting, as protests erupted and social media ignited with anger and outrage, Americans have been examining this familiar scenario for answers, wondering how this could have happened and if it will happen again.

The underlying causes and potential outcomes of Michael Brown’s death were examined in the “Forum on Ferguson: The Role of the Law” Sept. 10 at the Africana Studies and Research Center (ASRC). The forum brought together Travis Gosa, assistant professor at the ASRC; Joe Margulies, visiting professor at Cornell Law School and the Department of Government in the College of Arts and Sciences, and a civil rights attorney; and Lanre Akinsiku, an MFA student in fiction at Cornell who wrote about the weight of discrimination on the blog Gawker. Noliwe Rooks, associate professor of Africana studies, moderated the forum.

Participants addressed the persecution that African-Americans face daily. Margulies traced current discriminatory legal practices to the 1960s, when Jim Crow was ending and the role of law was changing. “As formal mechanisms of social control … were dismantled, a new body of mechanisms took shape,” he said. These new mechanisms turn the law into a tool of discrimination. “It is the law which allows the police to stop a young African-American man and in almost every case to frisk him, then also to handcuff him, based on nothing more than mere suspicion,” he said.

As Gosa remarked, however, “Black innocence is not just destroyed in the street by the police.” That innocence is also destroyed in the classroom, where discrimination leads to black children as young as preschool being far more likely to be suspended than white children, he said. “What’s occurring in the streets of Ferguson is actually occurring on a daily basis in our classrooms across the nation.”

Cornell graduate student Lanre Akinsiku discussed the discrimination he has faced personally in his Gawkerpiece, “The Price of Blackness.” As an undergraduate in Berkeley, he was pulled over by the police frequently. Even though he had done nothing wrong, he would let the officer see his college ID in the hope that this would let him be treated justly – and inevitably, it would.

Akinsiku and Gosa argued against this concept, what Gosa called “politics of respectability”: the idea that if blacks present themselves in ways that conform to middle-class, white notions of acceptable behavior, dress, language, etc. in public, then they won't be victims of discrimination. Gosa said he rejected “the outdated notion that if we just go out wearing suits, that if we speak the king’s English, that we’ll be safe from the brutality of racism.” In the case of Michael Brown, it was implied he didn’t deserve to die because he was going to college. “He didn’t deserve to die, period,” Akinsiku said.

Akinsiku recalled that he had once been given “the talk” about what to do and how to act when approached by a police officer. He recognized the potential futility of this, though: “My being, my existence threatens and scares folks, and what can a talk [like this] do for that?”

Sascha Hernández ’17 is a writer intern for the Chronicle.

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