Today, Baltimore Mayor changed her tune from giving space to the protesters to a curfew :
http://www.ibtimes.com/baltimore-protests-2015-mayor-blames-thugs-sets-citywide-curfew-quell-unrest-very-1899011
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/28/baltimore-mayor-s-tone-deaf-handling-of-city-s-riot-crisis.html
showing that she is still navigating blind in this crisis, veering to and fro in an attempt to solve a problem she does not understand. Sadly, she is not alone as the events have a deeper societal rooting than most commenters have been able to pinpoint so far.
The immediate timeline of these riots goes thus : On April 12th, a young man was arrested after fleeing the police on sight and found in possession of an illegal knife. He was thrown into a police van and arrived with severe spine injuries at the precinct from which he was transferred to a hospital where he later died. Early reports said the arrest had occurred without force although we learned that he was applied feet shackles upon resisting transportation and moved in a non-secure manner. Delays in getting him medical attention are also suspected.
Last Saturday ( 25th ), protests organized in Baltimore turned violent with confrontation with law enforcement. A comment by Mayor Rawlings-Blake to the effect that police had been instructed to give space to the demonstrators turned rioters sparked debate in the media. And yet, this position supposed to alleviate the anger by taking a relaxed stance was disproved by the beating of a Baltimore journalist covering the events.
Then yesterday, as the funeral of victim Freddie Gray was held, a fresh riot erupted near a mall by the city’s baseball park area that included hurt law enforcement officers ( broken bones ) fighting between rioters and bystanders. Police warned than gang members may use the unrest to target law enforcement and by the evening, the Mayor changed her tune to curfew and school closings for today as the National Guard called by the Maryland state Governor was on its way.
What turned an incident that must be called familiar in the USA of 2015 into such riots? Where does this flaring stems from? Was it possible to predict the events?
The answers to the above questions are all to be found in another modern republic that suffered something close a few years back for related if not exactly similar reasons. The country is France, the years were 2005, 2007 and 2009 and the the reason was what the French termed “social fracture”. We will show how the essential points are shared beyond the specifics that are to each their own, Our comparative story begins in the 1960s.
That decade was one of great change, upheaval even for dominant nations whose social structure was evolving quickly thanks to the promises of post WWII development and ensuing riches enhancement. In both America and France, as well as in other western nations to a lesser degree, the old social order was under attack and change was required by different groups with a slant on translating winning economical conditions into rights of a wider kind than seen previously. The differences stemmed from earlier history however. In France, the era of imperialism had concluded with the independence of Algeria, last of the colonies to go, in a conflict as easily handled militarily as it was impossible to win morally. This nearby land had been vacated and a massive influx of people had entered the nation as a result plot in two components : French settlers ( some from a hundred years prior ) filled with nostalgia and proponents of good ol’ times / status quo and Algerian natives that had supported the French presence and had to leave for fear of reprisals. The former were swept away in the reform storm to soon ensue ( although of course they still exist to a degree ) but the latter suffered a different fate.
First, they were not returning home in any way but stranded in their new homeland which was answered structurally by creating new communities in both location and mindset. Second, they were victims of racism in varying amount and forms by a local population that although used to immigration and other cultures buckled under the strain of the sheer amount of a visible minority. Their suffering was not immediately taken into account and compounded over the next generation. The author witnessed this “soft” racism at work 20 years later circa the mid 1980s and can vouch that it would evidently take at least as long to subside somewhat which it did. In essence, the ordinary nature of the problem hid its associated dangers until the damage was too deep to fix. They were not part of the great liberation of the hippy / new society fight that followed in 1968.
By comparison, the USA of then faced a conundrum both akin and existentially different. The imperialism had not been external but home-brewed and utterly ignored hitherto. The civil rights movement was confronting an already exiting social problem whose magnitude was evidently greater. The descendants of slavery were still second-class citizens in a very real way “thanks” to systemic adaptions varying regionally ( higher in the deep south below the Mason-Dixon line ) and fighting for real answers. Their demands could not be gored in a great land of liberties that had closed its eyes to unacceptable discrepancies in treatment of the citizens along a color line. The negroes were at the front line of emancipation and no one could ignore how central to the on-going transformation of the social structure of the nation their claims were. The racism was anything but soft ( no Ku Klux Klan ever existed in France ), in fact as harsh and brutal as can be, but there too, the correction was that of a century old situation. This too showed to be quelled yet not solved as also witnessed in the 1980s by this author. It resulted in the 1968 Baltimore riots to which the present events will soon be shown to be about the same echo as those of 10 years ago in France were to its own aforementioned problem.
