The only 'outside agitators' left in Ferguson are the white cops who don't live here

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/16/outside-agitators-ferguson-october-cops

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Thousands of people from around the nation have traveled here under the banner #FergusonOctober to protest the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. And while local citizens and politicians, visiting demonstrators and even media personnel have been subject to police confrontation since the earliest days of action, the latest round of demonstrations around the city have resulted in dozens of arrests – including those of Union Seminary professor Cornel West and African Methodist Episcopal pastor Renita Lamkin, who was also recently shot with a rubber bullet.

Although local organizations called for protestors to gather in St Louis last weekend, many in the press and general public are still questioning the presence and politics of what some – including Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson – have called “outside agitators”.

Some of us, however, are asking a radically different question: what and who, exactly, is an “outside agitator”? Because, depending on the definition, I might be considered one.

I first went to Ferguson in August with #BlackLivesMatter, a national movement that serves as a “response to the tragic history of racial supremacy – one that renders black life valueless”. We witnessed the tanks and teargas. We saw local police officers uniformed in military gear. The American midwest looked more like the Middle East, and 2014 felt more like 1964.

Just when it seemed like the mainstream media was done reporting on Ferguson, another black teenager from the St Louis area, Vonderrit Myers, was gunned down by an off-duty white police officer, enraging an already infuriated community and putting the area back in the spotlight. The entire nation – and much of the world – has its eyes on Ferguson, once again. And as police repression continues to increase, so do questions of who should be involved in the resistance to it.

“Outside agitator” rhetoric is far from new. In 1964, in the midst of Freedom Summer, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett called workers organizing voter registration drives “outside agitators”. A year earlier, when asked about the protests in Birmingham (referred to by many as “Bombingham”), the notorious Bull Connor blamed unrest in the city on “outside agitators led by Martin Luther King” – all while white police officers were hosing black children in the streets.

And though the specter of “outside agitators” was first raised by the Ferguson police, it is now articulated by people from both sides of the political divide. Conservatives use it to shift attention away from police brutality and state repression and focus instead on a few individuals they claim are inciting violence. Liberals, on the other hand, are legitimately concerned for the livelihood of Ferguson residents and their community.

But liberals’ allegiance to nonviolence renders the very idea of an “outside agitator” anathema. As a result, the peaceful protestor-outside agitator binary is used by those in power – across party lines – to legitimize state violence, perpetuate criminal stereotypes and, ultimately, prevent the possibility of a wider movement against police brutality, state repression and anti-black state violence.

If those in power can turn the youth and seasoned elders, pastors and paralegals who gathered in Ferguson this weekend into scary “outside agitators”, then the push to end police brutality will never grow beyond Ferguson. “Outside agitator” discourse, as authored and articulated by those in power, is a trap into which we who believe in freedom cannot fall.

The real question is not who belongs in Ferguson physically, but rather, who belongs in the fight that Ferguson now represents politically – that is, the struggle against police brutality and anti-black state violence.

As Dr King affirmed, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” What happens in Ferguson impacts us all, and we all have roles to play. The bullets that ended Michael Brown’s life emerged from the same system of anti-black violence that ends the futures of millions of black girls and boys across the US – be it through our failing school system, the growing prison industrial complex or any of the other structures of racial hierarchy that continually and systemically oppress black America.

As long as we allow the narrative of white supremacy to define the limits and possibilities of our resistance, we’ve already lost. But we can’t lose. As one of the world’s most well known “outside agitators”, Assata Shakur, reminds us: “It is our duty to win.” We must redefine what it means to be “outside” within a society that has historically rendered us outside the category of humanity itself. We must reconsider what it means to be named an “outside agitator” in a system whereby the very idea of blackness “agitates” – or disturbs – the “American dream”.

Within the gaze of white supremacy, all black people are potential “outside agitators”.

But through the eyes of black folk, from Ferguson to Flatbush, the real “outsider agitators” are the police officers who don’t live here but come in to “agitate” black people. The real “outside agitators” are the political leaders who work against our right freedom and justice. They have truly “agitated” black America.