- What happened in Ferguson
set people ablaze around this country,
particularly this generation,
because they, unlike ever before,
had to witness their mortality.
(soft music)
Well, I'm F. Willis Johnson,
I am, by day, a pastor of a church in Ferguson, Missouri,
the Wellspring Church.
I also teach and instruct at some area seminaries
and I'm just another guy. (laughing)
- Just another guy, just another guy
that happened to be either in the right place
or the wrong place when Michael Brown was shot.
That shooting happened just jogging distance
from your parish. - Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, the crazy thing about it Matt, real quick,
is that that happened early in the afternoon
on August 9th, on a Saturday.
And most people became aware of that
immediately through social media.
I remember getting, kinda getting buzzed,
whether through Facebook or through some text messages,
and unfortunately, I didn't pay
a whole lot of attention to it.
It was kind of a Sabbath day, or day
to be with my family, but also, more importantly,
those types of things happen so often
that I think we've sometimes become numb.
It's not unusual to have a shooting.
It's not unusual to have a police-involved shooting.
It's not even unusual for there to be tragedy
associated with that, or with that kind of occurrence.
But the magnitude of it, being immediately in our space,
and then later, coming home into our community
and what transpired, drew me.
Not as a practitioner or
a priest, but just 'cause, as somebody that lives,
and I heard the noise.
And once was there, knew that this was more
than just one young person.
This was a group of young people
who I think had realized their own mortality.
- You said that the first time
that you were in the streets with protestors
was in front of the police station
where students had gathered.
Talk a little bit about that experience.
- Well, on that night, August 9th,
throughout the day, most of the young people
had been stationed at Canfield.
That's why they were there, they lived in that community.
Obviously, many may know the account
that officers left the young man lying in the street
for many, for much of the time, initially, uncovered.
And let no one touch him, not even let
his own family come near him.
Eventually, he was covered,
but even then, he was not removed.
And so, you're talking about three or four hours,
minimum, for some of these young people,
who then took their grievance and their frustration
from West Florissant over to the police station,
municipality, which is on South Florissant or Ferguson,
and that's a half a block from my church
and my house, bookend.
And so, I heard the noise.
I heard the hollering,
and went out initially just to see what was happening.
Of course, when I did, I said,
I told my wife, "I'll be back."
I went out.
And I didn't go out there to pray with anybody.
I didn't go out there to,
I didn't do anything that you learn
in chaplaincy school or, it wasn't anything.
It was literally like, what's going on?
'Cause this had now become something significant,
and the young people were like,
we're not leaving till we talk to somebody.
And I was like, "They not tryin' to talk to y'all."
This place is on lockdown, they were like,
we're not leaving, and so I said,
"I think I might be able to help
"at least see if someone will come out
"or if you can have someone go and talk."
But even doing that was not
with a missional intent, it was just,
I live here, I'm like, I know what the curfew is,
I know this place.
And this is probably not the best way to handle things.
I'll be honest, my response to them
was not to stop them or curtail anything,
but, in hindsight, I think about
how we all have become conditioned,
even in Ferguson, how things are,
are just how they are.
And I don't think that's any different
from the civil rights era or eras before that.
- You've been working with this young man
who was protesting and got arrested and he's still in jail.
How do you walk that line between civil disobedience
and trying to get people's attention
and trying to shake up the system so that it changes,
versus sort of playing into that trap?
- I got pictured with a young man
who was part of a very large early on protest
in response to this, that kind of made me look
like I was doing something when I was actually
responding to him like I would my own son,
which was basically, don't do what they want you to do.
Let's not give in to what is desired,
which is an excuse to be able to then act upon in ways
that are usually damning and dangerous for black males.
That's what I said to him.
And I said, whatever you need to do,
whatever you need to say, you say it and do it to me.
'Cause I'm not gonna arrest you.
I'm not gonna shoot one of these guns at you.
That was the encounter.
It my sound real crass, but my dad told me one time,
he said, "Best way to help the poor is not to become it."
Now, that's not gonna go over well, I'm sure,
with some of your audience, but the idea was,
I feel that way about the judicial system.
I make sure I try my darndest
not to give somebody an excuse
to put handcuffs on me and lock me up.
They don't need much of an excuse.
But I think sometimes
that's the challenge of vulnerable populations,
and unfortunately, we've had people who have
succumbed to that and so now we have
an additional fight that we have to fight.
- There's a lot of young black men in prison.
This is data, this isn't a debate.
- No. - This is just the way it is.
What's happening, why is that, from your perspective?
- Oh, well, I believe it's very intentional.
I mean, I think it's a continuum of what this,
much of this country's historical
and philosophical and economic precedents
have put into motion,
and they had and have created institutions
that help to memorialize, justify and monetize
on those historical precedents.
Which is that we dehumanize one another,
that we see, particularly, black and brown bodies
and indigenous people, First Nationers,
as well as those of the African diaspora, as property.
Whether that's from chattel slavery into now,
that there has, our economic system
is predicated on having free or cheap labor.
And to justify that, we have to, again,
dehumanize, devalue, emasculate
those individuals so that then,
now they become elements of what, or cogs in the system.
