It’s better that Michael Brown was clearly imperfect, clearly flawed. 

Langston Hughes still says it best: “We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too.”

Far from complicating the issue of a black body gunned down in the street, I think the presence of a flawed protagonist at the center of yet another national morality play about race and police force supplies a much needed dose of realism to a country whose ideas about color so often involve fantasy, myths, cultural rumors.

Last night, Michael Brown was turned into a character. I don’t say this lightly—I say it with admiration for America’s indelible gift for narrative. It’s the same gift that made us turn Hollywood into the most powerful image-making machine in human history, right next to TV and social media, which we also created. We turned Michael Brown into a character, and it was no small achievement. In American entertainment, for so long, the path to public recognition for black men involved enacting two extremes:

• Black Sainthood, whose exemplars are Sidney Poitier, Dr. King, Barack Obama, Morgan Freeman, and, formerly, Bill Cosby. In this script, propagated by countless forms of cultural ephemera, the black body is capable of yogic flights of moral discipline. All our societal problems become his personal ones, and we simply sit back and watch him work his magic: he never curses, never shows his anger, never dare make it clear that he’s uncomfortable solving problems—interpersonal racism, the recession, deindustrialization—he didn’t start. He’s happy to do it. The performance hinges on his perfection—and his perfection serves to dehumanize him.
• The Penitent Thief (see: Jack Johnson, Charlie Parker, Flava Flav), a Rasputin-like trickster figure who takes the left-handed path to sainthood by willfully embodying the stereotypes heaped upon him by racist cultural vectors like feature films, sports, music, and magazines. Whether he actually does so in reality or not, on the screen or stage he seems to give the people what they want: a vision of the unadulterated black savage who validates the (white) viewing public’s need to live safe, sheltered lives away from the angry black masses he represents. The American Dream needs an occasional nightmare to make us realize how much we covet it.

If Brown fit one or the other of these scripts, the public response would be too well-worn, too predictable. Some call him innocent and saintly, others say he was a “thug.” Both miss the point entirely. Brown doesn’t fit either category, and that’s why the character we turned him into is so fresh: he was on his way to college and he stole, he wrote poetry and he cursed, he had aspirations and sometimes he lost sight of them. In death and in imperfection, Brown illustrated a central inhumane truth about racism more effectively than he would have if he were a certified saint or sinner. And that truth is this: black people raise imperfect children who suffer or die precisely because of these imperfections.

Of course, for those of us who stayed in to watch the spectacle unfold on television and social media, last night’s news of Darren Wilson’s acquittal was a study in mass media induced spectacles. In other words, shit got weird: at one point, a Will Ferrell parody account sprung up in my twitter feed which had the likeness of the comedian quoting Malcolm X. Meanwhile, on Facebook, ex-girlfriends were posting about cats and sandwiches while their fellow citizens were deciding whether or not to burn St. Louis to the ground. At one point, I turned my back to the TV to tend to my fried chicken dinner (you heard me), and a television anchor used the phrase “two minute warning”: we were officially 120 seconds away from Prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s impeccable impersonation of every 10^th grade science teacher whose name American teenagers dread seeing on their course schedule at the start of the school year.

Did the protesters in the 1960s Jim Crow South imagine that their work would culminate in millions of Americans waiting for Anderson Cooper to tell them whether they had a race problem or not? As one Facebooker put it, were we missing the point by waiting for “9PM Eastern/6PM Pacific” to be outraged?

CNN kept those of us who thought Monday night was for football on the edge of our seats for a referendum on the state of American race relations. For the first and last time in my life, I felt sorry for the NFL. If they had known back in October that Ravens v. Steelers would be competing with The Racial Apocalypse for ratings, maybe they would’ve let Ray Rice onto the field to see if anyone would notice. Or at least tried to get their hands on a Rams home game, so ESPN could give us split-screens comparing the stout St. Louis run defense with the National Guard’s deceitful barricading of areas they said would be open to protesters in nearby Ferguson. Instead, we were all busy watching this:

And this was about the time I decided to turn the television off.

I stayed at home last night for the same reason that I made the decision to watch Barack Obama’s inauguration, Occupy Wall Street, and the Seahawks’ Super Bowl victory at home. As a historian, I feel a responsibility to remember and recall the defining events of my lifetime and generation, and I didn’t want my recollection of the night and its significance clouded by adrenaline or probably alcohol. Also, it was cold and maybe wet out there, and I wondered “If they killed Mike Brown for nothing, what would they do to me for exercising my constitutional right to assemble?” More than anything, I knew there would be a moment that would put the whole night perspective, and—removed as I was from the surreal image of apparent Darth Vader clones standing underneath a “Seasons Greetings” banner in Ferguson—I figured that, way up here in Seattle, there was more of a likelihood that his would happen while watching ‘the first draft of history’ play itself out on TV and social media.

And I instantly recognized that this was the salient image of the night: A black president whose administration militarized the St. Louis police force with tactical weapons telling us that there was no excuse for violence. Could the ironies and half-truths of “post-racial America” be expressed any more eloquently than in this image?

Beautiful—and ugly, too.