Marc Lamont Hill - Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

We hope you enjoyed reading this Atria Books eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Atria Books and Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

Thank you for downloading this Atria Books eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Atria Books and Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2016 by Marc Lamont Hill

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Atria Books hardcover edition August 2016

and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or .

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Interior design by Renato Stanisic

Jacket design by Jason Booher

Jacket photograph Ferguson October Koranteng Addo

Author photograph by Whitney Thomas

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-2494-5

ISBN 978-1-5011-2497-6 (ebook)

For the two Mikes who changed my life:

Michael Eric Dysonmentor, teacher, and dear friendwho placed before me an open door;

and

Michael Brown, who died on August 9, 2014, so that a new generation of Freedom Fighters could live.

T he ghost of Ralph Ellison hovers over this book. Ellison, of course, was the gifted twentieth-century writer, an African-American, author of Invisible Man . When that novel was released in 1952and released is the right verb, considering the out-of-the-gates energy it possessedit was described by one reviewer as a work of poetic intensity and immense narrative drive. Intensity and drive it certainly had. But it is the books central, contradictory image that, even sixty years later, lingers in the mind. Ellisons protagonist-narrator is, as the title tells us, both a man and invisible, there but not there, of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids who might even be said to possess a mind and who is yet invisible simply, as he says, because people refuse to see me.

Ellison died in 1994, having never again equaled the artistic or commercial success of his one undeniable masterpiece, and Invisible Man has been taught in high school English classes for decades, tamed now by time and history in a way that has dampened the books original incandescent rageexplained away, sadly, as not so much a great book as a great black book, and, at that, a relic of a time when segregation and bigotry were still firmly embedded in the social order. What a disarming thing it is, then, to think of Ellisons image reappearing to us now in what we tend to think of as a more enlightened era, and that it does so in conjunction with the deaths of so many African-Americans, victims of both State and what you might call vigilante violence. The names of the dead form a list that recites, especially in the black communities that lost them, like a rosary: Michael Brown, Jordan Davis, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin.

These were not the caricature criminals whom middle-class white Americans had been taught to fear, not the late twentieth centurys image of the superpredator hatched in academic corridors where studies predictedincorrectly, as it turned outa coming wave of rampant juvenile violence, and which was then picked up by politicians who formulated crime-prevention and incarceration policies as bulwarks against the coming tide. No, they were people whose crimesjaywalking, playing loud music, failing to signal a lane change, making eye contact with a police officer, selling loosies, fleeing a traffic citation, holding a realistic-looking toy gun, being a strangerwere surreally dissonant with their fates; ordinary people, for lack of a better term, more representative than exceptional, who were struggling through lives of quiet desperation, and they all are now dead.

In most of these cases, we know how and where they were killed, and even by whom they were killed. Why, we even have video. Cell phones and dashboard cameras have given us this strange artifact, part criminal evidence, part memorial evocation. You can go onto YouTube right now and watch the unarmed, fifty-year-old Walter Scott be shot eight times in the back as he lumbers away from North Charleston police officer Michael Slager, and you can watch it for as long as there is a YouTube. You can eavesdrop on Sandra Blands degrading encounter with Texas trooper Brian Encinia, see the moments right before Freddie Gray gets loaded into a paddy wagon for his fateful ride to the station house, or take in Eric Garners desperate cryI cant breatheas he is pinned to the ground by a Staten Island cop, even as we know that those will be Garners last words on this earth.

One feels guilty for watching these short, crudely rendered films, like gazing through a peephole onto some private pain, and yet we should be grateful to have seen them nonetheless. Not only do they serve as nearly incontrovertible evidence to be considered at trial but they raise our awareness of what has been going on long before the video camera became miniature, personal, and ubiquitous. This is the other side of the emerging surveillance society: now that everything we do is being watched, we can actually watch the things we do, and see them for what they are. For surely it is not that the fates of Sandra Bland and Walter Scott and Eric Garner are unusual or even exclusive to our time. It is, instead, that the cell phone has become social sciences microscope, permitting us to see daily life in atomistic detail, and as we do, old assumptions and standing narratives fall by the wayside. Watch, for instance, Officer Slager check Scotts pulse before apparently running to get his Taser and dropping it by the victims dead bodythe better, one presumes, to illustrate the falsehood that he had been forced to kill him in a fight over his weapon. Had Feidin Santana, a young Dominican barber, not been strolling by on his way to work and raised his cell phone to record the scene, we would be primed to accept such a story. (Scott, after all, isnt here to contradict the officer.) But just think, now, about how many generations of Michael Slagers we have believed and how many Walter Scotts we have buried in the cold mist provided by such fictions.

Marc Lamont Hills take on all of this goes beyond the easy or predictable analysis. Too often in response to these events we have heard the chagrin that 150 years after the Civil War, fifty years after the Civil Rights Act, eight years after the election of our first black president, racism still motivates too much of what we do. Of course that is true. Who among us is nave enough to believe otherwise? But to see these events as nothing more than the vestiges of a persistent racial antagonism is to misunderstand them. Doing so would only confirm a simplistic remedy, one heard repetitively in political rhetoriceven, one might add, in the rhetoric of that first black presidentthat argues that while the nation has made great progress in race relations, we still have a lot of work to do . Okay, but precisely what is that work, and how will it differ from the work we have already done?