'We're Like Animals To Them': An American City's Daily Racism

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/residents-of-ferguson-struggle-with-daily-racism-a-987986.html



The slaying of an 18-year-old African-American man in Ferguson, Missouri, shows that racism and racial profiling remain a serious everyday problem in some parts of America. Some worry things will never change.

'We're Like Animals To Them': An American City's Daily Racism
By Markus Feldenkirchen
August 26, 2014 – 12:58 PM

As they pull up to the place where Michael Brown was killed, shot six times by a policeman, they sink to the ground and stare at a cross bearing his name.

"I don't get it," says Jurmael, 22. He and Tyler, 21, live in the neighborhood. Like Brown, they are African Americans and are close to his age. "I do get one thing though," Tyler says. "The name on the cross could just as well be one of ours."

Michael Brown was stopped on Canfield Drive by a white officer for the same reason that people are stopped everyday by the police. Roberts and Greer even have a name for the "offense" -- a common one in Ferguson, Missouri: "WWB," "Walking while black." Every black person living in Ferguson knows the meaning of the abbreviation because it is a constant part of their lives.

Persistent Racism

It took the shooting of 18-year-old Brown on August 9, a young man who was unarmed, before anyone took an interest in the everyday reality of the city's African-American population and their demoralizing harassment by the police. It also took this tragedy before people began to ask an important question: Why does a city whose population of 21,000 is two-thirds African American have a police force that is 95 percent white? And why, a half-century after Martin Luther King, Jr. launched the civil rights campaign and the end of segregation, are African-Americans still complaining today about persistent racism?