Failure of personal responsibility does not explain Ferguson

Last week, during the release of the Justice Department report on policing and municipal court practices in Ferguson, Mo., Attorney General Eric Holder said that the police there had fostered a “highly toxic environment” of racism and misconduct that turned the city into a “powder keg.” The investigation found that in “nearly every aspect of Ferguson’s law enforcement system,” African-Americans were impacted by a severely disproportionate amount by the system built upon using arrest and incarceration to squeeze money out of residents in order to raise revenue for the cash-strapped city.

Notably during the investigation, when asked to account for these policies and practices, incredibly, some city officials said that black residents of Ferguson lacked “personal responsibility” and this explained the race-based and systemic violations of rights outlined in the report.

{mosads}Though surprising, the reality is that far too frequently, too many of us consider the act of talking about structural racism — analyzing it, discussing it or just pointing out that it exists — to be racist in and of itself. As a result, when black people point out racism, or racism is pointed out by others, a default response is to say that the problem can most easily be solved by the victims, who just need to change their beliefs, thinking and behavior. They need to take personal responsibility. There is nothing about those claims to which the structure need respond.

Just consider that late in 2014, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof ran a series of data-laden columns explaining the inequality gap between blacks and whites called “When Whites Just Don’t Get It.” When interviewed by a reporter from The Washington Post about the responses he had received, he said he was surprised by how frequently his readers urged him to focus more on the fact that blacks needed to stop blaming others for racism and to start taking personal responsibility for their behavior, focusing less on so-called inequality or racism.

In regard to Ferguson, the Justice Department said its investigation found no evidence to support assertions of a failure of personal responsibility on the part of black residents in the town as explanation for the abuses outlined in the 105-page document. On the contrary, their investigation “revealed African Americans making extraordinary efforts to pay off expensive tickets for minor, often unfairly charged, violations, despite systemic obstacles to resolving those tickets.” Nonetheless, officials did find that “some Ferguson decision makers hold negative stereotypes about African Americans, and lack of personal responsibility is one of them.”

In the days since the report was released, Ferguson Mayor James Knowles has responded, saying that the Justice Department report was not “proof” of widespread race-based abuses in the city and city officials have fired one person, a city clerk, while two others have resigned — both police officers. They did so because they were found to have shared racially derogatory and inflammatory emails with each other and others. However, the mayor and the chief of police remain employed.

Critique of race-based structural inequality is not hate speech. Anti-black bias does exist, and disconnected independent action of individuals on either side of the bias is not the cause of oppression. It’s time we took personal responsibility off the table as the sole or even most important response to systemic racism.

Rooks is an associate professor in Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, Sexuality Studies at Cornell University.