The system is, by design, inhumane,
impersonal, and is only about keeping
the machine going by any means necessary.
And the mass incarceration is one element of that,
as we know from work from Michelle Alexander and others.
And not only in that kind of historical
or philosophical kind of perspective,
what we are doing in terms of
funneling people into that reality.
If people are forced to not find alternative ways
to gainfully support themselves,
no matter how we feel about what is right or wrong,
the reality is that people,
many people in this country, in this world,
are in survival mode.
- Let's unpack some of that from a libertarian perspective,
because I call the criminal justice system,
somewhat sarcastically, but it's mostly true,
I call it the prison industrial complex,
and it's a term that I've stolen and incorporated
from Eisenhower's description
of the military industrial complex.
And it's in large part fed by the criminalization
of nonviolent, consensual things, like drugs,
and that, one of the reasons we have so many people
in prison is because we arrest people
for things that aren't crimes, in my mind, as a libertarian.
- Like we have historically, around black and brown people,
and it is definitively clear, the difference
of how we have looked at crack, marijuana,
all those things prior to Colorado,
California getting legalized, Oregon,
and now, this opioid epidemic.
That kind of points to that disparity.
Even the Second Amendment
is not freely exercised or given,
or people who are black or brown,
are given the full autonomy that comes with that amendment
because possession of firearms
or the lack of proper licensing
and filing and those kinds of things,
are severe punishments for people
who are black and brown in this country.
- The other part of that is,
and this is said to be a classic critique
of how we think government works
is that once you create an institution
that feeds off of imprisoning people,
the incentive, whether,
and I don't think it's a private-public thing,
I think it's the Prison Workers Union
could be just as interested as the corporation
that builds new prisons.
All of those interests come together
to say, you know what, we need more prisons.
And one way you get more prisons
is by not dealing with the fact
that we're putting too many of our kids in prison.
And that's, we see that in a lot of things,
and I wonder if there isn't some common ground there,
because when you talk about the system,
I'm thinking about the system too.
There's a lot of perverse incentives
that don't make it safer, that destroy a lot of lives,
and I would think that left, right, center,
we could actually agree on that, at least in concept.
So upstream of politics, so as a libertarian,
there's big L libertarianism,
which is a political party and honestly,
I don't have much faith in the Republican Party,
the Democratic Party or the Libertarian Party
to solve all these problems. - Hmm.
- But the philosophy of libertarianism
is about, it sounds a lot like what I hear
sometimes from very progressive activists.
Bottom up, community based solutions.
We're gonna solves these problems
by working face to face and acknowledging our differences
and tolerating our differences
and finding a couple really big things
that we need to solve that keep society together.
I think that's what community organizing is.
I think that's what grassroots action is all about.
I don't think it's about electing somebody,
and you may disagree with that.
I think politicians, sometimes, this will be shocking,
sometimes they tell you just what you wanna hear,
and they may not mean it, but you and I
and our communities at the grassroots level
could come together and say you know what?
This is a real problem,
we're going to do something about it.
- I think you're right.
We are the strategy and the ultimate solution.
The question is, are we going to resist?
Are we going to not become the system?
There's a place I visited most recently
that's pretty popular and had a major issue,
and they're real excited because they have
a leader in their government
who comes out of the protest movement.
And I told someone, I said,
"Well, now they're a politician."
I have some good friends on Capitol Hill.
I mean, I have some mentors on Capitol Hill.
I think they're great people.
And they are.
And they're also politicians.
And you can't help but say that.
And acknowledge that.
I don't think most people know how to
either respect that or recognize that.
That once you're in the system,
there is, that's a game.
- You know, another way to think about the system
is concentrated power.
- Okay, hmm. - And again,
I'm thinking about it in my strange way
of thinking about things, and just replacing a politician
is you're basically taking power
from one person and giving it to another person
and I think power corrupts people.
And you mentioned Marvel Comics,
but we could mention the Lord of the Rings and the precious.
Nobody can wear that ring
without it fundamentally screwing them up.
So, I think what we're talking about
when we talk about community action
is decentralizing power, distributing power
and making sure that everybody has some power,
but nobody has access to all the power,
because it corrupts whoever is in charge.
And they sort of, they fall into the system
because now, now they benefit
from the system, by definition,
and I think that, to me, democratization
and decentralization and people showing up
and people being involved and people having conversations
and even people protesting,
all of that, done in the right way,
decentralizes power, and undermines the system, I think.
- It does, and it doesn't.
But yeah, I don't, I'm intrigued to figure out
how do we-- - I'm a romantic
about the future of this, by the way.
- No, you're talking to a person who
deals out hope, I mean,
all the time, so I believe that there is
there is not only a possibility,
there's not just a probability,
but there's a promise that good overcomes evil
and light overtakes darkness
and that people of good faith and good will do persevere.
I just struggle to figure out out how
in large scale and in kind of,
in expedited ways,
we have this pressed down and out.
- Yeah. (soft music)
Well, let's work on that together.
Thank you so much. - Thank you, brother.
- Yeah. - Right on, thank you.
(soft music)
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