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For days, large swaths of the U.S. and the globe waited to hear
whether or not the grand jury would indict Office Darren Wilson. For a
week, Missouri governor Jay Nixon had declared a state of emergency,  calling out the National Guard to “maintain peace and protect those exercising their right to free speech.” Today, he repeated the same message.

 

“Together we are all focused to make sure that the necessary
resources are at hand to protect lives, to protect business and to
protect free speech.”

Given the record of arrests by Ferguson police of protestors and
reporters, Nixon’s message was fairly simple to translate: he
anticipated—correctly–that the grand jury would not indict Darren
Wilson. Nixon’s fear was that in such a case, Black Americans’ ire at
that decision would explode in violence and potentially violate the
lives, businesses, and “free speech” not of black protestors, but of
white denizens. Nixon hadn’t said it, but his assumption of violence
reinscribed the assumption of Black madness, of the lack of rationality.
“Protest” could only be irrational, because it would challenge the
“natural order of things,” to paraphrase 17th century French economist
François Quesnay. In his very actions, he all but indicated, what most
of us knew and feared—that the grand jury would not indict Darren
Wilson. And for Nixon, the Ferguson police, and the white residents of
Ferguson that is as it should be.

The natural order, for Gov. Nixon, is one in which police violence
will continue to be seen as “stopping criminals,” and preserving
“freedom” for the whites of Ferguson. In the meantime, the Black
citizens of Ferguson and their supporters across the globe will ascribe
an enormous, though rather different, symbolism to the verdict: no
indictment confirms the continued absence of legal—and indeed, moral
justice.

Yet, it is hard to imagine that even had the grand jury indicted,
that their decision would have much of an effect on the institutional,
deeply-embedded problem of state-endorsed, police-led racial violence in
Ferguson, St. Louis, or anywhere else in the U.S.

The indictment itself is supposed to be an indication of whether
there appear to be sufficient grounds for putting Wilson on trial. In
the event that the grand jury had indicted, a trial itself, guaranteed
to be a long arduous process, would most likely not have had a very
satisfactory outcome. In the even more unlikely—and far away—case that
the trial were to have found Wilson to be guilty of having killed Brown
unjustly, at most, one police officer would have been convicted for one
act. A guilty legal verdict, in effect, would have been just that: a
lone legal verdict in one case involving one Black teenager and one
white police officer.