Lexi, Won't You Think of All the Lives Lost at the Hands of Fall Out Boy

By Jia Tolentino | August 11, 2015 | 1:20pm

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You know who else was 19, reportedly? Tank Man, at Tiananmen Square. Lexi is just like him, except the exact opposite: in a figurative sense—the Ferguson PD seems to have put away the military-grade weaponry they deployed to inflammatory and officially unconstitutional effect last year—she’s got her back to the tanks.

Though it’s always lovely to see young people standing up for what they believe in, in Lexi’s case, her cause appears to be the rights of a heavily armed and racially aggressive police department—one that, if you’ll remember, called black people “chimpanzees” in emails, routinely set their dogs on unarmed black suspects, and swarmed the streets of Ferguson with tanks and machine guns and tear gas in order to subdue and intimidate people protesting the murder of an unarmed teenager (for which the officer who killed him would be exonerated not just once but twice!)—to go about their ways even more unimpeded, if that’s possible.

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Save the armed and legally invincible agents of the only type of violence that’s sanctioned by the state! cries Lexi. Shouldn’t you be at home purchasing some bespoke Imagine Dragons MP3 file via iTunes gift certificate, we cry in return.

It’s “interesting,” in light of the protestor arrests made over the course of this horrible anniversary—over 100 so far—to see who the police are allowing to make their presence known in public. Lexi’s good, presumably: no arrest reports for her so far. Though Ferguson’s also been declared in a state of emergency, the Oath Keepers, a white “patriot” citizen militia, has been allowed to parade around with bulletproof vests and automatic weapons in the street.

Not so much leeway allowed to the journalists, or to this obviously dangerous presence:

“She’s 18!” yelped the police department. Classic.

Anyway, congratulations to Lexi for joining a 150-year-old tradition of white girls attempting to manipulate public emotion and engage state force in the interest of upholding the type of power that keeps a black man on trial even after he’s dead—a type of power that hasn’t changed much since the days when innocent white girlfriends would send each other cute little postcards about it. This is where they lynched a negro the other day. They don’t know who done it. I guess they don’t care much. I don’t, do you?

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