Freddie Gray

First of all, spare me any #notallwhites vitriol because you haven’t personally lynched any black people today. (Incidentally, it may be a frivolous aside, but can there be any more depressing harbinger of non-change that this–Lynch–is the last name of the newly installed Attorney General?) If that is your initial reaction, you have already missed the points I haven’t even made yet. You might want to stop reading here (though you in particular should probably read the whole thing). It is a thing of sheer beauty–terrible, evil beauty to be sure.

“An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”Now is the time to come together, on common ground.  This is not the time to let ourselves become even further divided and conquered… But rather, Now is the time to channel the anger, outrage, fury and fear into creative, conscious and constructive actions, that effect meaningful, positive and substantial change. […]

The source of the cancer. The tensions stem from a multiplicity of sources, some of which is certainly the police, the prison industrial complex, policing for profit, mass incarceration, the militarization of cops and the like. Yes, Freddie Gray may have precipitated the initial involvement and interaction, but there’s more at stake. The media have been horrid in their approach. CNN shows particular tone deafness when it comes to causation factors.

The reason the dispossessed turn to violence is because violence is the only thing power understands.
Baltimore is burning, embroiled in riots and protest against the city’s horrifically racist and oppressive police. That it took the death of Freddy Gray, a young man whose spine was severed in police custody, to spark the violence is perhaps less important than the fact that the explosion was inevitable.

Anti-Black racism, always just beneath the surface of polite racial discourse in the U.S., has exploded in reaction to the resistance of black youth to another brutal murder by the agents of this racist, settler-colonialist state. With the resistance, the focus shifted from the brutal murder of Freddie Gray and the systematic state violence that historically has been deployed to control and contain the black population in the colonized urban zones of North America, to the forms of resistance by African Americans to the trauma of ongoing state violence.

Baltimore apparently forgot the cause. Freddie Gray’s spine was severed after he made eye contact with the police and then ran. He died mysteriously in custody. He had a record, though that excuses not any mistreatment, and the case is being investigated. But the matter was seized as an excuse for thugs, bands of larcenous and marauding criminals, kids and punks, opportunistic lowlifes to co-opt the ostensible subject matter of the riots and have at it — pillaging, looting and steeling. It’s about crime and theft.

In the week beginning April 20, 2015, the American people got three object lessons about equal treatment and the stratification of status in the twenty-first century.
Three events in the week beginning April 20, 2015, show convincingly that the American promise of national and global societal justice is a lie. They specifically show that in this new American century, one’s economic status, access to power, and place of birth determine one’s access to human rights and equal protection under the law. Any illusions to the contrary are just that.