Sarah Kendzior is a writer in St. Louis.

Here, on the streets of Ferguson and St. Louis, you can already feel the rest of the world forgetting. Today, President Obama will hold in Washington a series of Ferguson-related meetings. He will meet with local law enforcement leaders, faith leaders, and focus on working together to “build trust to strengthen neighborhoods across the country.” What he will not do, evidently, is to come to Ferguson, to see the burned-out blocks and feel the city’s pain. The national media is beginning to depart. The grand jury is literally last week’s news.

But Ferguson is not “over,” because Ferguson never really “began.” Ferguson did not “start” on August 9 th when Darren Wilson approached Michael Brown; it did not “end” on November 24 th when the grand jury results were announced. As media vacate the smoldering wreckage of West Florissant Avenue, as pundits and politicians talk about “healing” and “closure,” St. Louis is being left to struggle with the same problems it always had. There has been no healing, only deeper wounds. There has been no closure, only a desire to move on. St. Louis wants to move forward, but it is driving blind.


This should have been a year of celebration. This is the 250 th anniversary of the founding of St. Louis, and across the metropolitan area, cakes were planted to mark important sites in the region’s history. Each cake is unique, beautiful, hand-painted by a local artist, often reflecting the landmark on which it lies. All year long, families in St. Louis have gone “caking”, posting pictures of themselves at each site. In late November, a gap-toothed child posed in front of a police barricade, the celebratory cake behind yellow tape and metal bars. That night, her city burned. This is St. Louis’s reality, 250 years in. This is what St. Louis’s children will remember.

Follow the pattern of the cakes, and you will see who is abandoned in St. Louis. You will find cakes in the downtown area, on 19 th-century sites built when St. Louis was proclaimed a “ future great city of the world.” You will find cakes in the museums and monuments created for the 1904 World’s Fair, when people traveled to St. Louis to see society build instead of burn. You will find cakes in the white suburbs, parked at ice cream parlors and children’s attractions, symbolic of our family-friendly ways. You will find few cakes in the black suburbs that are neither romantic enough for revitalization nor pestigious enough for investment. Civic abandonment is nothing to celebrate.

St. Louis was a city built on promise—the promise of the westward expansion, the promise of endless opportunity, the promise of great societal progress.

But the promise of St. Louis was one never meant—or kept—for all. Racial animosity predates the death of Michael Brown by centuries, structuring the city’s geography in good times and bad. By 1916, St. Louis had become a region of decadence and development: the fourth-largest city in the U.S, the envy of the world. That same year local magazines ran ads decrying blocks “ruined by Negro invasion” and asking residents to vote for segregation. In 1917, neighboring East St. Louis burned in some of the worst race riots in U.S. history. Today, impoverished East St. Louis is one of the many areas in the metro region St. Louisans encourage people to avoid. They will tell you it is dangerous but they will not say it is suffering. The region’s wounds are visible, unseen by choice.

St. Louis County, where Ferguson lies, is divided into 90 municipalities. This makes it difficult to govern but easy to avoid responsibility. As the months of unrest wore on, the leaders of Ferguson blamed the county police. The county blamed the government of Ferguson. St. Louis city leaders distanced themselves from the county even as they contended with the cases of Kajieme Powell and Vonderrit Myers, young black men killed by St. Louis city officers after Brown. Everyone looked to leadership from Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, who responded with a pre-emptive state of emergency that made no one feel safer expect possibly prosecutor Bob McCulloch. Streets burned, anguished citizens cried. Same as in August, same as it ever was.

On November 29, Officer Darren Wilson resigned. “It is my hope that my resignation will allow the community to heal,” he wrote, after taking 113 days of paid leave and receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. Michael Brown is dead, Darren Wilson is rich, and the streets he patrolled lie in ruins. This is not healing but salt in the wound.

On November 30, the lead op-ed in St. Louis Post-Dispatch called for St. Louisans to work together to heal. It was titled “The grand jury says no. Now St. Louis must make the most of it.” How does one make the most of the killing of a black teenager, unpunished by law and profitable in practice? How does one make the most of lost businesses, lost trust, lost lives? How does one heal when those who wound walk free, aided and abetted by the power structure that is supposed to protect?

In order to “heal”, St. Louis has been asked to have “a conversation on race.” This conversation has already been happening, and it is angry and uncomfortable.

The conversation on race is whispered between panicked mothers on the playground, shouted by racists in the night, chanted by protesters on the street. The conversation on race happens every time white families explain they are moving out of a black neighborhood because “it’s different when it’s your own kids,” every time investors announce a gentrification scheme, every time a black man is pulled over on the highway, every time officials tell a grieving community to “calm down.” Michael Brown and Darren Wilson had a conversation on race. Brown’s last words were allegedly: “I don't have a gun, stop shooting.”

Or maybe they were something else entirely—this city won’t have a chance to settle these questions in an open courtroom.

St. Louis has been having a conversation on race since its foundation. But there has been an element missing. The "conversation on race" that has not happened is the one in which white people listen to black people discuss their own experiences—and believe them. It is not about respectability. It is about respect.

It is a conversation that won’t bring “healing” quickly. It is a conversation that will continue long after the last news van leaves West Florissant.