This is why we can’t have nice things. Not because they are taken from us. Or hidden from us. Or placed behind a thousand-foot wall we can’t scale. Nope, sometimes black people can’t have nice things because we steadfastly, inexcusably, sabotage ourselves with apathy and ignorance.
These results are disgraceful, inexcusable and ultimately frightening. The entire black population of metro St. Louis is in the sunken place, and I don’t think even Rod of the T – S – Mutha&^% – A could get them out.
James Knowles, a 37-year-old white man who’s been in office for the last seven years, has now won three elections for mayor of Ferguson and two elections since the unrest and protests in the fall of 2014 over the killing of Brown. There are more than 24,000 registered voters in Ferguson, and the city’s population is more than 70 percent African American.
Ella Jones, who was elected to the City Council in 2015 running on a platform of forcing local police to keep cameras on at all times, demographically and statistically should have won this election going away. And yet …
Ferguson mayor’s race:
Ella Jones: 1,467 votes 43.7 percent
James W. Knowles III: 1,889 votes 56.3 percent
With 100 percent of precincts voting, a total of 3,356 people voted. There are no reports of massive voter intimidation, fraud or ballot-stealing. The people in Ferguson either don’t know, don’t show or don’t care about who runs their city. What’s worse is that given the disproportionate number of African-American voters in Ferguson, even if every white person voted for James Knowles, he still probably got about 40 percent of the black vote in order to win.
“Yeah, people didn’t like how he handled Ferguson, but he helped get that 100-year-old tree moved from their backyard, or got them a waiver to build something on their house,” Chappelle-Nadal said.
Chappelle-Nadal argues that despite the oppressive violence and white supremacy that is apparent in Ferguson, the black community needs to come up with a better candidate strategy. Poverty, environmental justice and a living wage need to be integrated into messaging about police reform.
There is some context to Chappelle-Nadal’s assessment. The ingredients are all there: Years of collusion between white Democrats and Republicans, gerrymandering, voter suppression and inept black leadership have baked a humble pie of passive black voters in and around St. Louis. Ferguson in particular had little history of protest before Mike Brown’s death. Basic strategies like get-out-the-vote and effective messaging are still a challenge.
However, the history of Ferguson can only go so far in justifying apathy. While Ella Jones may not have been the most inspiring candidate, does that mean James Knowles’ milquetoast rhetoric was inspiring? At some point, black folks have to become their own catalysts for freedom and reform. If you have to be “inspired” to vote against a mayor who twiddled his thumbs while Mike Brown’s dead body lay in the street for hours, maybe you don’t really deserve justice. That’s not how liberation works. That’s not how any part of democracy works.
A day before the Ferguson election, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he was basically going to rescind almost every police consent decree across the United States. This is at the same time that St. Louis County, where Ferguson is, just passed an $80 million measure to put more cops on the street. Would another state-sponsored killing of an unarmed black man be enough to inspire local voters to turn out and take control of their own political lives in Ferguson? Probably not. Some people are trying, but there aren’t enough of them. Some people don’t want to be saved.
This article originally appeared online at The Root.