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If you’ve been following the news this week, your television or computer screen has most likely flashed images of Baltimore being looted and burned. Today, the National Guard marches down the streets, protecting the community from its own people, while the family and friends of Freddie Gray mourn his death.
Depending on your racial identity, or your lack of connection to Baltimore itself, these scenes may not faze you, given the outrage following the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown this summer. We’ve already watched one city burn in recent memory, and white America seems weary of being shown black communities ravaged by their own citizens. From gauging the reactions of classmates and friends, this seems to be the case of Freddie Gray — another black man killed by the police, quickly followed by rioting from his community. Everyone knows that America has a racist past, and white people seem apathetic when being shown time and time again that we have not yet shaken off our dark history of oppression and black subjugation.
Protestors speak out against police brutality. (Photo courtesy of The All-Nite Images/Wikimedia Commons)
I’m not going to waste your time arguing the obvious — we do not live in a post-racial America. The epidemic-scale deaths of black men at the hands of police across the nation are clearly evidence of that, even if you haven’t looked at the disproportionate amount of minorities in our nation’s prisons. What I’m here to do is make sense of what is actually happening in Baltimore and why we are seeing violence and looting.
Freddie Gray was a 25-year-old black man from Baltimore who died a mysterious death. On April 12, Gray was walking down the street with a friend when he allegedly made eye contact with a bicycle cop and he took off running. The cop chased Gray with three others before they caught him several blocks later, where they arrested him.
Several minutes later, he was loaded into a police van, asked for an inhaler (he had asthma) and was ignored. Five minutes later, he was put in leg irons for struggling against his captors. Forty-five minutes later, the van stopped and the police requested paramedics. He arrived at the University of Maryland Medical Center and was placed in the shock trauma unit for severe damage to his spinal cord. He died there a week later, on April 19. According to a statement from his family’s lawyer, Gray’s spine was 80 percent severed.
The Department of Justice has since opened a probe into what exactly transpired in the police van. Meanwhile, Baltimore police remain steadfast, staunchly affirming that there was no foul play. Regardless, Freddie Gray is dead, and for now, those who trust in the U.S. justice system must sit tight until the federal investigation is concluded. For many, however, the conclusion is obvious — the police murdered Freddie Gray.
Outrage from the black community didn’t wait until Gray’s death. Protests began in front of the Western District police station a day before he succumbed to his injuries, and intensified the day of his death. From that point on the world has seen absolute chaos break out on Baltimore’s streets, complete with violent clashes with riot police, garbage cans thrown through local businesses’ windows and the ultimate decision by Maryland Governor Larry Hogan to mobilize the National Guard in a state of emergency.
I agree with the prevailing sentiment that the rioting and looting is disgraceful. Local business owners did not kill Freddie Gray, so why should they have to pay the price for an atrocity committed by the police? When businesses are being burned down and looted, companies stop investing in that community— meaning that the people may lose jobs and ultimately make a poor neighborhood poorer. This is the case in Sandtown-Winchester, Freddie Gray’s neighborhood. It’s simply a lose-lose for everyone.
We are seeing violence in Baltimore because Freddie Gray’s death unleashed all the built-up frustration and anger that was trapped in his community. People are absolutely livid, and why shouldn’t they be? Teens from low-income areas in East Baltimore face worse conditions than those in the slums of New Delhi and Ibadan, Nigeria— the country’s third largest city— and view their situation worse than teens in those other slums. It is these impoverished teens who are ultimately responsible for the looting and burning of Baltimore, especially the high school students who organized perhaps the most violent demonstration on Baltimore’s Mondawmin Mall, where they threw bricks at riot police amid streams of tear gas and batons.
And why should these kids protect a community that has given them nothing? In this light, the violence appears to be a projection of hopelessness, anger and grief.
Flyer distributed at Baltimore-area high schools calling for a “purge”. (Photo courtesy of Carrie Wells/Wikimedia Commons)
Baltimore is following the tendency for peaceful protests to be hijacked by a violent faction. I’ve seen it firsthand in Portland, and it’s been seen in Ferguson, where peaceful demonstrations were taken advantage of by people with different agendas. In a Portland anti-police brutality march that I went to, it was a group of white self-styled anarchists. In Ferguson, it was people who took advantage of the chaos for looting. Political interests often take a back seat to the interests of angry, greedy people with no cohesive agenda when police control of a community is compromised.
That being said, the reaction to Gray’s death has been overwhelmingly non-violent. Not until last Saturday night did violence begin, after a straight week of peaceful protesting. Activist groups from across the nation have come to Baltimore seeking peaceful protest, from Black Lives Matter to the Justice League of New York. Baltimore-area groups like the Nation of Islam and the 300 Men March have physically put themselves between the minority violent protestors and targeted riot police or local businesses.
Additionally, the NAACP, an instrumental organization that has promoted the rights of black Americans since the early 20th century, has publicly condemned the use of violence and the looting. To further illustrate the broad condemnation of violence, the local Bloods and Crips have teamed up with the Nation of Islam to ensure that demonstrations are peaceful.
There is an important distinction to be made here. A mass instance of chaos, looting, burning and violence against the police is a riot; a mass demonstration of non-violent individuals is a not a riot. It’s a peaceful protest with a message. Rioting has no message. Rioting is a self-interested act motivated by greed and a desire to disturb law and order. Some of Baltimore’s teens are rioting while the rest of the community is trying to peacefully push an agenda against police brutality, racial inequity and the dehumanization of black people.
The #BlackLivesMatter movement spread across the nation following the death of Michael Brown last August. (Photo courtesy of The All-Nite Images/Wikimedia Commons)
Organizers trying to push a positive agenda know that violence undermines their message and challenges their credibility. They try to maintain peaceful demonstrations that push a social agenda. With situations like Ferguson and Baltimore, though, non-violence is extremely hard to maintain, given that the catalysts for these protests are the police murders of two black men. Naturally, a community becomes outraged when one of their own is murdered by an agent of the state, especially when that community is being neglected by the state. In Baltimore and Ferguson, that anger is tenfold, and it is directed at the whole of the United States in all of its history, stemming from the original sin of slavery. Try keeping that in check.
So why are we only being shown images of the rioting, not the massive, peaceful protests that have been going on for over a week? This is happening, and always happens, when protests are subversive to the way things are run in this country. It happened in the Seattle WTO protests in 1999, and more recently, it happened in Ferguson. Cue the mainstream media, which is tasked with showing everyone who is not in Baltimore what is going on in Baltimore. Mainstream media outlets like MSNBC, CBS and Fox News are for-profit companies that benefit from invoking fear in American citizens with eye-catching headlines and images of burning cars and riot police, so there’s one obvious incentive to neglect the peaceful protests and their message.
The other reason is that mainstream media would have to push the narrative to white Americans that these protests are peaceful and positive, contrary to already existing beliefs. When white America sees some black people rioting in Baltimore, it assumes that what it’s seeing is representative of all of the activity there, even if that is far from the case. In other words, it needs to be proved to white America that black protests are respectable and legitimate, which is not something that the mainstream media is willing to lose profit over.
Resist the urge to judge the protests off of what the mainstream media shows us. Above all, don’t condemn the protests in Baltimore, and for Christ’s sake, don’t use the violence of a small fraction of people to write off the national movement for racial equity. This is Generation Y’s Civil Rights Movement, and in political organization, public opinion is a weapon, with white America being the temperature gauge of American public opinion. If white people like me are led to condemn the protests outright, there is no hope for solidarity and change.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Grant Stringer at grant.stringer@colorado.edu.
