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The lessons of the fires of Baltimore

The lessons of the fires of Baltimore

With the latest flare-up of urban anger over yet another death of a young African American at the hands of a police force, this time in Baltimore, J. BROOKS SPECTOR looks at the death of Freddie Gray, the city’s larger circumstances, and the possible impact of this death for the future.

Like so many other big industrial cities in America, Baltimore has been bleeding away factory jobs and industries for decades as China and the other emerging economies have become the world’s workshops instead of places like Baltimore and Detroit – or Sheffield in the UK for that matter. (The author once worked in a steel-fabricating factory in Baltimore that, along with so many other factories and plants there, has long been shuttered.) This erosion of economic possibilities has substantially disrupted the transmission belt that had seen so many sons follow fathers into those hard but decently paid, unionised jobs in all those factories, foundries and rail yards, for all those years.

Unfortunately, the disappearance of this employment has not been made up by the new service jobs in the glitzy redevelopment zone of the Baltimore Inner Harbour district – the pride and joy of contemporary urban renewal planners, what with its swanky hotels, conference centres, restaurants, the state-of-the-art national aquarium, and a veritable poster child for sensitive urban renewal and redevelopment. That, in turn, has knocked the pins out from under many of Baltimore’s working class people chances to step into those assembly line, strong-back jobs that had been the first rung upwards into a modest economic security for so many, for so long.

As the loss of such jobs accelerated, Baltimore’s people have increasingly migrated away from the city. Once one of the country’s bigger cities, with well over a million people inside its boundaries, Baltimore’s population has slipped by nearly 40% – to just a little over 600,000 residents. In the meanwhile, many of its more prosperous residents or those with viable skills and professions have moved to leafier suburbs and peri-urban towns and landscapes. Still others have sought out greener employment pastures much further away in other states (Americans have always been a particularly mobile people with a whole national mythology of moving on to better places and chances). And even Baltimore’s retirees have moved to places – largely in the South of the US like Florida – where the cost of living is lower and the weather is less taxing. All this has left an increasingly hollowed-out city where much of its remaining population is African American. A disproportionate number of such residents remain poor, unemployed and under-educated. This migration of industries, jobs and people has, correspondingly, cut a huge hole in the city’s tax base and its ability to finance and support future growth and development as well.

Naturally the changing demographics have meant that, in purely racial terms, the political structures in the city have evolved as well. As a result, Baltimore is now far away from a time when white ethnic political machine bosses largely controlled who was elected for city offices and state-wide offices as well, given Baltimore’s large population relative to the rest of the state. Instead, Baltimore has become a city that reliably elects African American mayors and city councillors (as well as state legislators and congressmen) and that now has African American chiefs of police and other top officials as well. However, in the past three decades, the continuing population growth of Baltimore County at the expense of the city along with the massive growth of those prosperous suburban counties bordering Washington, DC, but part of Maryland, have moved the state’s real power balances further away from Baltimore’s old political heft.

But despite the city being largely in the hands of a new-ish black political elite, on-the-ground policing has remained a problem for Baltimore, as it has in so many other places across the country – as we have learned from the events. Old patterns of policing black neighbourhoods have remained in the mode of what some have taken to describing as being in the style of an army moving in hostile territory – despite the fact that the police force itself also became increasingly African American in its personnel. As a result, it was probably inevitable that at some point, just as in growing list of other jurisdictions in America, in Baltimore, an African American, once arrested, would be treated with the kind of excessive force in the “mean streets” so familiar to television viewers around the world from shows like The Wire or Homicide – Life on the Street. Taken together, many in Baltimore’s African American population could easily see their present and future circumstances as hemmed in by the lack of real prospects for employment, under the watch of a police force that treated them as the enemy, and their lack of any “agency” to leverage the political power structures of the city to their economic and social advantage despite the altered racial demographics.

Or as the usually house conservative columnist for the Washington Post and former George W Bush aide, Michael Gerson put it the other day, “Yet clearly, some Baltimore neighborhoods began to feel more occupied than served. An element of the police — on the evidence, a relatively small element — became desensitized during its daily application of power. One result can be dehumanization, which may help explain Freddie Gray’s long, last trip. But some of the worst outcomes are not found in abuses of the system but rather in its design: a cycle of incarceration and return that reinforces ­criminality.”

Gerson went on to argue, “Large economic trends, particularly globalisation and the technological revolution, have pushed the blue-collar economy in many places into a permanent slump. Wages have stagnated or declined and workforce participation has fallen. At the same time, the connection between childbearing and marriage has been broken. Chronically stressed parents — often single parents — have less time and fewer resources to invest in their children. Community institutions, including public schools, are weak, providing children with fewer extracurricular opportunities. When children get into trouble — as children from all classes are wont to do — there is little support structure for addiction treatment and legal help. We cannot expect police power to confront these complex, interrelated difficulties. But someone, in addition to local religious and community leaders, needs to try. ”

And so, with 25-year old Freddie Gray’s arrest, and then his death from injuries sustained in a police van, following all the publicity to the litany of other deaths at the hands of police across the country in recent months, it was almost as if the anger felt by many in the city’s African American population tripped a kind of societal circuit breaker. And things quickly escalated (or spiralled downward, perhaps) as the police presence on those Baltimore streets soon had to be bolstered by hundreds of National Guard troops, even as opportunistic criminals – “thugs” in the words of politicians from President Barack Obama onward – took advantage of the ensuing chaos to loot and set fire to local stores.

