Twitter Reacts To That Darren Wilson Profile

The latest issue of The New Yorker hit newsstands on Monday, and gave rise to an eerie sense of déjà vu. The topic of Ferguson is back on everyone's tongues, and a familiar name is once again trending on social media: Darren Wilson. One of its more controversial pieces in recent history, The New Yorker 's profile on Darren Wilson has spawned a whole new discussion on the overall discourse created by Ferguson and the racial tension seen there. Judging by the general reaction on Twitter, people are outraged, not only by the new revelations, which depict the former cop's cold attitude toward race, but by the magazine itself.

The New Yorker has never shied away from profiling polarizing, oftentimes downright reviled, subjects (i.e. Kim Jong-un, Muammar Qaddafi, Floyd Mayweather), but few have prompted such a viral reaction as its article on Wilson. It comes almost exactly one year after the death of Michael Brown, and the decision to publicize the man who shot the teen is certainly an odd commemorative gesture. But what's even more infuriating to many is Wilson's own words. When answering writer Jake Halpern's questions on race, Wilson comes off as indifferent, wholly unaffected by his shooting of Brown, and outright racist at times.

When asked specifically whether he's read the Department of Justice's report on institutional racism in the Ferguson Police Department, Wilson answered:

I don’t have any desire. I’m not going to keep living in the past about what Ferguson did. It’s out of my control.

The overall message Wilson seems to send is that he's learned absolutely nothing from fatally shooting an unarmed black teen, or from the nationwide racial unrest that followed. This makes the profile, deliberately timed to come out just ahead of the one-year anniversary of Mike Brown's death, feel wildly inappropriate. Naturally, people took to Twitter to denounce both the profile and, of course, Wilson himself, with some even urging others to boycott reading the article.

One angry tweet resonated the loudest in the sea of outrage, reminding the public who we all should be focusing on one year after Ferguson: