Wrong! I don't say I was wrong with ease, but in this case, I'm wrong. There's no escaping it. I admit my wrong on the bloody boot-heel of two officers being shot during civic unrest in Ferguson, Missouri.
Initially, I didn't think that Michael Brown was shot because of his race. I really thought, and to some degree still acknowledge, that social-prejudice coupled with good ol' fashioned class struggle were to blame. I thought Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown not because of his race, but because he lived in a poor neighborhood that had a bad reputation. In fact, I thought most of the racially motivated incidents that the media reported were spun wrongly using the race issue.
I thought the cops, despite their race, had a superiority complex that played more into situations than race. In Michael Browns case, I think it was a racially motivated crime after all. Darren Wilson is a murderer.
As I write this today (Thursday, March 12th, 2015) this morning it was reported that the unending unrest in Ferguson led to the shooting of two officers over the night. "They were shot because they were cops..." I overheard from a news report on the TV in the adjacent room. If the two white officers were shot just because they were in a police uniform, as it was suggested, then there is an element of prejudice after all that could be based on race and assumption. Basically, Michael Brown verily well could have been shot just because he was black despite guilt. Darren Wilson is a murderer... And he got away with it because he was a cop!
I'm not saying that social-prejudice/class-struggle is entirely ruled out as factored, but I'm not ruling out the distinct possibility that Michael Brown was killed just because he's was black and in the wrong place, at the wrong time and in the wrong place... Michael Brown was killed because of the element of hate, bias and fear that exist in Ferguson and, sadly, just about everywhere else.