In late 2005, police chasing suspected youths unwillingly caused two deaths which brought about 3 weeks of rioting and a slew of arrests as well as many dozens injuries to law enforcements and the death of 3 bystanders, 2 of them murdered by rioters. In 2007, two youths were killed by a collision of their motorbike with a police car which resulted in 3 intense days of night riots that again left dozens of police officers injured but no deaths as the law enforcement response was better calibrated than the one from 24 months earlier. In 2009, a lower key riot occurred on Bastille day ( 4th of July equivalent ) with a dozen injuries to officers but still major property destruction, again following the suspicious death of a young man in police custody. In all 3 cases, the similarities to Baltimore go thus : the youths were of non-majority ethnic origin ( Arabic in France, Black in America ) & the localities concerned were impoverished economically and culturally ( add Ferguson, Miss. to the comparison ), disinherited zones at best, ghettoes at worst. In both, the basic underlying problem was that of a high difference in class treatment regardless of the fact that both countries pretend this not to be the case officially or legally. It is in this respect that the Baltimore riots can be seen as the iceberg’s tip of a national problem facing the USA.
Why is social fracture and why is it systemic?
Social fracture defines a problem similar to class warfare that survives an otherwise liberal environment. In both of our examples, the constitutional intent of the land is to provide equality or at least equal chances to the citizens. Thus, if classes still exist, it is supposed that they are solely based on achievements and not initial conditions or said otherwise that they are permeable. Any citizen can supposedly rise out of birth conditions, racial or economical or any other. In reverse, birth rights such as nobility do no warrant maintaining an unearned status anymore. Acquiring success in one’s life is possible for all. One of the main tools to this end is shared by both nations above : a ( reasonably performing ) public education system ( at least until college in the US ). Another such paramount tool is an equalitarian justice system and there our comparison breaks down.
Before getting back to Baltimore and America for good however, we can draw one last parallel by examining the term systemic. Is systemic a condition that stems from the operative mode of an organized process. When a structure has flaws inherent to its mode of functioning that produce results contrary to its goals, these are systemic. Biology wise, cancer is a systemic illness to human evolution; medicine is fighting it as well as it can. On the other hand, mental illness is a systemic flaw of the medical system itself as it is not on average treated properly.
In the case of our social fracture claim, systemic errors in France and America differ in causes but produce similar results which shows each to be similar and validates our approach of the Baltimore case. In France, the involvement of the central government is too high and results in local discrepancies in all regional matters. This was shown recently when the government cut credits to small localities known as communes to save on spending while forgetting to reduce and sometimes enhancing their responsibilities and thus incurred costs. In the US, the central government is often under-involved in nationwide problems and lacks the ability to quickly answer these through higher powers devoted to localities, at the state level as recently found regarding the Affordable Care Act, civil union or religious laws implementations.
What can show the social fracture to be of similar nature if not origin and scope though is the more subtle emotional link to the national concept of the involved minorities. In 2001, an incident occurred in France that saw the national anthem booed by young citizens during a friendly match-up ( as in not counting for World Cup placement ) of the football teams of France and Algeria followed by supporters of the latter invading the field which stopped the match. This is a perfect example of the problem. Those youths have an emotional attachment to their land of origin which is symptomatic and incoherent at the same time. Algeria has not progressed as it should have after independence. Rich in natural resources, gas primarily, the country is big but rather sparsely populated for its size. There is no valid reason for it not to be a modern land with a high living standard by now which is not quite the case. The reason for this under-achievement is mostly that since the independence, the regime there has crystallized around the revolution heroes beyond usefulness of its governance model. All judgment calls put aside, this results in a land in which most of the heckling youths would be hard pressed to find a better situation than they have in France and in fact could hardly survive. Sure, the racism would not be there but in counterpart, gone too would be the lifestyle of music, drugs and other liberty afforded “niceties” they take for granted. In fact, when the nation had a compulsory military service ( prior to the turn of the 20th century ), most young nationals of Algerian descent found it a harsh imposition but the same in their country of origin was twice as long in duration and way less comfortable in civil treatment. To make a long story short, they dream of a motherland that does not exist save in their dreams.
The same apart from the anthem incident, which would be nearly unthinkable in America, is true for disinherited Blacks. For at least 20 years, a resurgence of african symbolism has swept over the lowest tiers of Afro-Americans that bears little or no logical value. Kwanza or African names are not part of the average Black person’s memorial schemes in the US. In fact, most of the given names of that type are not to be found on the Black continent itself; they are an emotional answer to bridge the slavery hiatus past, easily understood in psychological terms but otherwise utterly void of strict significance. What is important is their symbolic value as to the hurt psyche of their users. A normal Black youth is so little related by now to Africa that they’d be prey over there, unable to cope with the complexities of ethnic and tribal feuding and as likely to suffer misery if not more. What links the two minorities is the surrealism of this attitude in the face of true conditions. That they are left to resort to such mechanisms shows the social fracture more than any riot. They truly feel as second class citizens still.
