Was Big Mike Suppose To Be A Surgeon (or Michael, An Angel)?

I wish I could not relate so easily to young black men who find themselves in the predicament that Michael Brown Jr. found himself that fateful day he left to become Michael, an angel. 

I aint sayin’ he was an angel during his lifetime.  He was human, and he’s likely the kid on the video who "strong-armed" those cigarillos, which are cigars that are used for rolling blunts (marijuana joints rolled with cigar skins). 

Reasonable accounts have Michael Brown Jr. and Dorian Johnson stealin’ and thuggin’ the day Darren Wilson took Brown Jr's life.  It’s something I might have done myself on some level or another growing up in places that make you choose one path  versus the other.  I have certainly seen it live and in living color on many occasions.  For many inner city youth, you either follow those who are stealin’ and thuggin’ or you follow those who are mackin’ and hangin’.  I was not properly suited for either endeavor, so I avoided both and settled on the more traditional route of sports and school, but so did Michael Brown Jr.  To graduate high school means you shunned enough distractions to make it through. He did no less than any high school kid does in the end; he survived and got a diploma and was scheduled to continue his education.

And then the real tug-o-war began.

The world is a scary place and life will be challenging under the best of circumstances.  Every hood in America is basically the same. On one corner they are mackin’ and hangin’ and on the other they are stealin’ and thuggin'. Young black men who live in really tough areas have a duty to insure that they maintain a tough exterior, even if they would prefer to only do the mackin’ and hangin’ instead of the stealin' and thuggin' that Michael Brown Jr. looked to be doing just before he was shot down in the street.  Black men who reject both directions learn how to play act either role for survival sake. If the streets know you are aspiring to do more than these hopeless endeavors, the streets will make every attempt to keep you near.

There simply is no way to question the obvious fear that America has for black men, especially young and dark and big like Michael Brown Jr.  Black men fear one another too.  Turns out that growing up as a young black man is so difficult, you never know who is handling the task very well, so you have to be ready to deal with an angry black man at all times....especially if you are one.  WE understand black male fear because WE live in it.

The oddest part about facing a scary world is that some folks decide it’s easier to be scary instead of scared.  On some level or another, we all assume this survival posture in life, but few of us do it in such a way to incite felony convictions or gunfire. If you are an inner city black man, avoiding felony convictions or gunfire is a magic trick of sorts. It’s not impossible to pull off, but demands more energy than anybody who is not a black man quite understands. Growing up naturally insures mistakes. A world that is inclined to see you as a villain is apt to think you are doing something wrong, even when you're not. People who prefer to label only work to prove themselves right. Incarceration trends have not matched crime for 40 years.

This story demands speculation and it is often unfair to do much speculation, but Michael Brown Jr., much like Trayvon Martin, has risen above his own name and become the symbol of what many poor American’s have said about bad cops for years.  Seldom, if ever, are bad cops convicted for the crimes they commit against regular citizens, so to expect differently is foolish.  Darren Wilson will likely walk, or he will be given a charge of manslaughter and suspended jail time that won’t satisfy the angry.  If he actually goes down for Murder 2 and see's real time, this statue becomes a  monument that is higher and more significant than any of us have seen thus far in this age-old debate.

Michael Brown Jr. is the new and improved Trayvon Martin because the evidence, especially witnesses, have elevated this beyond simple supposition.  This is probability at its finest, and it is probable that we will have all of the pertinent facts necessary to achieve a necessary conviction…….yet we still must preserve the sanctity of policing by not trying to heap years of oppression onto the back of Darren Wilson.

We (I’m talking to my black folk now) should prepare ourselves for the necessity of leniency. On that special day when the police force becomes 67% black in Ferguson because the city is 67% black, those 67% will be YOUR friends and family members burdened with the challenge of policing desperate populations in their area.  One day the news report is of the lost life of a citizen, and tomorrow it is the lost life of an off duty police officer who stepped in to calm young folks who decided thuggin’ at a Jazz festival in Denver City park is a great way to flex your muscle. Not at all the same topic, but young black men are dying at the hand of a lot of bullets and the residual casualties are making the whole issue harder to ignore.

