Perhaps the most prevalent narrative of the year was found in a mere gesture. Following the August death of African-American teenager Michael Brown at the hands of a white Ferguson, Mo., police officer, protesters adopted the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture, adopting the narrative that Brown was attempting to surrender when he was shot. Yet the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrated that Brown attacked officer Darren Wilson in his squad car, then charged at Wilson in a second altercation before Wilson shot Brown to death.
Nonetheless, narrative trumped facts, and looters set Ferguson ablaze on the night the grand jury announced its decision to not charge Wilson with Brown’s murder. Even after all the forensics and testimony were made available, the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture lived on in protests around the country. In essence, “hands up, don’t shoot” became a stand-in for African-American distrust of police departments around the country; distrust intensified by the officer-instigated deaths of Eric Garner in New York, Tamir Rice in Cleveland and Dontre Hamilton in Milwaukee.
Yet poor areas weren’t the only place where the wish became the father of the facts. On college campuses, feminists pushed the “rape culture” narrative, trying to convince Americans that sexual assault on elite campuses was more prevalent than in violent Third World nations. President Barack Obama himself cited an extremely wobbly statistic that claims 20% of women on campus are victims of sexual assault; near the end of the year, the U.S Department of Justice reported that the number was more like 0.6%, and women were actually safer on college campuses than in society at large.
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