The Atlantic

Jeff Sessions's Blind Eye

The new attorney general makes it clear that when it comes to abuses in local policing, Americans are now on their own.
Source: Lawrence Bryant / Reuters

One of the effects of racial segregation is that it fractures reality, so that the daily occurrences of one world can be entirely invisible, even fantastic, to another. When the town of Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in protest during the summer of 2014, in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s shooting at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson, millions of Americans were shocked, both at the ferocity of the demonstrations, and the brutal, militaristic response of local police.

To many white Americans, the world Ferguson residents described to reporters must have seemed preposterous––a where black residents were bled dry by the municipal government and frequently abused and treated with contempt by an unaccountable police force. In turn, Ferguson’s black residents radiated frustration with a country that seemed in

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