#BlackLivesLooking: A Year After Ferguson

One year ago today, August 9 2014, Michael Brown was killed by then-Officer Darren Wilson. From that minute has come a movement that has many goals and accomplishments. Its overarching tactic has been to keep our attention focused on the killing of Black people by police, which has created a new way of seeing that we might call #BlackLivesLooking. Like all other police, Wilson relied on the very brevity of the encounter to avoid indictment. #BlackLivesLooking refuses to allow these moments to pass and keeps us looking at what at first seems to be unbearable. As we stay with them, we see these moments not as "tragedies" or "mistakes" but instances of how the system of racial hierarchy known as white supremacy functions. Every day.