The music is an implicit conversation about the conjoined legacies of slavery, segregation, police brutality and other hideous injustices that our society doesn't care to solve.
The deeper causes of the riot were high levels of frustration, resentment, and anger that had been created among African Americans by unemployment and underemployment, persistent and extreme poverty, racism and racial segregation, police brutality, and lack of economic and educational opportunities.
When not dreaming up new kinds of censorship, under the guise of safe-space protection or trigger warnings, students are reviving blasphemy laws, defending pre-Philip Larkin-era sex segregation, piously policing the language so as not to upset local sectarians – objecting vehemently to words and acronyms that their politically correct parents had been assured were one hundred per cent acceptable.
They have also been immunized, relatively speaking, from the systemic, routine and often lethal violence exercised by the state against the black community -- not just episodes of individual killing, but the institutionalized violence of residential segregation, educational segregation, job discrimination, policing and mass incarceration.
We are either pro-apartheid, checkpoints, walls, segregation, militarized policing, sensational media, industrialized prisons, displacement, the bombing of human beings, acts of senseless murder or... not?
Needless to say, the criticism the United States is receiving from abroad touches on controversial, all-too-familiar domestic themes: racism, inequality, segregation, and police brutality.
It's just that there are certain events that remind us of yesteryear--Ferguson's segregation-era policing tactics, for example.
But Milwaukee has a unique history of segregation and police brutality––one that residents describe as setting the stage for rioting and violence.
It has been heightened by White fear of non-white people, residential and school segregation, a police culture that allows officers to act outside the law, calls for increased security since September 2001, and the supplying of military equipment to local police forces.
Nobody can agree on the riots' underlying causes, which include joblessness, segregation, hard-line policing, discrimination, drug mafias and a lack of parental control especially, according to one outspoken minister, in polygamous families.
With that as the backdrop, it's no wonder that Ferguson -- already troubled with inequality, segregation, and unfair policing -- was the town that eventually burned.
