Baltimore
became the center of national attention in April because of the
events surrounding the killing of Freddie Gray by the police while he
was in custody on April 19. Freddie Gray's death became the focal
point for local, city-wide demonstrations that became larger and more
militant in the week following Freddie Gray's death, until on April
25th
there was a dual confrontation between demonstrators and bar crowds
downtown and then demonstrators and the police, which ended in some
property damage and the arrests of a handful of protesters.
Freddie
Gray and Baltimore's West Side
Freddie
Gray lived on the near west side of Baltimore, in a poor black
neighborhood like many others in the U.S. In the post-WWII period,
in part thanks to industrial expansion and in part thanks to the
Civil Rights and Black Power movements, it seemed as if there might
be a break with the old world of racial oppression grounded in the
split between unfree black labor and free, waged white labor, which
had begun with chattel slavery and continued with segregation.
However, this break was not to lead to liberation from racialization.
Capital flight and de-industrialization were already breaking up the
post-WWII capital-labor productivity-wages agreement, leading to an
increasingly generalized contingency of workers to access to waged
work. This economic shift combined with white flight from the city
to the suburbs meant that wealth production and taxable income left
the cities. This dual movement re-instantiated racial division on a
new basis, where black people became non-labor, radically contingent
to wage labor, and the inhabitants of de-industrialized, impoverished
urban areas. As these conditions progressed from the late 1960's to
the 2000's, the underground economy based on the drug and sex trades
expanded exponentially and the state responded with the
militarization of the police and increasing incarceration of black
people. Gentrification that began in the 1980's in some cities (in
Baltimore only in the 2000's) only intensified the divide, justifying
even more militarized policing.
The
police in Baltimore therefore were not doing anything new when they
arrested Freddie Gray because he ran away when they rolled up. Nor
were they doing anything new when they bent him like a pretzel during
the arrest, broke his spine while in transit to the police station,
and lied about it on their arrest report. The
murder of Freddie Gray by the police is the latest in a long line of
incidents.i
The city of Baltimore has paid out approximately $6 million in
settlements over the past four years to avoid criminal prosecution of
Baltimore City police officers. According to the Baltimore Sunii,
this is because “more than 100 people have won court judgment or
settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights
violations.” On a national scale, the closest count seems to be
from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reportiii
in the Justice Department, which reported more than 4,800
“arrest-related” deaths from 2003 to 2009. Black people were
just under 4 times as likely to die in custody as white people and
almost twice as likely as Latinos. ProPublica did an analysis of the
data from 2010-2012 and determined that in that period, young black
men aged 15-19 were 21 times more likely to be killed by the police
than young white men in the same age group.iv
These numbers, as bad as they are, are based on very incomplete data
sets.
Daily
Protests
From
the day of Freddie Gray’s death on April 19th,
there have been daily demonstrations attended by hundreds and, by the
25th,
thousands of people from all walks of life.v
The first real violence took place on the 25th
in the evening near Camden Yards where the Baltimore Orioles baseball
team was playing. There was a combination of some protesters ready
for a fight, mixed with a series of hostile, racist provocations from
drunken white sports fansvi
and cops all too willing to use any misstep as an opportunity to wade
into the protesters and arrest people.
The
mainstream media coverage only focused on the “violence” of the
protesters, who had done little more than break some windows and
“loot” a 7-Eleven convenience store. Arrested protesters, on the
other hand, reported being maced while in the holding cells by
officers.
A
Provoked Riotvii
The
events that have become the focal point, the riots on Monday April
27th,
actually had a somewhat indirect relationship to the protests. The
conditions that led to the events on Monday were effectively created
by the actions of the police.
In
response to items posted on various social media that there should be
a “purge”viii
at Mondawmin Mall, a very poor city mall near where Freddie Gray
lived and died. The mall was closed down and the students at
Frederick Douglass High School across the street were let out early.
Many students told teachers they wanted to get out of the area before
anything crazy happened. However, instead of letting students get on
buses and disperse, the police department re-routed buses away from
the school, and took passengers off of the buses that were leaving
the area, and effectively forced the students to stay in the
neighborhood face to face with 200-300 hundred police in riot gear,
who then moved on the students.
After
a considerable amount of tension had built up, the students began to
throw things at the police who had herded them into a corner. Once
the dam was breached, all of the anger was released in a running
battle that lasted well into the evening, eventually centering around
the CVS drug store at Pennsylvania Ave. and North Ave. Over a dozen
police were hurt and around 200 people were arrested. Approximately
15 buildings were burnt, and some looting took place, though not as
much as you would think since there aren’t a lot of places to loot
there.
Not
only was the police role the riot not reported, but all we have heard
from the Democratic President to far right-wing bloggers to
Baltimore’s Democratic mayor is how horrible it was that these
“thugs” destroyed property and hurt cops, but no recognition that
the cops killed
Freddie
Gray; how the
protesters ought to be peaceful even though this completely
misrepresented the protesters as the same people as the rioters in
order to discredit the protests; how black people have no right to be
angry about police violence and institutionalized poverty and
discrimination because “they” burned down a chain drug store.
