Why do black men continue to die at the hands of police? When will something be done about it?
It’s easy for me, a white, middle-class guy to write a column about it. It’s harder for black communities who continue to live it. Frustration on their part is not hard to understand. It’s also never an excuse for violence.
But protester violence is no excuse for ignoring or even accepting police violence. Some seem to veer in that direction when these ugly spectacles erupt.
Between Ferguson and Baltimore, we should all be accustomed to the narrative by now. A black man dies in the presence of police under questionable circumstances. The community protests. Some protesters turn violent. The violence receives the most media attention. Police brutality receives less attention. Police violence becomes overshadowed by protest violence. Some Americans watching their computers and TVs might even begin to believe that the citizens of these communities somehow deserve abuse based on the despicable behavior of a relative few. Innocent people speaking up for their rights and basic humanity end up getting lumped together with genuine criminals. …
The Department of Justice’s Ferguson report revealed awful and indefensible systemic abuse of that city’s black citizens by their local government, but it was widely ignored. The Baltimore Sun last year reported on multiple incidents of police brutality and the attempts to cover it up. Between these two reports alone, separated by 800 miles but joined by common circumstances and dynamics, there exist patterns.
There is no excuse for monsters who attack innocent people, loot and destroy private property. President Obama said those who committed violence in Baltimore this week are “criminals” and “thugs.” He’s right.
But the tragic chain of events in Baltimore did not happen in a vacuum. Police brutalizing and killing the people they’re paid to protect does happen — particularly if you’re black — and more frequently than most would, or should, be comfortable with.
The anguish in Baltimore this week in the wake of the riots is real. So is the rage. And it didn’t start this week.
From Jean Card, at U.S. News & World Report: However you look at it, the net result of a riot is negative. On this we agree. But maybe there is more we can agree on. Wouldn't it be perfectly human to agree that the issues at hand are complicated, and we feel inadequate because we don't have the solution yet? Can we show vulnerability? Can our leaders? I think they can, as long as they pair it with strength and genuine hope for progress.
This is a tough, tough time for elected officials and for cultural leaders. They are human, and they likely have experienced mixed emotions this week. Admitting to that, I think, helps with the challenge so many politicians have with authenticity.
I hope it’s fair to say that most people who observed or dealt with the Baltimore riots had a jumble of conflicted feelings this week – fear, sadness, anger, frustration, empathy. The best leaders will acknowledge that they felt this, too. Those who are too assured, whose comments are too rooted in the one-note tune of blame, aren’t leaders.
Non-leaders on the right concluded that this is the result of decades of liberal social policy. Wow! Case solved. Non-leaders on the left placed blame on white privilege and white bigotry. Perfect! Now we know who to be mad at. But these comments solve nothing. This is political posturing, meant to score political points. It would be far more productive to agree — and for leaders to simply say – this is terrible, this is sad and scary, and it’s hard to solve.
The problem is that, in an era of professional politicians, we are highly unlikely to find (or produce) the type of leader who communicates in that highly human fashion. Incentives and disincentives in politics have killed agreement and vulnerability as a leadership traits. “I don’t know” or “I agree with my opponent” are politically suicidal answers.
If we cannot produce leaders who can connect with the people, the cycle of human conflict will continue in the U.S. Old wounds won’t heal. Fighting will persist. The desire for transformative leadership has never been so palpable, or so remote.
From Leah Eliza Balter, in the Baltimore Sun: The revolution Baltimore worked hard to create was not televised for what it truly was or is. The revolution was televised as angry citizens burning flags, looting stores and breaking police car windows. This is a skewed portrayal of the protests; it is what the media chose to portray — the media that consumers bewilderingly seem to want.
The real revolution is thousands of people across America standing in solidarity against police brutality. The real revolution is youth activists using their voices and their fearlessness to fight for the future of their generation. The real revolution is people of different races walking through the streets of inner city Baltimore, arms locked, chanting “All night, all day, we will fight for Freddie Gray.”
The revolution is not violent or exclusionary. As a young white girl, I at first felt out of place, marching alongside people who endure struggles everyday that I will never understand because of the color of my skin. But as we neared City Hall, the leaders of the protest reminded everyone that it takes people of all races to make change. The revolution needs black people, white people, Asian people, Hispanic people — everyone.
