We interrupt our irregularly scheduled programming for something far more personal and having nothing to do with television. I really hope you don't mind.
I’ve been thinking a lot today
about Baltimore. Mostly, it’s the fault
of this article
by The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates
and this interview
(actually from last August concerning the Ferguson riots) with historian
Heather Ann Thompson. In particular, two
passages stood out to me. From Coates:
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.
And from Thompson:
Any time that there is urban rebellion, the way that it is spun
has everything to do with whether it's granted legitimacy. Notably, when there
was rioting in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, and you saw the
police with fire hoses and police dogs, it was very easy for white Northerners,
particularly the press, to report that for exactly what it was — which was
police violence on black citizens who were protesting. Everyone's very clear
about that. Sheriff Bull Connor is a racist, the police are racist, and that is
why it is violent.
But the minute that these protests moved northward, the racial
narrative was much more uncomfortable. "Why in the world would blacks be
protesting against us good-hearted white folks in the North? And how dare
they?" And what it means is that they were demanding too much, and that
they were in fact just looking for trouble. So that narrative of who gets to be
a legitimate protester shifts dramatically once protests move northward. It's
all about violence, troublemaking, looting, and so forth.
That second passage stands out
not just for its relevance today, but for its relevance to pretty much every
revolution ever. The American colonists
began with nonviolent resistance before graduating to property destruction (the
Boston Tea Party) and, ultimately, war.
Multiple times during the 19th century, rebel slaves took up
arms against their owners. African Americans
in the 1960s, gay communities in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, black South
Africans under apartheid, the rebels of the Arab Spring – all of these
oppressed groups were ultimately forced into violence in order to wrest equal
rights from the powerful.
So what’s the difference between
these revolutions and the riotous “thugs” and “criminals” in Ferguson and
Baltimore? Well, to put it frankly, for
the first time in this generation Americans are being confronted with the
painful idea that maybe, just maybe, we
are the oppressors. Certainly no group
in power thinks of itself as oppressive.
Running colonies across an ocean is expensive, so it only makes sense to
tax those who live there. Slave owners
and Afrikaners alike believed that blacks were inherently inferior and needed
the guiding hand of benevolent whites to survive.
It is only with the distance of
culture and time that we can see the unfairness of these systems and the
devastation they caused to the suffering populations. Unfortunately, we are without such gifts in
evaluating our own culture. And, much as
the white Northerners in the 1960s deplored police violence in Birmingham while
demonizing the “troublemakers” and “looters” in their own neighborhoods, we,
today, look back at past oppressors with the appropriate level of condemnation
while simultaneously crying, “No. Not
us. We’re the good guys.”
You can see it in the worlds of
Baltimore police officials. All week
long their declaration has been “Baltimore is not Ferguson.” After all, Baltimore has a black mayor. A majority of its city council is black. 43% of its police officers are black. And, yet, economically speaking, the towns
are not so different. Young black men in
Baltimore (aged 20-24) are four times more likely than whites to be unemployed,
and one-fifth as likely to have a college degree. Throw in the standard insane disparities of police
stops, arrests, and jail time* and it’s easy to see how many Baltimoreans can see themselves as an oppressed
population being overseen by an occupying force.
* Not to mention the fact that Freddie Gray was chased, arrested, and
fatally injured not because he actually committed or was suspected of
committing a crime, but merely for the act of running from police.
It can be difficult to accept the
idea that there is an oppressed people living within our very midst, especially
when most Americans don’t feel any particular animosity toward African
Americans. But what we have is not an
active racism, but a passive one in which we create laws that allow our
government to discriminate covertly, all in the name of the War on Drugs and “keeping
our streets safe.”
All of this brings me back to the
idea of nonviolence and whether it is a reasonable expectation in a world in
which young black men are seemingly killed with impunity by police officers
who, themselves, rarely face repercussions even when their killings are not deemed "justified."
Coates covered a lot of the problems with pleas for nonviolence in his
essay fittingly titled “Nonviolence as Compliance,” but I think he could have
expanded on one. “Nonviolence” is the
cry of the bully after his victim has finally punched back. As Coates points out, it is a ruse, a
distraction, the height of hypocrisy to breed a culture of violence in African
American communities – to use violence and threats of violence to bend a people
to the government’s will – and then to turn around and beg for those same
people to maintain the peace once they’ve reached their limit.
Where were the cries for
nonviolence as Freddie Gray was having his spinal cord severed? Where were the pleas for nonviolence as Tamir
Rice was being gunned down in his neighborhood park? Where were the people asking for nonviolence
when Eric Garner was having the life choked out of him or John Crawford was
being killed while shopping at Wal-Mart or Walter Scott was being murdered
while running away?
As Coates says in his piece, this
isn’t meant to argue that rioting and violence are “right,” merely that they
are inevitable. They are the inevitable result
of any revolution in which the people in power refuse to realize that they are,
in fact, the villains of the story. And
until we start demanding nonviolence from the powerful – our government, our
police, our military – I can’t in good conscience demand the same from the
powerless.
Tyler Williams a professional librarian and an amateur television critic. You can reach him at TyTalksTV AT gmail DOT com or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.
