The Devil Made Me Do It!
After Michael Brown was shot dead in August, his mother, Leslie McSpadden, said, "My son was sweet. He didn't mean any harm to anybody." He was, she said, "a gentle giant."
But when police officer Darren Wilson fired the shot that ended Brown's life, he saw things differently. "I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan," he said in his testimony to the grand jury. "That's just how big he felt and how small I felt." Wilson said "the only way" he could describe Brown's "intense aggressive face" was that it looked like "a demon." He feared for his life.
Many observers, such as Slate's Jamelle Bouie and Vox's Lauren Williams, pointed out that Wilson's testimony has historical echoes of the "black brute" caricatures that portrayed black men as savage, destructive
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