The Freddie Gray demonstrations are the Civil Rights movements of the 21st century.
From Rich Lowry in the National Review: President Barack Obama responded to the Baltimore riots with a heartfelt bout of self-righteous hectoring. Supposedly, we all know what's wrong with Baltimore and how to fix it, but don't care enough. Not only is this attitude highhanded, it rests on a flagrantly erroneous premise. President Obama doesn't have the slightest idea how to fix Baltimore. His solutions fall back on liberal bromides going back 50 years. Dating back to the Kerner Commission after the riots of the 1960s, the Left's go-to solution to urban problems has been more social programs. Since then, we've gotten more social programs — and just as many urban problems.
Exhibit A is Baltimore itself. The city hasn’t been “neglected.” It has been misgoverned into the ground. It is a Great Society city that bought fully into the big-government vision of the 1960s, and the bitter fruit has been corruption, violence, and despair. Obama’s solutions fall back on liberal bromides going back 50 years. We don’t know all the facts surrounding Freddie Gray’s tragic death. But as a general matter, it is easy to believe that the Baltimore police are corrupt, dysfunctional, and unaccountable — because most of the Baltimore government is that way. This is a failure exclusively of Democrats, unless the root causes of Baltimore’s troubles are to be traced to its last Republican mayor, Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, who left office in 1967. And it is an indictment of a failed model of government. The city has been shedding jobs and people for decades, including in the 1990s when the rest of the country was booming.
Baltimore is a high-tax city, with malice aforethought. …This makes for fertile ground for the city’s traditional corruption. Baltimore’s preferred driver of growth has been government. …
What is Obama offering in response to this deep, decades-long decline? Among other things, more pre-K education and job training, even though these programs have a long history of ineffectiveness. The imperative in Baltimore should be to think and act anew. But the Left’s takeaway will be that there’s an urgent need for more of the same, as Baltimore and places like it continue to rot.
From David Cay Johnston at Al Jazeera America: Baltimore offered a powerful warning about what lies ahead for America if its epidemic of inequality continues. But will we understand the message in the chaos?
“A riot is the language of the unheard,” the Rev. Martin Luther King said. What gets lost in translation is the logic that motivates rioters, whose inability to articulate their frustration finds expression in rocks thrown at police, looting neighborhood stores and setting fires. To outside observers, these actions appear irrational and self-defeating.
But their rhetoric is as old as civilization. Riots are a way for the oppressed to make their frustration known in the vain hope that those in power will respond with better policies.
The Baltimore high school kids who rioted know what their future holds: inescapable poverty, misery and the ever present risk of danger from the police, who are seen not as guardians of the people but as oppressors ever ready to attack.
They live in a city that a quarter-century ago lavished more than $400 million of public funds to attract a football team from Cleveland yet had no money for modern science textbooks for schoolchildren.
They know that the police will arrest them on pretexts. Freddie Gray became a suspect because he simply looked directly at a police officer and ran. His punishment was death in police custody, his spinal cord nearly severed.
The police provoke anger because just one encounter can ensure that poverty and misery will follow you all of your days. A mere arrest condemns inner-city youth to a life of poverty because most companies turn away those with a record, even one consisting of nothing more than a baseless arrest.
Poverty in Baltimore rivals even that of the developing world. A 2014 Johns Hopkins University study found that 15-to-19-year-olds in Baltimore are worse off than their counterparts in New Delhi and the Nigerian city of Ibadan. This awful news from a local university did not rate a mention in The Baltimore Sun.
From N. D. B. Connolly, in the New York Times: In the wake of the Michael Brown shooting and subsequent unrest in Ferguson, Mo., commentators noted the absence of black representatives among Ferguson's elected officials and its police leadership. A Department of Justice report highlighted how Ferguson's mostly white City Council and its courts spurred on explicitly racist policing, in part to harvest fines from black residents.
Then came Baltimore. The death of Freddie Gray, like those of Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Rekia Boyd and so many other unarmed African-Americans, at first seemed to fit the all-too-familiar template — white cops, black suspect, black corpse.