But why have these populations continued to be so volatile or resentful? In essence, for many years there have been two contrasting lines of argument running concurrently. Back in the 1944, according to a classic study by Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, the preponderance of blame belonged squarely on a system of institutional racism that continued to keep the majority of African Americans largely locked into the position of being a subservient economic underclass for the rest of society. That inevitably has led to the baleful consequences now coming due, despite all those formal government efforts to move people out of poverty and hopelessness from the days of the War on Poverty in the early 1960s and onward.

In contrast to that position, broadly put, American sociologist Daniel Moynihan argued in The Negro Family: the case for national action back in 1965 that while the magnitude of the problem was certainly a grave one, the core of it was, then, less contemporary racism than it was the inheritance of social pathologies that ultimately reached back to slavery’s destruction of the black family structure. Female headed households and the disordered family life that contributed to, generated recurring patterns of failure that would continue to produce the black underclass. Looking forward, Moynihan predicted that as such households continued to grow proportionately, those ill-omened societal outcomes would also grow. As a result, until the family circumstances could somehow be changed by major national interventions of cash and social policy, many African Americans would be unable to break out of the vicious circle.

After the report was released, its conclusions (and Moynihan himself, then a young official in the Lyndon Johnson administration) were strongly attacked by many as just a cleverly phrased version of the destructive tendency of “blaming the victim” for his misfortunes. Meanwhile, proponents of the idea that institutional racism was at the heart of things were criticised for their reluctance to give individuals any sense that their futures could lie in their own hands. In more extreme responses, such critics argued that calling institutional racism the key was giving racism’s victims a free pass for their anti-social behaviour.

Meanwhile, in cities like Baltimore, where political power now increasingly resides with black voters and black office holders such as that city’s mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, recurring incidents of police criminality point to the inability of the new black political class to achieve any kind of decisive breakthrough in police behaviour. Adding to the problem, police forces are inevitably the sharp end of the system’s “stick”, representing everything that seems wrong with the system in their guise as that “occupying army”.

And that may be why such quick, decisive action by States Attorney Marilyn Mosby to indict six Baltimore police men on a range of criminal acts that led directly to Freddie Gray’s death (although not for first degree murder) seems to have achieved major symbolic importance. Rather than long, drawn out investigations that ultimately lead nowhere while tempers continued to boil, as most investigations of policy misbehaviour seem to have done nationally, Mosby moved with almost unprecedented speed to bring those charges forward.

The challenges going forward, of course, are whether or not she will be able to secure any convictions in a court. If not, perhaps the unhappiness in the streets will simply make another comeback as a demonstration that the system cannot help prevent police brutality from happening again. And, of course, even convictions will not address the vast substrata of problems among black communities, including the situation where few jobs remain in these neighbourhoods – and where chances to gain the skills crucial for the jobs of the 21st century economy remain limited. And then, too, what in South Africa would be termed the anger over inadequate service delivery continues to run deep in such neighbourhoods in Baltimore, with the feeling that those African American neighbourhoods gain the least from their local governments. And, of course, simply spending more money on better civic services or a new community centre will not solve the crisis either.

Something else – or many things – must still happen to rescue such communities and bring them fully into the mainstream of the country. We live in the time when a supercharged atmosphere will be fed by instant access to information wherever or whenever an inept or brutal police action can ignite nationwide rage. As a result, it doesn’t require too much power of prognostication to say that the country will almost certainly face more days of rage in towns and cities wherever and whenever residents of black neighbourhoods and communities see themselves as threatened or ignored by the very governments that are supposed to serve them. It may well be a difficult, dangerous summer for many this year in America.

And, in fact, the impact of Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore has transcended the US and leapt whole continents. Over the past weekend, when several Tel Aviv police carried out an apparently unprovoked attack on an Israeli soldier of (black) Ethiopian descent in uniform, and once the video of this attack was widely seen via social media and broadcast television, Ethiopian Jewish community leaders called the resulting demonstrations Israel’s “Baltimore moment”. (Ethiopian Jews comprise about 120,000 of Israel’s population – out of six and a quarter million Jewish Israelis – and that community’s members frequently complain about discrimination against them by the rest of the population in jobs, housing, education and equal treatment.)

The quick dismissal of the attacking policemen in Tel Aviv from their jobs may have stayed further protests for the moment in Israel by its Ethiopian community, but, similarly with America, dealing successfully with symptoms, rather than with the deeper problems, may ultimately be like putting an elastic bandage over a gaping wound. It seems safe to say that in the US at least, there will be, in the title of James Baldwin’s classic volume of 1963, The Fire Next Time, and then the next, and the next – until this thing is finally and decisively solved. DM

Photo: Police and firefighters respond in front of a building that caught fire as protests of the death of Freddie Gray continue in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, late 27 April 2015. EPA/JOHN TAGGART

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