Cultural tectonics

Abstract

On a Sunday morning in 2009 near Seattle, Maurice Clemmons, a middleaged African American man, shot four white policemen. The ensuing media coverage of the manhunt, and numerous legal system failures to contain Clemmons eclipsed any alternative pursuit to uncover and explore the social and environmental forces that may have helped shape Clemmons' psychological structure. In making a scapegoat of Clemmons, Seattle missed the opportunity to explore the long-term and insidious psychological impact of oppression, poverty, racism, and cultural violence. The author also explores individual and community psychological structure within the overarching metaphor and model of plate tectonics. The EventThree years ago, on the Sunday morning following Thanksgiving 2009, a social cataclysm erupted, a metaphoric earthquake, in Tacoma, Washington. A southern born African American man, who had spent the majority of his life imprisoned or monitored by the American legal system, executed four white police officers enjoying breakfast before their upcoming shift. He had told a friend a few days before that he wanted company in death. Maurice Clemmons was on the verge of his third strike, and the prospect of losing his home to foreclosure. He was increasingly delusional (Armstrong et al, 2009).In a cell-phone photograph that circulated the Internet in 2009, Maurice Clemmons' naked body, half-covered by a white sheet, lies on a gurney (Wikipedia, 2010). A bullet hole, inflicted by the gun of an officer Clemmons killed, was visible in the center of his abdomen. Round bandages cover other bullet holes that later felled the fugitive as he fled from a Seattle police officer, thus ending a desperate, relentless manhunt, involving helicopters, swat teams, infiltrated neighborhoods, and police robots (Gutierrez et al, 2009).