Regarding Baltimore
By WH
Recently, another American city had to call in National Guard troops to sustain order against rioting. Thus far, there have been 235 arrests, according to Reuters, and about 20 police officers hurt. Fifteen cars have burned, and 144 buildings went aflame. Public transportation has shut down, and schools have cancelled classes in the midst of the unrest. The spectre of militarized police officers, which made its first haunting in Ferguson, Missouri, made another appearance in the city where “The Star-Spangled Banner” was written: Baltimore.
The case of the 25-year-old black man Freddie Gray lit the powder keg beneath the seemingly benign city; Gray was murdered at the hands of police who folded him “like origami,” according to The Baltimore Sun. They did not put on his seat belt, after they had beaten him to a pulp. Fully-knowing that Gray was injured and not buckled in, they proceeded to drive like maniacs, which severed his spinal cord. To add to the tragedy: his only ‘crime’ was looking at the police and then leaving the area.
This case isn’t abnormal; many other cases like it happen throughout the country. According to Reason, the case of Najee Rivera in Philadelphia is like that of Gray, since he was also beaten to a pulp without provocation. To boot, back in 2004, another man was awarded 39 million dollars after he was paralyzed by similar actions by police officers, reports The Atlantic.
These actions do have a context and they speak to the systematic dispossession rife in Baltimore. As quoted in Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1968), Martin Luther King Jr. said :
But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.
The image of burned out homes and looted shelves may resonate through the television sets of American homes, but there is another side to this story, oftentimes just next door to those victims of local strife. There are the boarded-up businesses of days past, and the foreclosed homes of families who are victims of financial circumstance.
The plain facts regarding Baltimore are appalling: nearly one in four residents are below the poverty line, according to the Census Bureau. Median household income is almost half that of the rest of Maryland, and the per capita income is a third of that of the rest of the state. According to the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation, Baltimore’s unemployment rate is above eight percent; Maryland’s is less than five and a half.
While the lifelong resident of Baltimore struggles to live a normal life, the inner-city increasingly is a victim of a new gentry. The Christian Science Monitor’s correspondent Stephanie Hanes reported on the incoming young professionals, many of them just out of college, peopling such previously shunned places as Baltimore. As they move in, they expect the high-class adornments and living space of the fashionable city dweller, and oftentimes they look to the city government to help in their endeavours.
Hanes wrote of “tax credits and streamlined building permits,” tools employed to accomplish “long-held strategic goals and policies” — a primary goal is to push out the working-class residents, and replace them with the high class technocrats of a new age.
Besides this stultifying bourgeois thinking, the city cannot even provide its citizens with adequate infrastructure. CNBC reports that 20 percent of the city’s water doesn’t even find its way to the customer; instead it just dribbles into the ground. The city has four thousand miles of pipes, yet it is replacing just 5 miles of it every year.
In Baltimore, there are many ready hands and work to be done, but nothing is getting done.
The New York Times reported that the city’s mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, uttered these hollow words, “Too many people have spent generations building up this city for it to be destroyed by thugs.” The city government finds itself helpless to defend its citizens from the ravages of an economic system that doesn’t know what it’s doing. It cannot get its people to work, but when it does, the workers can barely eat.
Amidst all of this, the Republican Governor Larry Hogan proposes cuts across the board and contemplating tax cuts, which tend to benefit the rich the most. The cuts to the budget are specifically targeting “education, healthcare and state employee compensation,” reports The Baltimore Sun. The basic services state governments are supposed to give will be cut, thus damaging social mobility in Maryland, while the rich men that perpetuate a system of high unemployment and low wages may get a tax cut.
Shawn Gude for Jacobin Magazine wrote a harrowing article, and ended on this note:
The snails-pace of police reform at the Maryland Legislature didn’t spark an uprising. When Tyrone West died at the hands of police, and when Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts insisted that they were “changing and adapting the organization” after the cops got off scot-free, Baltimoreans didn’t revolt. And when police faced no charges in the death of Anthony Anderson, Charm City residents showed remarkable restraint.
But police immunity and dehumanizing poverty can only coexist for so long. If the future is uncertain, one thing is clear: it is only through resistance and struggle that a new, more just Baltimore will be born.
When people are put on the knife’s edge, where they fear that the police department that is supposed to “protect and serve” might kill them in the back of a van; where their education is cut, and healthcare malnourished; where they are a step away from the reality of unemployment; where pay for a day’s work is little more than minimum wage; then they become desperate. When people are treated as mere means to an soul-crushing end, they feel alienated and dispossessed.
The issue isn’t the riots; the issue is what caused the riots, and the way to solve it isn’t National Guard troops; the way out is treating people as human beings.
