“Ferguson Police just executed my unarmed son.”

Michael Brown’s stepfather, Louis Head, holds a sign.

Stacia L. Brown has a powerful piece on the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was killed by a police officer in a St. Louis suburb while walking unarmed down the street on Saturday afternoon. 

I don’t want to think of who will go out on her hands and knees to scrub what’s left of the boy’s blood from the concrete. It will probably be a loved one, her hands idle after hours of clenching them into fists, watching what used to be her breathing boy lie lifeless, as she waited and waited and waited for the police and the coroner and the county to get their stories straight and their shit together and their privilege, sitting crooked as a ten-dollar wig, readjusted till it was firmly intact. All that time they spent, just primping, just holding their whiteness and authority up as mirrors for one another, tuning out the cries of a mourning community — or garbling them, rather. Did they say, “Kill the police?!” As long as that’s the way you heard it, they did. And that is what AP will wire out to every mainstream news outlet who can be bothered to report the death of another unarmed black son on a Saturday night.

Their truth is not our truth.

Daughter, I said I didn’t have it in me to sit with the murder of Michael Brown last night and comb my social media accounts for first-hand anecdotes that would likely be more accurate than anything the news stations would report. I didn’t want to watch the Vines or read the Instagram messages under a photo collage of police presence at the crime scene, wailing friends and neighbors, the boy’s father holding up a scrap of cardboard scrawled with, “Ferguson Police just executed my unarmed son,” and the barely covered body of the boy himself.

But I stayed up anyway, because his neighbors had not gone home. They had held vigil and recorded and tweeted and planted their feet as a helicopter shone floodlight into their faces and a tank rolled into their apartment complex and barely restrained dogs bared their teeth and growled like they were hoping to be sicced.

The residents of Ferguson, Missouri who came out to protest Brown’s death this weekend are all too used to racial profiling by the police. Black drivers there are twice as likely to be searched and arrested as white drivers. While the media inevitably focuses on the looting and violence that led to more than 30 arrests on Sunday night, community members gathered again this morning outside the police department in a peaceful protest with some clear demands for justice: that the officer who shot Brown be fired, that the department’s protocol handbook be distributed through the community, and that the police force reflect the racial demographics of the city.

Maya Dusenbery is an Executive Director of Feministing.