What are then the true causes that can explain the Baltimore riots? Three main ones spring to mind : Justice, economy and culture. Culture is easily understood in light of the above but the other two are more important. Economy is strictly American. Whereas the isolation in France was built along with cities for the new immigrants and in recent years found to be part of the problem which is now being tackled by restructuring of these impoverished suburbs ( parking lots for humans ) through a central government issued requirement for a percentage of public housing per city / commune, the same is as we said much more difficult to implement in the US. Each city thus or at the very least state has to tackle these independently thus weakening a nation wide solution to the problem. Ferguson maybe even more than Baltimore shows that coercion can be used on poor communities to insure financial viability of a wider regional system. Economic solutions are very local whereas they should rightfully be of larger application. The situation of Detroit in this respect can be seen as a proof of concept and cannot easily be denied to represent a blemish of the success of the Nation. Inequality in America applies to entire cities no matter how important or representative they used to be to the history of the land. Until the conditions of a national planning to solve this are found, factual class zones will endure. The two aforementioned causes can be found in images : when a Muslim extremist youth committed an attack in Copenhagen two months ago, his brethren removed the flowers marking the spot of his death at the hands of the local police because they deemed them unrepresentative of his jihad.
Click for link in Danish.
By contrast, this is what the young rioters put around Freddie Gray’s arrest location :
Click for Slate article link on Baltimore ‘hood of F. Gray.
Beers and liquor as a symbol of Black pride???
The third discrepancy evident of the existing social fracture is that of law enforcement ( given already as an economical variable ) compounded by the Justice system. In an America that elects its many and most of judges and thus subjects them to the pressures of public opinion way beyond the neutrality required by their function, the penal system relies on money for the implementation of its prisons. The semi-private nature of the incarceration system is an incentive to prison terms as are some of the though laws that warrant long terms for minor offenses when repeated. This makes money that ensures election of the judicial powers cousin to that raked in by the prisons. As a direct result of which, the great land of liberty has the highest prison population in the world and second most per capita! On that level, the comparison with France, 7-fold lower, simply does not exist.
If one then remembers the vagrancy laws known as Black Codes furthered as Jim Crow laws and links their disappearance in the 1960s ( at the time of the Civil Rights movement and original Baltimore riots ) to the appearance of the jail privatization in the 1980s, it becomes easy to understand that segregation factually endured nearly unbroken since the slavery days leading to a factual low tier class beyond the abolition of the principles of its actual existence. That a minority representing less than 15% of the nation could score nearly 40% of its penal population ( compounded by the overall incredible recidivism rate ) is evidence of a social fracture. That this situation provides ( local ) results such as the ongoing Baltimore unrest is a simple consequence of it.
In conclusion, it must be said that this portrait does not excuse the community entirely. We have said on this blog in no uncertain terms that part of the solution should come from within the concerned community itself. The same has also been publicly voiced by Black leaders. The same holds for France’s ethnic “Arabs”. Yet it is known that the psychological weight of such a perception often outweighs its factual value and favors its continuation. The point is not to shame America into further racial divide but to use the existence of such as a marker to bring about the need to inverse the trend. Baltimore’s Mayor as the President in Washington are both Blacks themselves which is much rarer and sometimes unheard of elsewhere, for instance. Admitting the presence of a problem is but a first step. But in all countries, when untreated, such situations undermine the nation’s stability and conditions of success. It is in fact because our two examples are successful to begin with that the existence of their discrepancies are difficult to admit and in suite to treat. I merely wanted the reader to know of their existence to arm them with the will to correct the situation. The goal here is to make sure that lethal errors by the police do not bring about more deaths by protest than occur in the initial mistake.
Let’s hope the debate can be re-centered on long term treatment of the systemic flaws to abolish both the errors and their consequences through the recognition of their causes. Anyone on both sides of the Atlantic and anywhere else around the globe should want as much for their country, don’t you think?
Tay.
Additional reading :
Slate simple small pieces series on the Baltimore riots :
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/04/20/freddie_gray_police_report_baltimore_man_with_broken_vertebra_allegedly.html
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/04/25/freddie_gray_protest_in_baltimore_turns_violent_12_arrested.html
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/04/26/baltimore_police_beat_up_city_paper_photographer_at_freddie_gray_protest.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/04/freddie_gray_death_a_closer_look_at_the_tragically_impoverished_and_violent.html
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/04/27/freddie_gray_protests_baltimore_cops_assaulted_with_bricks_and_rocks_as.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/04/baltimore_erupts_in_anger_fire_and_unrest_what_i_saw_across_the_city.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/04/_1968_baltimore_do_the_riots_after_martin_luther_king_jr_s_assassination.html
Timeline by the LA Times :
http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-baltimore-freddie-gray-20150427-htmlstory.html
About incarceration history in the USA :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Codes_(United_States)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jim_Crow_law_examples_by_state
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States#Privatization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_incarcerated_African-American_males
About the French riots :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_French_riots
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Villiers-le-Bel_riots
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_French_riots
From our pages on Blacks in America :
http://definitivelapseofreason.com/2013/08/24/the-50-year-long-dream-and-unkept-promises-americas-debt-to-itself/
and a very general viewpoint to complement the above,
http://definitivelapseofreason.com/2013/03/17/white-or-black-man-or-woman-good-or-bad-education-as-hope-in-sequitur-format/
Definitive Lapse of Reason 