GW Hatchet

Michael Wenger is an adjunct professor of sociology and a senior fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a research institution that concentrates on race issues.

Michael Brown, the young black man shot and killed Aug. 9 in Ferguson, Mo., is yet another on the long list of unarmed black men – including two others in the past month and a half – who have suffered similar fates at the hands of law enforcement.

Since mid-July, we’ve seen the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island by a police officer’s chokehold and the fatal shooting of Ezell Ford by two Los Angeles Police Department officers. This country has a long history of such events, going back to slavery and the thousands of lynchings during the Jim Crow era.

Yet, amid the outrage over the Brown killing, we must not lose focus of the bigger picture. Since the founding of our nation, society has displayed a deeply entrenched belief in a racial hierarchy. This hierarchy assumes the superiority of white Americans and devalues the lives of non-white Americans.

Despite popular opinion, those racial beliefs have not been erased by the emancipation of enslaved people, by the Civil Rights Movement or by the election of a president with African ancestry. Until the hierarchy has been dismantled, we will continue to witness such killings.

This racial hierarchy manifests itself in both conscious and unconscious ways. Consciously, it caused the brutal system of slavery and the era of Jim Crow racism that followed emancipation, as well as the purposeful exclusion of African Americans from Social Security and the GI Bill. Additionally, the enactment of government policies, both written and unwritten, has institutionalized residential segregation and resulted in the mass incarceration of young men of color.