Why Ferguson Matters To Me and Mizak, Haiti

It’s been almost 4 weeks since Michael Brown was shot by police officer, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking protests and rallies for justice in that city and across the nation. At the time, I did not add my voice to all of the commentaries on what happened beyond sharing a few links to other articles on the net, but my silence was not due to any apathy on my part. The fact that I hadn’t written about Ferguson yet was not because what happened there did not hurt me deeply as a human being, or anger me as an American who depends on the same system of justice that Michael Brown did. I hadn’t written simply because I got busy doing other things and got lazy with my blogging. I allowed my voice to go unheard and continued to contemplate these events internally while I renovated an old farm shed into an art studio, and spent time with my adorable new niece and other family, and focused on writing cover letters and updating resumes for the job search that I’m currently engaging in. But now that the shed’s all cleaned out, my family has moved on back to their lives, and all my applications are sent in, I wanted to sit down and share some feelings on what happened to Michael Brown and what has happened to our society. I share these thoughts now, knowing that it will never be too late to do so because such incidents will continue to occur as long as we collectively allow them to fade quickly from our consciousness and into a jumbled bag labeled “THAT’S REALLY TOO BAD”

Although it might be hard to really put a finger on the feelings that have come out of this situation, for myself, I think that most of them have to do with this guy:


This is Sony. He is the 22-year-old reason that I’ve stayed active in Haiti as long as I have. He became my friend very early on when I first moved there in 2007 and hasn’t left my side since. He is the one who taught me how to speak Creole, how to play kasino, how to navigate the market and who to buy the best freezy pops from and how to understand the culture on a deeper level. He has helped me build my home, build a photography business, build deep relationships within the community, and build a network of collaborators for a number of projects. He was with me when I made my first hike to the southern coastal community of La Montagne, and he was with me when I danced behind my first sha at Kanaval, and he was there when I had my first Prestige on the beach at Raymond. He was also there by my side the moment that the earth shook on January 12, 2010. And he’s still there every morning to see what my schedule is for the day and how he can be involved in it. He’s my standard motorcycle driver, my house manager, my dog caretaker, my comic relief, and my constant dose of reality. He is my roommate, my good friend, and my brother. I have many good friends in Haiti, but none truly quite like Sony who have been through so much with me. He is one of my favorite people in the world.

And yet, some people can’t understand why he’s one of my favorite people in the world because he is also, undeniably, one of the rudest, most stubborn, and most self-centered people in the world. He is unapologetically honest in his opinion, often to the point of seeming cruel. He won’t hesitate to tell you that you look like horse vomit or a zombie fart if he doesn’t like your outfit or your hairdo. And if he thinks you’re being selfish or unfair, he’ll be the first to call you out on your white privilege and criticize you for treating poor people like dirt. He boldly believes that he deserves to be treated like a human being and treated just like any wealthy white person should, which comes off as an offensive sense of entitlement to anyone who doesn’t believe that of a young Haitian man. He can be abrasive and obnoxious and will sacrifice a supposed friendship with someone long before he compromises or apologizes for who he is. When he’s confident that he doesn’t need to be your friend, he’s not going to go out of his way to become such. Still, I couldn’t be more thankful that he decided to become mine.

Sony is the type of guy that once you really get to know him, you can’t help but love him. But if you don’t take the time to get to know him, you’ll probably want to shoot him. He’s the type of guy that if a police officer pointed a gun at him and accused him of something that he knew he was innocent of, he’d probably tell the officer exactly where he could shove that gun of his while insulting his mother in the process. He wouldn’t get belligerent or resist violently, but he also wouldn’t lay down and wait to be cuffed and he certainly wouldn’t keep his mouth shut.

Sony is the type of young, black, male who, if he was stopped by a racist cop in the US for some reason (or walked onto a racist gun owner’s porch to ask for help, or tried to buy a toy gun in Walmart) would have a high likelihood of getting killed just for being young, black, and rude. I know it’s likely because in this country even the nice, polite, young black individual’s get killed for no reason. So Sony, with his big mouth, would have no chance of surviving a racist here.

And that’s when I’m thankful that out of all my roommates, Sony is the one who honestly has no desire to ever come to the United States. The others might get lucky with their attractive smiles and gentle demeanors if they were confronted by an American gun-wielding racist, whether in uniform or not. But Sony would be so easy to criminalize that if he was the victim of such a shooting, that he too would have thousands of people taking to Facebook and Twitter saying that he deserved it and calling his killer a hero. He too would be called a thug and demonized for the many aspects of his youth that so many in this country somehow believe justify his death. He wouldn’t have a whole lot of people in his corner but he would have plenty of people coming up with lists of reasons why this happened when the truth is that there is no reason.

And if that happened it would be me in the position of Michael Brown’s mother. Except for the fact that I would have my white privilege that would allow many more people to listen to my words and take them seriously when I said “No more.” If I said, “Justice.” They would be interpreted differently coming out of a white mouth. And yet, I know that if I was actually in that position, there is no way that I would handle it with the composure that she has. There is no way that I would be able to “protest peacefully” like so many in the Ferguson community and beyond have done in the wake of Brown’s death. I would be the first one lighting tires on fire in the streets and throwing rocks at the swat teams. I wouldn’t be able to contain my fury. I’m too patient and reasonable of a person in the rest of my life, if I had to deal with something like this personally, I would become unhinged so quickly and so dramatically that I’d probably be giving them a real reason to arrest me before I had a chance to speak out.

And for that reason my heart remains with the family of Michael Brown and the people of Ferguson who are almost out of the public eye already because Jennifer Lawrence’s nude photos were leaked. For that reason my heart is constantly going out to the victims of senseless racially motivated violence in this country, most of whom never get to be in the public eye at all and never get their cries for justice to be heard. My heart is with them because my heart for so long has been with Sony and so many others like him who deserve a chance at life no matter what color their skin is, what age they are, what mistakes they’ve made, or how likeable they may or may not be. Because we all deserve that chance no matter what.