Abstract
Particularly for ethnographers researching civil unrest in Black communities, place-based sociohistorical context and boots-on-the-ground depictions of community organizers, protesters’ mobilizations, social organization, resilience, social ties, communal challenges, and their demands for social justice are far too often absent in twenty-first-century social movement research literature. However, in You Can’t Stop the Revolution: Community Disorder and Social Ties in Post-Ferguson America, Andrea Boyles provides us a front row seat and real-time account of demands for justice in the City of Ferguson, Missouri, in the aftermath of the horrific and untimely death of Michael Brown Jr.
Mike Brown, as he is referred to throughout the book, was an unarmed 18-year-old Black male who was shot six times on August 9, 2014, by a White police officer, Darren Wilson. The book commences with vivid descriptions, outraged responses, and the somber grief of Mike Brown’s mother, father, family members, neighbors, mourners, and bystanders as they gathered that hot summer afternoon to witness Mike Brown’s bloody body laid prostrate for four hours on Canfield Drive. And while behaviors and accounts of the St. Louis law enforcement and local, national, and international media are noted by the author, the book focuses primarily on capturing the racial discrimination and systemic injustice that sparked the emergence of the post-Ferguson revolution led mainly by the Black citizens of St. Louis, Missouri.
Boyles’s methodological accounts of St. Louisans’ civil unrest are outlined in her copious field notes, focus group sessions, and in-depth interviews with a large number of eyewitnesses, community organizers, and citizens. Boyles’s three-year ethnographic study not only takes us into real-time reactions to the Ferguson community’s loss and grief over Mike Brown, but provides a detailed account of the frustration, anger, and other sentiments these Black citizens experienced over the countless other Blacks who were murdered or injured by police in their increasingly violent suburban community.
Through the racial lens of Black citizens’ lived experiences, Boyles portrays the community’s complex positionality, coping reactions to trauma, and the resilience they continuously exhibited in mass mobilization efforts after Mike Brown’s premature death (Tummala-Narra 2007). Approaching the sixth anniversary of Ferguson’s civil unrest, Boyles brings a needed humanization and an up-close and personal sensitivity to the Ferguson community. For far too long, the humanity, respect, and resilience of Black protesters have been left out of social movement literature. By sheer ignorance or racist callousness, Black civil unrest responses to police brutality and police killings are repeatedly characterized in dehumanizing terms (e.g., riots, uncivil and violent disturbances) (Greenberg 1992) or with demonizing descriptions of Black protesters (e.g., thugs, looters, and disorderly masses of peoples) (Owusu-Bempah 2017).
When researching civil unrest, particularly in Black communities, historical and current trauma, as well as the positive value of race-based resilience, are too important to be ignored in the mass conceptualization of, cultivation of, and protests for social justice (Fast and Collin-Vézina 2019). Unfortunately, the Ferguson community’s reactions to the loss of Mike Brown mirror the complex loss, trauma, and resilience many Black communities (Fairfax: Natasha McKenna; Baltimore: Freddie Gray Jr.; Minnesota: Philando Castile; Baton Rouge: Alton Sterling; Montgomery: Gregory Gunn; Cincinnati: Samuel DuBose; Raleigh: Akiel Denkins; Waller County, Texas: Sandra Bland; etc.) experience when Black lives are lost decades before their time.
While Boyles eloquently illustrates the complexities and competing perspectives of Ferguson’s communal trauma and resilience, the community’s loss and grief reactions to the death of Mike Brown should have been expounded upon more in the book. Black lives, Black deaths, and Black social ties all matter. Black citizens’ complex loss and grief must be appropriately acknowledged and addressed (Umberson 2017). The discriminatory social constructs—stemming from Black slavery in the United States—such as the idea that Blacks are desensitized to emotional and physical pain are fallacies that must cease, and they should not be used as justifications for law enforcement to kill Black citizens, especially unarmed Black citizens (Gaylord-Harden, Cunningham, and Zelencik 2011; Rose 2018).
Black communities traumatized by repeated police shootings and exposure to violent deaths at the hands of law enforcement result in complex loss and grief that demand culturally sensitive mental health services for individuals, families, and communities impacted by the violent deaths in their communities (Kalish 2019). Boyles provides methodological considerations to both qualitative and quantitative researchers to highlight the importance of including the community’s lived mass mobilization experiences into their research.
As the book’s title, You Can’t Stop the Revolution: Community Disorder and Social Ties in Post-Ferguson America, suggests, when communities are sick and tired of disorder due to ongoing police brutality and police killings, their communal loss, trauma, and resilience manifest and ultimately result in an awakening that cannot be ignored, silenced, or stopped. Thank you, Dr. Andrea Boyles, for humanizing and acknowledging the “boots-on-the-ground” community leaders and protesters who in 2014 so righteously organized and vigorously mobilized, fueling a contagious determination to bring social accountability, social order, and social justice to Ferguson and other Black communities impacted by the untimely loss of Black lives.