There is absolutely no excuse for the riots and the fires in
Baltimore. Violence is never the appropriate way to seek redress of grievances
in a civil society.
But just because we don’t condone, does not mean that we
can’t empathize with the rioters and their concerns. If we want to prevent
future violence of the same sort, we have to explore the reasons that motivated
so many people suddenly to break loose of the social bonds that restrain all of
us most of the time and to burst into rioting.
We know the origin of the Baltimore riots is the death of
African-Americans everywhere in the United States at the hands of police, who
are quicker to arrest blacks, quicker to use force on them and quicker to draw
their gun and fire at them than they are when confronting whites. The death of
Freddie Gray from a spinal cord injury while in police custody was the
proximate cause of the Baltimore riot, but behind it stand years of rough
treatment of African-Americans by the Baltimore police and the crescendo of
recent publicity surrounding other African-Americans essentially murdered by
police in Ferguson, Tulsa, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Cleveland and
elsewhere.
The equation is simple: riots about unfair and brutal
treatment of minorities by local police departments will end when local police
departments stop treating minorities unfairly and brutally.
As they always do after spontaneous violence flares up in
reaction to injustice, the rightwing news media has thrown all its support
behind the police while tarring the entire community with blame for the violent
actions of what is always a minority of the neighborhood where rioting occurs.
Meanwhile, the mainstream news media seek to conflate the rioting with the
police brutality that instigated it on the moral and ethical level.
Both may be unacceptable, but two factors make the police
actions far worse. For one thing, it is the police actions that constitute the
injustice which foments the violence.
More significantly, the violence in the community is
unplanned, a spontaneous outbreak of people who have often suffered for
decades. As the U.S. Department of
Justice report on Ferguson substantiates, the police violence against African-Americans
is often part of a larger, long-term policy of unjust discrimination that
includes racial profiling, more frequent arrests, larger fines and prison terms
and more frequent applications of violent force. To blame equally the rioters
and the police who kill, hurt and hassle people because of their color is to
misunderstand the dynamics of racial discrimination in America.
No comments:
Post a Comment