How A Young Black Male's Life In Missouri Collides With An Asian Male's Life In North Carolina

This blog was published in the Chapel Hill News on August 22, 2014.  Click here for the link to the published article:

Michael Brown and Feng Liu: When Worlds Collide

On the surface, the connection between the tragic deaths of Ferguson County Missouri youth Michael Brown and UNC-Chapel Hill professor Feng Liu appears far-reaching if nonexistent.  It is a lot easier to draw a connection between the perpetrators who are charged in the senseless and horrendous murder of Professor Liu—Troy Arrington and Derrick Davis—and Michael Brown, the victim of what appears to be a brutal killing by a law enforcement officer.  These three young men—Michael, Troy and Derrick—although on opposite sides of two tragic events—share several important characteristics:  they are black males; they don’t appear to have come from affluent families; and neither appeared to have prestigious jobs (or any job for that matter) or were in positions of high stature in their communities.  Whereas, Dr. Feng Liu—an Asian male, who from all accounts had a distinguished career, was relatively affluent and  held in high esteem by his community of family, friends and colleagues.  Liu by many tangible measures lived in a world far from that known to or experienced by Arrington, Davis and Brown. 

So how can the claim be made that Brown and Liu’s tragedies collide or connect in any way? For starters, at the root of both tragedies lies the danger of perception —the way you think about or understand something or someone.  The way black males collectively are perceived and the stereotypes that emerge from those perceptions besmirch the identities of black males with little discrimination on an individual level. Scholars across disciplines (i.e. sociology, education, public health, psychology,  criminal justice) have produced voluminous findings providing credible evidence to suggest that Black males in America, more often than not, are perceived as violent, uncivilized, predatory, hypersexual and feral by nature.

From the sensationalized character “Mandingo” with his super-sized phallus to the merciless killer and drug-slinging villain Nino Brown in the movie New Jack City—these negative and degrading images of black males are pervasive and overshadow as well as shade reality.  The major problem with perpetuating and using these images as the main-frames or norm for black male identities is that they become the glue that holds together a social structure whereby black males are viewed as diabolic  “others”  and therefore are a threat, dispensable and underserving of equal protection under the same laws that protect “the rest of us,” more precisely white Americans.  (I won’t go into a long discourse providing historical and scholarly references to support this claim but for those who are truly interested they should consult or read the published works of Dr. Michael Eric Dyson (Georgetown University), Dr. Ron Mincy (Columbia University) or Duke professors Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, Dr. Sandy Darity and Dr. Eduardo Bonilla Silva, to mention a few.)

Police officers and citizen vigilantes who take on the role as law enforcers, kill black youth, in particularly black males like Mike Brown, Jonathan Ferrell, Sean Bell, Trayvon Martin, and Jordan Davis for starters because they can with little fear of retribution in a society that by its inaction in correcting these ill contrived perceptions of the “super predatory black males” has given them the red light to act based on their perceptions.  Another reason black males are killed with little fear of retribution is because the social structures buttress social institutions that reflect and perpetuate the idea that black males’ lives are of little significant value to the progress of society.  Both of these assumptions coalesce to create the perfect social climate where the final life outcome a young black male in Missouri can collide with the final life outcome of a distinguished research professor in Chapel Hill North Carolina. In one case you have a young black male who became the victim of a law enforcement officer who perceived his life as having no worth or rights worth protecting.  In the other case you have a professor who was the victim of young black males who no doubt internalized the perception of having no value to society and therefore saw no value in preserving the life of another.

Until we can see the social facts surrounding both of these tragic cases as being interrelated and begin to seriously address the structural and systemic problems that continue to widen the gulf between the two Americas –white and affluent—colored and poor—we will continue to witness both of these sad and tragic stories play out in our local communities and on the national level.