By the time the sun came up over Baltimore’s bruised and battered landscape Tuesday, a war-inspired narrative was being employed to characterize a night of burnings and mayhem. Its aggressors, as that narrative went, were the lawless, opportunistic thugs and looters out to destroy the city for no reason.
There is of course no justification for the vandalism and violence, but it is inaccurate to suggest there was no reason for it. Even rioters have a reason for rioting, and unless officials try to understand it, no number of National Guard troops will effectively stop them. Yet Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan dismissed any association between the rioting and the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who suffered a severe spinal injury while in police custody and died later. “This is lawless gangs of thugs roaming the streets,” Hogan insisted. “And we’re not going to tolerate that.”
No, it can’t be tolerated, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum. But what might cause people to feel so alienated or hopeless that they’d want to destroy their city? The most thoughtful answer I’ve heard came, of all people, from the chief operating officer of the Baltimore Orioles, John Angelos:
“My greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts. It is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle-class and working-class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.”
Angelos said what most of the presidential hopefuls coming through Iowa have lacked the guts, or perhaps the insight, to say. Few have linked growing impoverishment with trade policies that have made our workers redundant while enriching corporate coffers. Almost none of the presidential hopefuls — themselves backed by corporate patrons — even mentions poverty. So it’s doubtful they’ve considered the sense of hopelessness that chronic unemployment might cause, or the disenfranchisement a black man might experience when his very presence is treated as a problem.
Even Martin O’Malley, Maryland’s former governor and Baltimore’s former mayor, who is positioning himself as a progressive Democratic alternative to Hillary Clinton, is blamed by community leaders for 15 years ago implementing a zero-tolerance policy for crime. That has disproportionately hurt young black men, according to Lawrence Bell, the former Baltimore city council president. It has led to arrests for minor offenses, and helped fuel distrust of law enforcement. Having a record then makes it harder to get a job. After enough indignities and enough deprivations of rights and resources, you might start to believe the rules are different for you than for other people. You might come to see that as its own kind of warfare.
