Broken City

They called from Spain. They had been watching TV and the first question that spilled from their lips was: “What the hell is going on in St. Louis?”

My city is broken.

It didn’t break when Michael Brown fell lifeless to the asphalt. It didn’t break when the first rock shattered the store-front window. It didn’t break with the first canister of tear gas fired into an angry crowd.

It has been broken for a very long time.

Nobody seemed to notice although it’s painfully obvious, like a fractured radius sticking out through the skin. In nearly every chain restaurant, the patrons are white, the servers are black. White people stay in our hotels; brown people clean them. In a city where less than 30% of its citizens are white, over 94% of the police force is.

A few months ago, the garage door opener was swiped from my car, so I called the local police station to report it. I’m not even kidding, three minutes later there was an officer at the door to take my statement. Three minutes. St. Louis has statistically one of the highest crime rates in the country but where I live, the cops apparently have quite a bit a free time.

Of course, I don’t live in the ghetto anymore. All the brown people in my neighborhood live in my house. Most St. Louisans shrug off the crime stats when out of town friends and relatives bring it up. It’s no big deal, we say. Everyone knows where the bad areas are, we say. We don’t go to those areas.

Those areas.

Where all those black people live.

That’s the part we don’t say. We don’t say it out loud or someone might notice how racist we are.

And boy are we ever. As soon as the Michael Brown story broke, black people bemoaned another unarmed young man shot down like a dog in the streets; white people started lining up to defend the cop. Exactly zero of these people knew what had really happened yet everyone had already decided that all policemen are violent gestapo bullies or that gangster thug probably deserved it.

I don’t blame anyone’s reaction. It is a symptom of our brokenness.

My city has been broken for a long time and now everyone in the whole world knows it.

It doesn’t really matter why Michael Brown got shot. It doesn’t matter if the cop was justified in pulling the trigger. It doesn’t matter if the courts review all the details of this case and deliver a ruling with perfect justice. And it will continue to not matter until the next Michael Brown is born with just as much chance of ending up an accountant or a lawyer as ending up in prison or dying violently.

50 years have passed since the Civil Right Act but we have still systematically and intentionally stacked the deck against young black men. I know, many of them overcome the odds and become very successful. But you know what’s better than overcoming the odds? Not being set up to fail in the first place.

Americans don’t like to talk about racism or our less than virtuous past. Maybe if we ignore it, it won’t be real. Maybe if we pretend it’s all good, it will give minorities the space they need to get over it. Sure.

I heard a man speak about giving a seminar on the death penalty to a group of Germans. One German lady told him that they do not have the death penalty in Germany. With their history, they could never have a State sponsored system of executing people. The speaker went on to ask us to imagine if Germany did have a death penalty. And to imagine if they executed a disproportionate number of Jews. Would that not make everyone really uncomfortable?

We are a country that once owned people. My home state of Missouri entered this fair union as a slave state. The great grandparents of the protesters in Ferguson were kept in chains and counted as less than human (3/5 of a human to be exact). Should it not make us profoundly uncomfortable to see a white police force and a white mayor as authorities over a black city? Should it not disturb us that a disproportionate number of black people are locked up in our prisons? Maybe these things are not inherently problematic in and of themselves, but with our history…maybe they are.

Racism exists, prevalently; the wounds of slavery, lynchings and segregation are real and unhealed. That is where we are.

That doesn’t mean we must stay here.

Healing can happen. It begins with forgiveness, asking and giving. It begins with honestly acknowledging our past. It begins when we stand up for justice - not fairness, but real, biblical Justice: being a voice for those who have none.

Healing can happen. Someday my city won’t be broken anymore.

Won’t that be a great day?