White America refuses to understand the death of Freddie Gray

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Baltimore is a southern city with a northern culture. Because of Maryland’s location south of the Mason-Dixon Line, Maryland was a slave owning state. However, Abraham Lincoln believed that keeping Maryland in the Union was of paramount importance, so much so that jailed Confederate sympathizers without habeas corpus to prevent Maryland from seceding.

To this day, Maryland has maintained its identity of a border state, neither culturally southern nor culturally northern.
On April 19th, 25-year-old Freddie Gray died as a result of injuries sustained when the police nearly severed his spinal cord as they arrested him. According to the City of Baltimore, on April 12th “an officer made eye contact with Gray, and he took off running, so they pursued him. Though he’d had scrapes with the law before, there’s no indication he was wanted at the time.” Even if he had been wanted, even if he was carrying a gun, he did not deserve to be killed by the police.

The people of Baltimore were understandably outraged, and took to the streets. Protests began on April 18th in front of a police station in West Baltimore, and were peaceful for nearly one week  before becoming violent on April 25th, and even then only roughly 100 out of over 10,000 people were violent.

On the 25th, one got a vastly different perspective on the protests depending on what news channel one turned to. CNN tore their hair out over “scenes of chaos and rioting” while Al Jazeera described the same protests as mostly peaceful and nonviolent, with “pockets of violence erupting.” Al Jazeera’s journalistic reporting is sadly in the minority amongst American news media outlets, as most other channels sensationalized the situation and seemingly blew things out of proportion, with some reports saying there were “thousands of black rioters” and others calling the city a “war zone.” In fact, the major news networks were more concerned with their self-aggrandizing dinner disguised as a fundraiser – the White House Correspondents Dinner (aka “Nerd Prom,” which is neither nerdy nor prom-like) – happening just 35 miles away in Washington DC, than they were with the riots.

One startling example of actual journalism came from the local NBC affiliate in Baltimore, WBAL TV 11. One reporter interviewed members of rival gangs, who came together not to make a plan to kill white cops, like most news sources were saying, but were in fact trying to stop the rioting because they were in support of Freddie Gray and believed that the riots were not helping the cause in any way. Let me repeat this for emphasis: Rival gang members, who could have very easily capitalized on the chaos, were trying to stop the riots in support of nonviolence! That’s a great story in and of itself, and yet even NBC’s national network, to say nothing of the other major outlets, insisted on either getting it wrong or ignoring it completely.

By April 27th and 28th, following Freddie Gray’s funeral, the once peaceful protests had turned into full-scale rioting, looting, and arson. Newly-elected Maryland Governor Larry Hogan had declared a state of emergency, calling in the National Guard and declaring a week-long curfew.

These protests, and the nature in which they are being carried out, should come as a surprise to no one. Many non-white Americans are living in a terrible situation that they feel trapped in, and have tried every peaceful avenue available to get the attention of the news agencies, government and the rest of “White America.” Over a quarter of Baltimore’s population lives below the poverty line, and the city’s unemployment rate is 8.2%. While its crime rate has improved in recent years, it is still well above the national average. Only 2/3 of Baltimore’s high school students will graduate — and that’s an improvement.

Black man stopped by police, via Shutterstock

Combine lack of economic and educational opportunity with a bloated, top-down law enforcement infrastructure, and you’ll get violence every time. Baltimore does not exist in a vacuum; it is the airing of grievances that are held throughout the country. Non-White Americans know that Freddie Gray or Michael Brown could have very easily been them. White Americans like myself will never fully be able to understand this. We don’t have to seriously consider the possibility that we could have our spine severed like Freddie Gray, or that we could be shot in the back like Walter Scott, or choked to death like Eric Garner, all while posing no threat to the police officer doing the killing. Until white Americans – especially those with the power and influence to make a difference – realize that this is the reality faced by millions of Americans every day, nothing will change.

Although this situation hits particularly close to home for me, as I grew up just outside of Baltimore, this is by no means an isolated instance of police brutality. The number of black men that have been killed in the last few months by police officers goes beyond there being “a few bad apples;” it is a pattern. A pattern indicative of systemic racism and violence condoned and perpetuated from within police culture itself. This pattern has been corroborated by the US Department of Justice’s report on institutionalized racism within the Ferguson, Missouri police department. But going beyond that, if the Justice Department were to carry out investigations of random police departments I’m positive that they would find similar results in almost every American city — especially cities with large minority populations.

The pattern is also reflective of the prison industrial complex as a whole, which overwhelmingly imprisons people of color and is instrumental in perpetuating the cycle of violence and poverty for racial minorities in America. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners. African Americans constitute 1 million of the total 2.3 million prison population and are incarcerated at six-times the rate of white Americans. The majority of those arrests are for petty crimes and drug possession.

We as a nation are guilty in part of perpetuating the cycles of poverty and violence as well as the stereotypes of racial minorities. If I tell that someone has been murdered in a major American city, what gender do you think they are? What race do you think they are? Are they old or young? When someone mentions gangs, what images come to mind? If our image of a violent gang member or murder is that of a young African American or Hispanic male, then is it really surprising that the police, who face violence every day, also have that image in their heads?

How do we end the cycles of rioting, police brutality and poverty in America? The subcultures of both the police and the African American community need to change. First, both groups need organization and leadership from within. For the police this needs to come from above, from the lieutenants and commissioners of major American cities. For the African American community, this needs to come from civil rights and church leaders, especially those who lived through or were influenced by the Civil Rights movement in the 60s. Second we need proper education. For the police, this must come in the form of training in non-violent methods to de-escalate violence. For the African American community this comes in the form of proper government funding for schools in impoverished areas, and programs to increase the graduation rate. Third, the police need to develop a mutually supportive working relationship with the communities that they oversee by working with community leaders and members, and encouraging cooperation when crimes occur.

All of those things sound fairly simple. As President Obama noted on Tuesday, if we really wanted to address this problem, it is well within our means to do so. The only question that remains, then, is if we are going to be honest with ourselves about what it’s going to take to make racial justice a reality.

The curfew seems to have quelled the violence for now, but the anger and the lived reality for millions of Americans persists. This is not the end of the violence. All it takes is one more example of police brutality, one more data point in the trend, to begin the cycle anew. This. Will. Keep. Happening.

Although the anger and the violence is completely understandable, the death of Freddie Gray does not and cannot justify the violent behavior of both the protestors and the police. We as a nation cannot ever condone rioting and looting. However, you don’t need to condone rioting and looting to understand it. Until white America begins to understand the reality that millions of minorities struggle with every day, a reality that they cannot escape from, it can’t act surprised when marginalized communities insist on getting its attention.

from AMERICAblog News http://ift.tt/1Q780bA