I recently wrote that the critically important question the Ferguson, Missouri, story is asking us is this:
Who has the right to do what to whom?
And then I added,
As Rachel Maddow said when the protests at Ferguson got underway, imagine how the people cheering the police in Ferguson would have behaved during the Cliven Bundy standoff if the self-appointed militiamen aiming their guns at federal officers in Wyoming had been black men and not white men.
And now Heather Digby Parton asks the following question:
What do you suppose would happen to an agitated, belligerent African-American man wandering around on the street in his pajamas yelling at people, waving a gun around and telling police to shoot him?
As Digby points out, we know very well what St. Louis police did when Kajime Powell was standing on a street corner last month waving a steak knife, shouting, and asking to be shot: within 15 seconds after they arrived on the scene, two policemen shot Powell dead.
Powell was a black man.
As Digby says, compare/contrast how twelve police in Kalamazoo, Michigan, recently treated a drunken "open-carry" advocate walking around town waving a gun and raving, demanding to be shot.
A white man . . . .
