More notes on racism, riots and the police

One of the things that has struck me about the debate over police brutality and the uprising in Baltimore is its reductive nature — both sides demonizing everyone on the other side, failing to acknowledge the difficulties that both sides live with every day. I can’t pretend to know what it is like to live in a place like Ferguson or West Baltimore, where money and jobs are scarce, where the police appear as overseers and occupiers; I also can’t pretend to know what it is like to do a job in which there is a chance that any interaction can turn violent in a second.

But while there is a lot of gray in this debate, it is not one in which blame can be spread equally. The power structure — of which police are a part — is responsible for the creating conditions in which American citizens feel like an oppressed and occupied population. History argues that this is the case, the history of slavery, Jim Crow in the South and a de facto Jim Crow in the North that played out in housing policy (as outlined in Ta Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations”), union membership and hiring, the deindustrialization of our cities, white flight, school funding fights, etc.; the war on drugs and the general use of war rhetoric in the public policy arena, especially as it relates to black youth; and the victim blaming we see regularly on cable television that pretends that the occasional success story (i.e., Barack Obama or Cory Booker) proves it isn’t public policy but personal character that determines all outcomes.

In a lot of ways, the protests — and riots — in Ferguson, Baltimore and elsewhere were almost inevitable. Michael Brown and Freddie Gray were spark and the long-term conditions were the fuel, though it is hard to know why these specific cases were the ones to ignite what has happened and not others that were equally alarming. (I won’t call them tragic, because I try to reserve the use of the word to the Aristotilian use — via Joyce — in which tragedy is the result of hubris, the tragic outcome a result of an individual’s excessive pride and something caused by his or her own actions.) Violence can follow when subjugated people — or people who view themselves as subjugated — feel as though their concerns are being ignored.

Coates, in an essay shortly after last month’s riot, was critical of those calling for calm and criticizing the youth in Baltimore from afar. The riot, he said, was “an angry response to the death of Freddie Gray, a death my native city seems powerless to explain,” but also a response to something deeper.

Gray did not die mysteriously in some back alley but in the custody of the city’s publicly appointed guardians of order. And yet the mayor of that city and the commissioner of that city’s police still have no idea what happened. I suspect this is not because the mayor and police commissioner are bad people, but because the state of Maryland prioritizes the protection of police officers charged with abuse over the citizens who fall under its purview.

The citizens who live in West Baltimore, where the rioting began, intuitively understand this.

The calls for non-violence, he adds, came from people “charged with enforcing the very policies that led to Gray’s death, and yet they can offer no rational justification for Gray’s death and so they appeal for calm.” That, he said, is disingenuous.

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is “correct” or “wise,” any more than a forest fire can be “correct” or “wise.” Wisdom isn’t the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called rioting an immoral act, but also made clear that “riot is the language of the unheard” — a line he used a number of times, including a little remarked upon speech (“The Other America”) and this CBS interview. King was critical of violence on moral and tactical grounds, but he understood its genesis. The Black Power movement of the time was a response to the failures of white America to address not only segregation but economic inequality and the race-based, though seemingly race-neutral policies used to enforce the status quo.

The police are a part of this legacy, though their part is complicated and not completely or even mostly of their own creation. They have been put in an untenable position, having these racist and military tropes drilled into their heads repeatedly. They have been told they are fighting a war, so it should be no surprise when they act like soldiers and treat the “bad guys” not just as people who may have broken a law but as the enemy and, as we do to all enemies in war, as less than human.

Radley Balko put it this way in an interview a few years ago:

I think rhetoric is very important. For one, declaring war on drugs, crime, etc. conditions the public to be ready to give up some essential rights in order to win the war, as often happens during war. But it also of course has an effect on police, who have come to see themselves as soldiers on a battlefield instead of peace officers.

The war rhetoric has also been accompanied by efforts to dehumanize drug offenders. One Nixon official called them “vermin.” William Bennett once floated the idea of public beheading of drug dealers. Daryl Gates once equated drug use with treason. When you tell the public that drug offenders are less than human, the public is more tolerant of treating them that way.

Part of this is the history of American police forces — which were created to protect property and wealth and keep the rabble (blacks, Jews, the Irish, the Italians, workers) in check.

Before the 19th century, there were no police forces that we would recognize as such anywhere in the world. In the northern United States, there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force was the slave patrols. Then, as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working-class neighborhoods.

Today’s police are very different than those early forces — far more professional and, in many places, better connected to the communities in which they serve. But their main focus remains the same — keeping order — and that infuses everything they do. They’ve also become their own standing interest group, with leaders fighting to protect members and to maintain long-won prerogatives, and the ability to influence local and state politics. (In this way, the police unions are no different than the teachers or other public employee unions, though they rarely end up the butt of criticism in the same way that teachers do.)
 If it sounds like I am being critical of all police, then you’re misreading my intent. There are good cops out there — most cops, in fact, are well-intentioned, are professional, are only interested in protecting the community. But they operate in a system designed to stifle their best impulses. Systemic reform is needed — not just within individual police departments or even within the larger police culture, but at a societal level, a cultural level, a broad economic level. Democratizing police culture is a start, but it won’t go very far until we acknowledge that we need to fix the rot at the core of the American economy and address hundreds of years of willful neglect of (and, in too many cases, outright hostility toward) Black Americans.

Send me an e-mail.