The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey

Nicole Sealey’s breathtaking sequence “The Ferguson Report: An Erasure” reimagines the Department of Justice’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department following the tragic and galvanizing events that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Redacting the report line by line, word by word, letter by letter, Sealey excavates larger and deeper insights from its account of systemic racism and violence. These are declarations of a different sort, telling a tale, if not of two cities—Ferguson and St. Louis—then of what can feel like two nations. Sealey identifies a “they” and a “we,” divided along lines of power: “They say stand in line, / so we stand in line.” Obedience, conflict, contradiction: all lead to the kinds of conflagrations that Ferguson saw in response to the killing of the unarmed teenager Michael Brown by a police officer who saw Brown’s very body as a weapon.