Michael Brown Jr. should have never lost his life, but neither should have Celena Hollis of the Denver police force. I only mention her because when I think of anger towards police, I remember Celena Hollis and her family.  Darren Wilson has a family too.

Is one death more emblematic of a bigger societal problem? Probably!

Yet, if we cause the best of our society to stop sacrificing themselves to the demands of law enforcement, what kind of new societal problem will we experience?  Police are something nobody seems to like except everybody that needs one.  I can only imagine how frustrating these days must be to the good cops of Ferguson; having to listen to the anger of some the same people they had to rescue prior to the death of Michael Brown Jr.

I am not an advocate of disrupting the sanctity of policing, not even for Michael Brown Jr.  The spirit tells me that we won’t have to because Michael Brown Jr., like Trayvon Martin is a flash point to a greater, long overdue discussion.  Our angels for change. Michael Brown Jr. told his grandpa that the world would know him one day, and he was right.

SquareBiz stands committed to this discussion and all of America’s important conversations that we have yet to seriously start or sensibly finish.  Rodney King was the first of this kind; modern day police brutality caught on camera.  While we do not have actual footage of the Brown Jr. shooting,  eye witness and forensic evidence caused nearly two weeks of street protests and rare federal oversight.  Fortunately for Rodney, he lived and L.A. recovered from the destruction it experienced when the cops got off.  Unfortunately for America, the discussion did not live, as it only revealed how opposed many of us were over the latitude we believe policing demands and how this flexibility has disproportionately smacked the hell out of brown skinned people. Quickly, we retreated into our respective corners only to pretend that this was not a fight worth having. After all, Rodney lived.  

Michael Brown Jr. did not live, but will his memory die as well?

We have had our head violently yanked from the sand on this one, but despite oxygen deprivation, it seems we often prefer to shove our head back where it came.  Eyewitness testimony may be inspiring the black president and his black Attorney General to move with haste, but the Ferguson mayor, Missouri governor and every presidential candidate who could be forced to oversee America’s future conversations on race have been slow and silent, much like racial progress. It’s rather easy to alter the face of racism by turning your back on it, but in doing so, you have done little to affect historical change and nothing to lead the change that’s needed today. If leaders chose only to speak on the importance of respecting our good cops during these angered moments, that would have value. Silence is a message of another kind.

If we slap a chest camera on every officer in America is that the license to continue the silent delusion that community policing was not the solution to begin with?  Cities that have implemented chest cam’s have seen up to 80% reductions in violent policing, but have they seen a change in attitude? Integrating will help, but does that ultimately mean more cops, of whatever color, and more jails?  Breaking the tragic cycles of life and prejudice that result in incarceration (or death by cop) should be the greater goals that we look to gain from the senseless loss of another young black man, but even that places the wrong focus on this issue.  Michael Brown Jr., good, bad or in between should not have been shot that day, so the idea of mentoring, as suggested by the president’s My Brother’s Keeper comments, lends itself to the notion that mentoring could have saved the life of Michael Brown Jr. Six foot four, big black and scary, Michael  Brown Jr. needed a cop who saw his own son, and not some menace to society. America needs this too.

If Wilson killed Brown Jr. without knowing about the video............ (Why do we have this video in the first place?)

What mentoring could have done is offered a summer program for college credit that Brown Jr. could have been attending instead of stealin’ and thuggin’, and walking in the middle of the street to go do some mackin’ and hangin'. Seeing a non-athletic, scary black man in college is a visual mentoring of its own kind.  In this case, mentoring could have only forced this awful plight on some other black family, at a different time and place, to watch their loved one become the poster child for police brutality run amok. At the rate of death to young black men by insensitive white cops, this day was inevitable, which also means that some other innocent family of the killer cop would be dealing with whatever the family of Darren Wilson is dealing with in St. Louis. God Bless both families during this trying time. 

I know that my white neighbor, the surgeon, did not call it stealin’ and thuggin’ when he too behaved like Michael Brown Jr. as a kid, despite a much more privileged life than Brown Jr., but he always shakes his head when he thinks about how awful, and how fortunate he was given his travails while coming of age. Imagine the outcry if he'd been killed by police while doing some of the same stuff black kids die for all of the time?

Which lead me to wonder. Could Big Mike have become a world famous surgeon, or was he always destined to be an angel named Mike?