How the Eric Garner and Ferguson Protests Have 'Struck a Blow to America's Image' Terrence McCoy - The Washington Post
go to original December 6, 2014

Jon Stewart Gets Real About the Injustice of the Eric Garner Case (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart)

Inhabitants of the United States are notoriously inward-looking. It’s football, not futbol. It’s Fahrenheit, not Celsius. It’s imperial measurement, not metric. So when the events of Ferguson, Mo., erupted this summer and continued into unrest over Eric Garner killing, much analysis has focused on what this rupture in the social compact meant domestically.

But it has international ramifications as well. Americans weren’t the only one watching. So were the Chinese. So were the Russians, the Iranians, the Egyptians – even the North Koreans. And some analysts now fear the ongoing unrest weakens the United States’ moral authority when it castigates other nations on human rights abuses and opens the United States up to broad criticism – which it has gotten plenty of.

“Ferguson also struck a blow to America’s image as the global standard-bearer for equality, human rights, and opportunity,” wrote Stephen M. Walt, a Harvard professor of international affairs. “The treatment of black Americans has long tarnished our national mythology of the ‘melting pot,’ and with it the smug belief that American is the ideal model for the rest of the world,” he wrote in Foreign Policy. “This latest episode reminds us that the country still does not live up to the ideals that it likes to preach to others.”

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