What Latinos can learn from Ferguson

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco

This is a tricky proposition, because it’s not only Latinos who can learn from the events in Ferguson. The causes of what we see now as an eruption of anger and racial tension aren’t specific to the Ferguson, Missouri, area. That’s because the things that sparked the shooting of an unarmed man and the string of protests and  reactions that followed are things that we’re familiar with: unemployment, lack of education, disconnected youth, a detached electorate, demographic changes. The militarization of a suburban police force made matters much worse.

Ferguson changed in the past twenty years.

Twenty years ago Ferguson was a White-majority suburb of St. Louis. It was quiet, because it was predictably suburban: white, affluent. Politics and society mirrored the predictability. But over the last two decades the white-majority population gave way to a black majority, the predictability changed as well. Most whites left town. But the structures remained the same: a white majority police force, and a clueless city government.

The new black majority was relegated to a community with dwindling finances, and sub-par schools. According to reporting by Vox, the majority-white Ferguson police force was burdened with carrying the budgetary load. Fines and tickets became a major revenue source for the city, and the majority-black population was footing the bill.

The pattern isn’t new.

What was left was a community where political power was disconnected and perpetuated because of low black voter turnout – poverty and low education are endemic and causes of low political participation. The lagging economy produced 50 percent unemployment among young black men. The gap between hope and opportunity became volatile, and the shooting of Michael Brown was a spark.

It could have been any city in the country where such disparities exist. Switch black for Latino and the patterns look and sound familiar.

What we’re seeing in Ferguson is an eruption of a situation that was ignored, just as it’s ignored in countless cities and towns across the country. It’s an injustice and a cautionary tale – deep unemployment, tragic under education, political disparities, and militarized police are a bad combination.

anaheim 2012But there’s more.

Just last week the news was filled with the problems in the Middle East. Militants in Gaza and the Israeli military were trading missiles and blame. And as quick as a finger snap our collective attention shifted. It’s as if nothing else in the world exists or is worthy of our media attention. Or maybe it’s that for all our flaunting about multi-tasking we can’t handle more than one hyped event at a time.

The legs will soon wear out from under this Ferguson story, not because we don’t care, but because there will be a scandal or another incident that’ll fill the drive-by  pages and minutes and Tweets and such that these days pass for deliberate debate.

There’s a lesson in that too. The problem doesn’t go away when the nightly news and your Twitter feed get bored with it.

Ferguson affects us all.

The problems that led to the tension and the eruption aren’t isolated.  There’s little difference between Ferguson today and Anaheim in 2012.

And the difference between Ferguson and the next incident will be what we’ve learned in the interim.

[Photos courtesy peoplesworldNoHoDamon/Flickr]

Subscribe today!

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Must Read