Thread by @doctorow

The #BlackLivesMatter movement began in the #Ferguson uprising, whose proximate cause was the police murder of Michael Brown, but whose context was a city that survived by immiserating and incarcerating Black people.

1/

Ferguson is one of those Red State low-tax zones, having capitulated to the tax extremism of right-wing, white, wealthy people, and yet, it was also a city that needed to keep the lights on, pave the roads, and run its schools.

2/

So to find revenue, Ferguson turned to its poorest residents - its Black people - inventing a modern form of debt bondage, wherein Black people were stopped for petty infractions and then subjected to massive fines.

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

3/

Failure to pay those fines created more fines, and so on. And since debts that can't be paid won't be paid, the city needed a way to convince Black people to go into punitive debt to pay their fines and penalties.

So they created debtors' prisons.

theguardian.com/us-news/2015/m…

4/

The point being: the racist cops who harassed, beat and even murdered the people of Ferguson may have been motivated by sadism and a disregard for human life, but the system itself? It had a business-model. It was about dehumanizing and abusing people for financial gain.

5/

Flash forward to today, and there is genuine, long-overdue change in the wind.

Ferguson just elected its first Black mayor, @Ella4Ferguson.

thehill.com/homenews/state…

6/

Asked to sum up the significance of her win, Jones said, "One word: inclusion."

Ferguson's police force now answers to Jones. She has the ability to set the city's agenda, up to a less barbaric way of funding its operation than debtors' prisons.

7/

Ferguson is not alone in funding itself through legal harassment. In America, the Blacker a city is, the more it fines its residents.

priceonomics.com/the-fining-of-…

Jones's win a small step, and long overdue, but it's also a small sliver of goodness in a time of rage and sorrow.

eof/