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Thank you for creating space for this conversation, Alice.

As your final paragraph points out, part of the harm is that these stories persist in painting Black communities as deficient. It is angering to see the media attempt to portray Mike Brown as a criminal, and it is angering to see other sources attempt to portray him as an exception to the rule. It does not matter what kind of person he was; he surrendered, and he was shot. If our collective response to the tape of the convenience store robbery is to say, "Well, this explains everything" -- which, it seems, is how the media expects us to respond -- then we have no right to claim to live in a democracy.

The first Facebook comment brings to mind something that has been itching at me for several days. India's Independence Day was August 15th, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a speech. In it, he described the recent spate of sexual assaults as a "national shame" and, unlike many Indian politicians in the past, he placed the blame squarely on perpetrators of assaults, not the victims. He urged parents of sons to take responsibility for teaching them right from wrong. Many Indian feminists applauded him for his speech, but others remain skeptical. At the beginning of this summer, anti-rape protestors in Kerala were arrested for "indecent exposure" when they wrapped themselves in banners with slogans speaking out against the lynching of two teenage low-caste girls in Uttar Pradesh. The genocidal brutality directed at low-caste and Dalit bodies is never broadcast in the international media, but it happens every day -- we just have to pay attention. The party that Modi represents is both directly and indirectly implicated in the torture, rape, and murder of non-Hindu bodies, from the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992 to the Gujarat riots in 2002 to the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. The rise of Hindutva can be traced back to British colonial re-fashioning of Hinduism as a religion with inflexible rules so that a legal system could be built upon it; additionally, the media portrayal of interreligious conflict in South Asia as a fateful clash between equal aggregators is also a reflection of the ways in which British officials painted non-Christian religions as instigators of violence and a consequence of the ways in which colonialism set communities up to fail.

It is absolutely the same scenario in the U.S. Mike Brown's murder is part of a larger historical pattern of genocidal violence that targets Black bodies, families, and communities. I urge people who are responding to the onslaught of posts about Ferguson in their feeds with accusations of internet "slacktivism" to rethink their criticism. If it weren't for social media, this case wouldn't even be scratching the front page of "legitimate" media, which it is barely managing to do anyway. If hearing news about Mike Brown or Ferguson annoys us, then we aren't really hearing the news at all. Now is the time to turn up the volume and tune into what's being said.