Race panel discusses recent African-American deaths, grand jury decisions
Corinne LoweProfessors applauded the protests in the wake of Michael Brown’s and Eric Garner’s deaths in recent weeks, and clarified the practices and legal processes that help explain their deathsand the lack of indictment in a panel discussion on Thursday. Associate Professor of African American Studies Naomi Murakawa, Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs Kim Lane Scheppele and sociology professor at the Institute for Advanced StudiesDidier Fassin were on the panel. Fassin noted the significance of public discussion and protests that have occurred in past weeks that he contrasted with the “moral anesthesia” typical of the United States. “The most remarkable fact is that, for the first time for many years, the death of a black man has not remained buried in the news and public consciousness,” Fassin said. Fassin offered three major observations about the response to Brown’s and Garner’s murders: that the wave of protests is a rupture in the indifference to what police call “justifiable death,” that recent protests have been almost exclusively peaceful, and that the response is national, crossing color lines and social classes. Fassin also discussed how racial criminalization compares in other nations, comparing this incident to an incident in December 2005 in France in which two innocent black men were brutally killed by police after a theft had been committed in an area close to where they were walking.