But unlike New York, Chicago and other cities with white leaders, Baltimore has a black mayor, a black police commissioner and a majority-black City Council. Yet the city still has one of the most stained records of police brutality in recent years.
In the absence of a perceptible “white power structure,” the discussion around Baltimore has quickly turned to one about the failings of black culture. This confuses even those who sympathize with black hardship. When people took to the streets and destroyed property, most observers did not see an understandable social response to apparent state inaction. They saw, in the words of Baltimore’s mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, “thugs,” or in the words of President Obama, “criminals and thugs.”
To be fair, the mayor later expressed regret, and both she and the president have tried to show empathy for the dispossessed. But they are also fighting myths about degenerate black culture. Condemning “criminals” and “thugs” seems to get them away from beliefs about broad black inferiority.
Yet when black people of influence make these arguments, it prevents us from questioning Baltimore the way we questioned Ferguson.
Instead, we lionize people like Toya Graham, the Baltimore mother who went upside the head of her rioting son. Baltimore’s police commissioner, Anthony W. Batts, applauded her, pleading with parents to “take control of your kids.” But the footage certainly affirms violence as the best way to get wayward black people under control.
Moreover, by treating a moment of black-on-black violence as a bright spot, we take our eye off the circumstances that created the event. We forget, for instance, about how officials, in their fear of black youth, issued what witnesses said was a pre-emptive riot-police blockade hemming in students around Mondawmin Mall, where looting erupted.
The problem is not black culture. It is policy and politics, the very things that bind together the history of Ferguson and Baltimore and, for that matter, the rest of America.
Specifically, the problem rests on the continued profitability of racism. Freddie Gray’s exposure to lead paint as a child, his suspected participation in the drug trade, and the relative confinement of black unrest to black communities during this week’s riot are all features of a city and a country that still segregate people along racial lines, to the financial enrichment of landlords, corner store merchants and other vendors selling second-rate goods.
The problem originates in a political culture that has long bound black bodies to questions of property. Yes, I’m referring to slavery.
Slavery was not so much a labor system as it was a property regime, with slaves serving not just as workers, but as commodities. Back in the day, people routinely borrowed against other human beings. They took out mortgages on them. As a commodity, the slave had a value that the state was bound to protect.
Now housing and commercial real estate have come to occupy the heart of America’s property regime, replacing slavery. And damage to real estate, far more than damage to ostensibly free black people, tends to evoke swift responses from the state. …
By avoiding the language of individual failings and degenerate culture, political leaders, black and otherwise, can help us all see the daily violence of poverty. More, they can better use the power they have to do something about it. By calling a nationwide “state of emergency” on the problem of residential segregation, by devising a fairer tax structure, by investing in public space, community policing, tenants’ rights and a government jobs program, our leaders can find a way forward.
From Bryce Covert, in The Nation: Ferguson's mass protests in the wake of Michael Brown's killing sparked a wide-ranging conversation about housing policy and racial segregation, as well as the ways in which the local court systems were funded by preying on the city's poorest. Already, Freddie Gray's death in Baltimore has us talking about concentrated poverty, income and racial inequality, and dearth of jobs—let alone jobs that pay a living wage.
These are important conversations and they deserve a national dialogue. But these phenomena aren’t limited to Ferguson and Baltimore. They’re not new and they’re happening in cities across America. But we don’t talk about them until a black man is killed by a police officer — and a mass upheaval, usually including some property destruction, follows.
America’s cities are profoundly segregated by race, even today. The average city-dwelling white person lives in a neighborhood that is 75 percent white. The average black person lives in a neighborhood that is 45 percent black. Baltimore, and the St. Louis area where Ferguson is located, both rank among some of the worst offenders (St. Louis ranks ninth; Baltimore clocks in at 16th), but they are not the worst. That award goes to Detroit and Milwaukee. …
The residents of Ferguson and Baltimore — and others that have seen demonstrations and protests against racial mistreatment — have demanded to be heard, and they deserve to be heard. It’s important that we listen and that we take time to talk about how we got into this situation — one in which whole communities have so few opportunities. But it’s also worth remembering that there are countless Fergusons and Baltimores across the country. Is it possible to talk about them before someone dies?
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