It is all over the news today. A call for calm, a reminder of "nonviolence", a caricature of the "thugs" who burned buildings and pelted police with rocks and bricks. Civil rights, and peaceful protests retreat, safely away so that politicians and law enforcement agencies do not have to talk about the history of violence that has been perpetrated on black people in their city for the last century. Today it is all about the burning buildings and the injured police and how the Rev. King, Jr. would have handled it, and black politicians and civil rights leaders will be cowed into "of course its wrong," "we condemn such lawlessness," "a few days ago we were peaceful" and this "is not in the spirit of our protest".
What began yesterday is not simply about one more black man (or woman, as Baltimore seems to be an equal opportunity brutalizer) being killed by police, but about how we treat black people in general, how we stand to see them live in such misery, and how little we care about their children. Now that state violence has begot street violence the state will follow it up with thousands of soldiers, more policemen, nightly curfews, "tougher" tactics and official condemnations. What will not follow is a real discussion of why the people in these Baltimore neighborhoods distrust the police so much; why a liberal state has such poverty and dysfunction; why the police force is so brutal (and so white); why instead of "partying" students let out early become aggressors; and why there is so much inner directed violence against the neighborhoods in which people live. We will chalk it up simply to "reaction" or maybe in Fox News to ghetto culture, and the President will say a few words in which he condemns the looters, reminds us of an unfair America and then shifts back to defending drone strikes and proclaiming his administration's efforts on behalf of "all Americans".
Those Baltimore neighborhoods will remain, as they did after the riots of 1968, abandoned and unreconstructed. Police will become even more abusive "because" they are now "being targeted" by gangs (black, of course).
It is the legacy of American society that state violence seems always to hide behind minority reaction; and that the life of one policeman is more significant than the lives of scores of people of color who receive no state-sponsored parade and whose deaths add up to simply a statistic.
What happened yesterday in Baltimore is a reaction to state violence in the form of police brutality, joblessness, poverty, bad schooling, neglect and social hostility. People don't riot simply because they want to loot, nor do they let their neighborhood burn just to have a camp fire. Their actions may not be rational but neither is the violence and neglect in which they live. No one needs to justify or apologize for yesterday because words do little to change the realities of inner city America. Years ago, we would say this is a wake-up call. But years of being stone deaf means the state will simply become more militarized, and people of color more alienated. But they will still have to clean up "their" mess.
