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Ferguson changed matters. It was an event that ruptured the illusion of another historic moment: the election of the nation's first black president.1 To be sure, national media and the country in general would have been transfixed by the protests and the police response whether there was a black man in the White House or not. The conflict made for good entertainment. But the fact of Obama's presidency, at least ideally, was supposed to signal the end of this kind of racial tension. Riots or urban rebellions were to become a permanent relic of the racial past; Obama's presence signified "our" wholesale inclusion in the body politic and the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of that America.
The shooting death of Michael Brown took place against the backdrop of a series of shootings and deaths of African Americans at the hands of the police (e.g., John Crawford, killed by police in a suburban Ohio Walmart, Eric Garner, choked to death by the New York police, Ezell Ford, allegedly shot in the back by Los Angeles police while laying on the ground, Marlene Pinnock, punched repeatedly by a Californian highway policemen, and host of other examples). Combined with the economic devastation of black communities since 2008 and attempts to disenfranchise black voters with voter identification laws, the police brutality in this instance and in all the video footage of police violence we have subsequently seen, revealed the precarious position of African Americans, particularly those of a certain class, in the United States. What was thought of as an historic event - the election of the first black president - turned out to be an illusion of novelty, one that aimed to reduce the story of black struggle to a sterile repetition of a liberal fantasy of getting rid of race and to narrow the range of legitimate black political behavior.2 Or put another way, our wholesale inclusion into mainstream American life required the suspension of the particular and persistent features of black misery. The story of the black freedom struggle became a constitutive feature of a general liberal consensus narrative and an affirmation of American exceptionalism. Yet, at every turn, African Americans confronted the brutal fact that the moment of Obama's election...