A deep winter can give way to a kind of collective amnesia – but everything gets saved in the ice, preserved for exposure when the temperatures finally rise. “Objects that would clang if they hit pavement”, BloombergBusiness observed about losing objects in Boston’s 100+ inches of snow, “can simply be swallowed by a snowbank without a sound.”

The bulk of what re-emerges is nasty shit. In New York City, as the Times recognized, “beneath the snow, slumbered the vices and indulgences of a city beaten down by harrowing waves of ice, sleet, slush and arctic winds.” These are not objects one would want to encounter once again, but there they are, unavoidable. The dog shit – once warm, then frozen hard, and currently melting in the sun into pools of bacteria-riddled goop – and the used condoms and the defrosting vomit, the artifact of what some drunken bros ate on a wild February night preserved for the bottom of my shoe many weeks later.

All of it was buried just beneath surfaces of oppressive whiteness, but couldn’t stay hidden forever.

The Black Lives Matter movement is thawing things, too, after a winter spent mostly indoors; during their hiatus, no small amount of racist shit accumulated.

Tasha Thomas, the girlfriend of the unarmed man, John Crawford, shot by police in Beavercreek, Ohio, was killed in a car chase. The City of Cleveland blamed the shooting of unarmed, 12-year-old Tamir Rice’s on the child himself. We learned that the city of Chicago had exported one its cops with a history of torturing black Americans to do his meanest at Guantanamo Bay, and has been exposed for having a secret site jail. A police officer in Madison shot Tony Robinson, another unarmed man – but at least the police chief apologized. The killing of unarmed black people continued essentially apace.

Meanwhile at the University of Oklahoma - in a state which wants to expunge its racist history from its history classes - video leaked of a fraternity singing racists chants which would have been at home in the film Birth of A Nation (if sound had only been in movies a hundred years ago). The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force tracked a Black Lives Matter protest in the Mall of America in Minnesota as if it were Isis. And the head of the FBI implied police violence would go down if we could all admit, Avenue Q style, that “everyone’s a little bit racist.”

In Ferguson, citizens must sue to stop being subjected to illegal debtors prisons. The Department of Justice won’t prosecute Darren Wilson, but it thinks the Ferguson Police Department has engaged in such blatant systemic racism that whole thing may be dismantled. Judge Ronald J Brockmeyer, who oversaw the imprisonment of many of Ferguson’s black citizens for unpaid fines, owes $170,000 in back taxes himself. Ferguson City Manager John Shaw and Police Chief Thomas Jackson chief have all resigned (the latter with a hefty severance package).

More racism, both structural and personal, was revealed than anyone likely expected on that tragic summer day in August, when Mike Brown’s body lay in the street for four hours.That has meant there is much more to clean up than white people expected or black people ever dreamed could be expressed. Even activists who here in Ferguson who have been active for more than 200 nights now admit they didn’t know initially how far this would go.

But Black Lives Matter is a reaction to more than simply the injustices of a single year: it’s intended to rouse us from decades and centuries of passive slumber about white supremacy and structural racism. It doesn’t just expose the unresolved issues from Ferguson or Staten Island from last year; it exposes the bullshit of how black people are still fighting for issues as basic as the right to vote. It exposes the muck of how Sarah Collins Rudolph, the fifth girl bombed in Birmingham, still has no affordable medical care in America, even as she faces blindness from a white supremacist’s bomb that blasted the other eye out of her head.

The tension is predictably intense as the long, cold winter of the American status quo slowly thaws. There is a centuries-long patterns of racialized American violence which defined our nation from even before General Washington and the Continental Army retreated to Valley Forge in 1777; violence has begotten more violence, over and over again, until it feels like we know few other responses.

Wednesday night’s shooting of two police officers in Ferguson, while indefensible, is not the fault of the protesters. Even though St Louis County police chief Jon Belmar erroneously said the shooter(s) were “embedded” with those chanting outside the Ferguson Police Department, the shots came from far away and could have easily struck anyone.



The protesters held the moral high road on Thursday night, by placing themselves, unarmed, right between the Ferguson police and whoever was behind those bullets on Wednesday (and who remains at large). Undeterred at a prayer vigil and while marching in front of the police department, the protesters here maintained that their fight for justice does not require slowing down to accept guilt by association for the actions of unknown others. No matter how much muck is exposed as winter melts away, the protesters – spilling back into the streets without fear and with courage – give hope for the spring days ahead.