Reality in Colour

Danielle Bowler, Eyewitness News

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it… How does it feel to be a problem?

The St Louis County grand jury’s decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, did not come as a surprise. While it registers as unthinkable, it simultaneously fits within a paradigm that continually devalues black lives.

From Michael Brown to Assata Shakur, the racist state of America persists

Angela Davis, The Guardian

Although racist state violence has been a consistent theme in the history of people of African descent in North America, it has become especially noteworthy during the administration of the first African-American president, whose very election was widely interpreted as heralding the advent of a new, postracial era.

How to write about the deaths of people who don’t matter

Sisonke Msimang

Sisonke Msimang, The Daily Maverick

I was asked this week what it takes to tell the stories of black lesbians killed in the townships in South Africa. The answer, in some ways, lies in Ferguson, Missouri, far away from South Africa, in an American community that has been burning all week.

There is much that South African journalists and editors can learn from the coverage of the protests that have arisen in the wake of Michael Brown’s death. Under normal circumstances the shooting death of a black teenager from a segregated community in the Southern state of Missouri would not have garnered much attention nationally, let alone globally. After all, two black men are killed every week by law enforcement officials in the US – most of them unarmed. Indeed, until he died, it is unlikely that Michael Brown mattered much to anyone except those who loved him. In his death he has come to matter a great deal to a great many people in America and beyond.

Marikana, Gaza, Ferguson

Richard Pithouse, The Con

In colonial wars the occupying power invariably reaches a point where it has to acknowledge that its true enemy is not a minority – devil worshipers, communists, fanatics or terrorists – subject to external and evil manipulation, but the people as a whole. Once this point is reached every colonised person is taken as a potential combatant and the neighbourhood and the home are cast as legitimate sites of combat.

This is the moment when liberal paternalism breaks down.