However,
the defenders of the protesters and rioters were often as
unsatisfactory. Some of the anarchist-inclined Left, seduced by
images of “riot porn”, uncritically read the riots as a kind of
pure resistance, never mind the problematic celebration of
destruction in “those people's” neighborhood under the assumption
that “they” have “nothing” anyway, a view by no means shared
by many people in the neighborhoods where rioting happened. The more
progressive local politicians recognized a crucial “socio-economic
dimension” to the protests and riots, but of course cannot account
for this “dimension” as intrinsic to capital and so they can't
really say why this “dimension” persists seemingly without end.
The traditional Left called for “workers' solidarity” under the
idea that “the race problem” is really
only
a “class problem”, as always unable to reckon with the
irreducible specificity of racial domination. Finally, the largest
Left-liberal milieu, espousing a politics of “white privilege”
falls into line with Black Nationalist politics in hypostatizing
racial differentiation. On the one hand, this politics cannot but
offend a large layer of working class whites who in no way feel
privileged in the age of capital's precaritisation of all labor, and
on the other hand it provides cover for black middle class
opportunism in the name of sublimating radical critique to obedience
to “the leaders” of “the community”. It disarms radical
critique in the face of the politics of ressentiment, of “white
victimization”, which is frequently strongest among whites
most likely to be economically and socially punished for close
proximity to black people (e.g. the real estate industry really does
drop property values in neighborhoods where black people move in, so
poor whites who have scraped something together frequently draw the
conclusion that the problem is black people, not a racist capitalism,
the latter being much harder to do anything about.)
Solidarity
Actions
On
Monday night a state of emergency was declared and the Governor sent
in National Guard troops to assist the police in maintaining “order”,
that is, in maintain a situation in which poverty, state sanctioned
murder, and business as usual is met with compliance. This has been
phenomenally successful in stopping all tourism and business activity
in the downtown area, but not the activity of protesters.
Despite
the blockading of some neighborhoods by the police, with no logic
other than to cut them off from the rest of the city, hundreds of
people from all over the city came out to help clean up the area
where the riots took place. Parents brought their children to talk
with them about what was going on and why. Gangs called a truce (not
to facilitate murdering police officers, as the Police Department
claimed) in order to help stabilize the city. By the end of Tuesday
night, it was also clear that those people from around the city were
key in keeping the police from provoking new riots because the police
started using tear gas and shooting pepper-spray bullets at people in
certain neighborhoods, with seemingly little provocation.
It
has also been great to see solidarity demonstrations in Seattle, New
York City, Chicago, and other cities, but we also need to understand
that these are not just acts of solidarity. These demonstrations are
acts of resistance because Staten Island is Ferguson is Baltimore is
America. The brutality of the police in relation to these
demonstrations has been higher than normal, as have been the number
of arrests.
An
Indictment!?
No
doubt the most singularly surprising outcome of all this was the
actual indictment, on May 1, of the six police officers involved in
Freddie Gray's death. This probably would not have happened without
the constant pressure of people in Baltimore and around the country
in the last year.
As
a result, the demonstration on Friday, May 1, was both surprisingly
large (I would estimate at its peak somewhere around 4,000 people)
and extremely well-received. We marched from downtown, surrounded by
heavily armed police and National Guard units, with armored military
vehicles, up to the neighborhood where the main rioting took place
and back into the downtown area. Support on the way out was
generally positive, but it was hard not to cry as we entered the
community around Pennsylvania and North. There were already hundreds
of people out in their cars blocking the streets, “Justice for
Freddie Gray”, “No Racist Police” and all manner of other
slogans on people's cars, posted on buildings, etc., but neither they
nor we had any idea that these two demonstrations would come
together. People on all sides cheered, got out of their cars and
hugged marchers, honked their horns in support, took pictures
together, marched together. Small children no more than 6 or 7 years
old stood on top of cars, fists in the air, high-fiving people who
walked by.
Saturday,
a similar march went to back, but this time instead f marching on,
they stayed and literally held a street festival, with people dancing
and carousing and paying no heed to the barriers that normally break
people apart. This, much more than the very male-centered, adult
riot, is what the powers that be should fear. This was a festival,
however brief, against oppression. There were no “revolutionary
heroics” to be found here, but something profoundly auguring a
different future.
i http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/police-shootings-ferguson-race-data,
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/police-shootings-michael-brown-ferguson-black-men,
http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white.
Given the limits of the data and its reliability, the difference
could in fact be anywhere from 10-40 times more likely.
v Estimates
for the April 25th March vary from 1200-5000 people.
Journalist
Brandon Soderberg, who was there and who intervened in one instance,
relates what actually happened here.
viii “The
Purge” is a fictional film (now with a sequel) about the seizure
of power by a right-wing government in the U.S. and how that
government institutes a “purge” one night a year, in which
everyone can commit any sort of crime they want, including murder.
Hence the reference of “purging”.
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