Michael Brown: Race-Based Peonage Exposed

The shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown at the beginning of the month has revealed much that is shameful about how we live our lives here within the United States of America. All were witness to the St. Louis County peace officers' militarized, attack-oriented response to the spontaneous protests that erupted following the shooting. And all have had to come to terms with the inherent racism of a system that allows for a black-majority city like Ferguson to be policed by a nearly all-white law enforcement agency.

What I have found encouraging is that there has been very little defense in the mainstream media of our rotten, racist, militarized status quo. The evidence is too overwhelming to refute. People can be bamboozled about what goes on overseas, but it becomes more difficult to convince people of something that goes against their direct daily experience: in this case, that the police are angels of light and good order and there is no racial bias to found in our public places. Fox News, the few times I caught a glimpse of it, made some passes at playing "blame the victim," but it rang hollow. You could feel the skittishness emanating from the executive suites. You don't want to be perceived as lily white in a global marketplace that is multiracial; it is bad for business. If a television network goes too far in fomenting race hatred, an advertising boycott campaign can't be far behind.

A particularly illuminating story by Campbell Robertson and Joseph Goldstein, "In Aftermath of Missouri Protests, Skepticism About the Prospects for Change," appeared in the newspaper yesterday; it provides an accessible nuts and bolts explanation about how institutional racism works:

MAPLEWOOD, Mo. — On Monday night, just a few hours after Michael Brown was laid to rest, an amiable judge sat in the City Council chambers here and weighed in on the traffic violations and petty crimes, one by one, of more than a hundred people. At least two-thirds of those waiting were black, roughly a reverse racial image of the demographics of Maplewood itself. 

The scene was banal compared to the tear gas and outrage over the last two weeks in Ferguson, 13 miles away. But it is in courts like this that the daily frustrations that led in 

Young black men, who in many towns in St. Louis County are pulled over at a rate greater than whites, routinely find themselves in the patchwork of municipal courts here, without lawyers and unable to pay the fines levied for their traffic violations. Many end up being passed from jail to jail around the county until they can pay their fines and in some cases other administrative fees, a revenue source on which some towns are growing increasingly reliant.

“It angers people, because it seems like they’re just messing with you,” said Cameron Lester, a 22-year-old college student who knew Mr. Brown, and days earlier was protesting his death. He described how an unpaid $75 ticket once turned into days behind bars in two different police stations and hundreds of dollars in fees. He was skeptical about change. 

“Will it make a difference?” he asked. “Same thing as Trayvon Martin. Where’s that now?”part to the turmoil in Ferguson begin to fester.  

What Roberston and Goldstein describe is our present-day system of peonage, the way in which white supremacy was enforced in the South after the Civil War. Newly freed blacks were rounded up as "vagrants" and forced into involuntary servitude or contract labor. Southern states enshrined this in laws known as the "Black Codes."

As Robertson and Goldenstein explain the current version of the Black Codes begins with "driving while black." After a traffic citation is written, a no-show at court turns into an arrest warrant and additional penalties and fees:

That there is racial disparity in police stops is borne out by official numbers. 

In Maplewood, according to a 2013 report by the state attorney general, black motorists were searched or arrested during stops at more than twice the rate of whites. Yet searches of whites and blacks were almost equally likely to turn up contraband. Messages for the police chief in Maplewood were not returned. 

In the city of Hazelwood, blacks were twice as likely as whites to be searched during a police stop, and nearly three times as likely to be arrested, while searches of whites were about one and a half times as likely to yield contraband. 

City officials, pointing out that there is extensive training to avoid racial profiling, said these numbers cannot be interpreted without context.

“If our stops may reflect a higher percentage of people, perhaps that reflects the percentage of people who are coming through Hazelwood,” said Gregg Hall, the city’s police chief. 

Many of the towns have come to rely on court fines; in St. Ann, which has a population of around 13,000 and a 27-person jail, court fines and fees make up well over a third of the general fund revenues.

Matt Conley, the St. Ann city administrator, said that a rise in the number of tickets there came from a crackdown on speeding because of frequent accidents. 

“Nobody is forcing people to go out there and speed and commit traffic issues,” he said, adding that radar cameras cannot detect race. 

When a person fails to appear and pay, here as in many other places, a warrant is issued and that person’s license is suspended. In the hodgepodge of cities that make up St. Louis County, some drivers may have multiple warrants. In Ferguson, more than one and a half warrants have been issued for every resident. And as the warrants stack up, so do the fines: Not showing up to pay a $90 taillight violation means a failure-to-appear warrant with its own fee of $100 or more; each successive failure-to-appear warrant adds to that; and if there is a stop, there are incarceration fees and towing fees.

In the end, said Brendan Roediger, an assistant professor at St. Louis University Law School, a person who had trouble coming up with $90 might owe a jurisdiction well over a thousand dollars.

“The police aren’t actually pulling people over to find contraband,” he said. “They’re pulling people over to see if they have warrants. And they always do. If you run a system that ultimately makes every black person in your town have a warrant, then racial profiling does work.”

State Senator Jamilah Nasheed, who represents part of the city of St. Louis, said the racial disparity in traffic stops, the unwillingness of cities to consider ability to pay and the fact that small city budgets are increasingly reliant on court fines show how officials have learned to “sustain their municipalities by pulling young black men over.”

This is race-based peonage plain and simple, a system where involuntary servitude is used to maintain the local power structure:

Making the rounds,” the “muni-shuffle,” the “jail hop”: Talk to a young black man in northern St. Louis County and he knows what this is. When someone is stopped on a warrant in any of the municipalities in north St. Louis County, he knows he is going to jail everywhere he has a warrant for an unpaid traffic ticket. Whether the full amount of the fine — often in addition to hundreds of dollars in fees — is still due after a few days in jail is up to the judge. 

“You sit in jail for a week and you get out and you still owe it,” said Brandon Ghoston, 33, who works at a car dealership and has done the rounds himself. 

His brother, Nikos Chatman, who paints airplanes at the St. Louis Downtown Airport, has a ritual: “If I know I have warrants in five or six different places, and I get pulled over, the first thing I do is light a cigarette because I know I’m gone, I’m going to do the rounds.” 

“I’m 30 years old and I’ve never been locked up for anything but a traffic ticket,” Mr. Chatman added. “I’ve been locked up a lot of times.”

How to change a system that has been around basically for 150 years -- since the end of the Civil War? The prevalent line is always "Get out and vote." But winning elections, hard as that is, is not even half the struggle. Once the right people have been elected to office, you have to keep the voting public engaged in the change process; you have to keep the elected official(s) engaged; and you have to combat the push-back from the entrenched status quo, the abiding "deep state" of things.

As long as we have this simplistic, Cracker Jack cartoon vision of civic engagement -- "Vote the bums out! -- nothing will change.