Snapshot: In 1968, Baltimore, Maryland, erupted in violent looting, rioting and fires as police clashed with citizens in the city’s streets just as cops in Newark, N.J., and Cincinnati’s Avondale neighborhoods were doing the same. It was the start of America’s call-and-response.
Snapshot: Early last week an NBC reporter walked alongside an 11-year-old black boy holding a sign as he marched with throngs of folks peacefully protesting the police-custody death of Freddie Gray. When the reporter asked the boy why he was marching, he said because he’s afraid to play in the street, to walk home from school and to be a black boy in Baltimore. He does not want to be killed by the cops, he told America.
Now we see that much of the April 27 looting and the rock throwing at Baltimore’s cops that morphed into fires, violent confrontations between cops and citizens that resulted in 15 injured cops and two shot citizens and the eventual deployment of the National Guard, making West Baltimore yet another militarized zone in yet another American city, has largely been at the hands of young teenagers.
That’s young, black teen-aged boys.
But before we level judgments and harsh advice and start blaming their (absentee?) parents or even Freddie Gray himself, we should ask ourselves this: If our very demographic — virtual representatives of whom we look like — were under lethal attack across the country by state-sanctioned gangs (police) paid for by tax dollars, what would or responses be?
Let me even more specific.
If middle-aged, black, chubby, profoundly near-sighted, insulin-dependant diabetic, lesbian writers who teach college journalism courses who like to read, watch movies and go to concerts and museums were being shot dead in the back or shot with their hands up in surrender mode or choked on a public sidewalk in broad daylight until they couldn’t breathe or thrown into the backs of police vans and left to endure an intentionally “rough ride” to the police station without first being strapped in as is mandated by state law, and if that specific demographic wound up at the police station with a severed spinal chord and a crushed larynx and later died after never emerging from a coma, then I would be in the streets throwing bricks at cops, too.
I would be setting fires, burning down the cages in my neighborhood that had held me trapped.
I would be coming out of the CVS with multipacks of Northern toilet paper, liters of soda and bottles of lotion, Glucerna diabetic shakes and Always maxi-pads.
I would be running into the burglarized pawn shop where I’d probably previously taken something of value only to get pennies in exchange to keep my lights on to get guns, watches, TVs and probably a saxophone, because I once took lessons as a child.
So, now, in addition to taking to task the Baltimore Police Department for its legacy of brutality toward black men in that city — several lawsuits have been settled between the police department and black men with spinal chord injuries while in police custody — the city must also figure out ways to capture the attention of these angry and agile young black boys who are in the streets under the cover of darkness heaving their pain, anxiety, disappointment and, mostly, their fear at the police whose riot gear cannot mask their own fears and anxieties.
But how will people like Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake — both black — prioritize this most nebulous of responsibilities? And is it even their collective responsibility or that of “the city” or “America” to disabuse these black boys of the notions that their lives, reduced now infamously to a mere profile, a veritable threat, matter as has been so bluntly hashtagged, shouted and broadcast through bullhorns?
America has failed, railroaded and used up its citizenry of color; yet, there has been a very particular way — a niche or boutique business, almost — in which America has (dis)regarded its black boys and men and it has reached frightening, surreal and laughable proportions.
Since before Emmett Till — whose mamma demanded his coffin be left open so the public could see what the white southern lynch mob did to her baby — black mammas have been weeping and wailing as Mary did in the Scriptures at the brutal lynchings of their sons.
But I had hoped for so much more from Baltimore, as I hoped for more for and from every other city where black men have died at the hands of cops in this short string of us-and-them terror.
I think I wanted so much more from Baltimore because its heads — its upper echelons of leadership — are black people, and when something goes wrong when blacks are in charge even and especially when that trouble is beyond the black leaders’ control or reach, the blame becomes subversive and is racialized.
It’s equating ineptness with race.
There are but two black women mayors in this country and they’re neighbors — Rawlings-Blake in Baltimore and the other, Muriel Bowser, in Washington, D.C.
I am wondering now if political protocol precludes the two women from calling one another, kvetching about what to do with their police departments, their councils, their black districts and their substandard housing, jobs and schools.
I wonder if they are helping one another, whatever that could possibly mean, or if one is praying her circumstance does not become like the other’s. You know? Black guilt by black association because we blacks do that stuff sometimes.
In the end, who cares about that, really, because what Baltimore needs is what every city with ill-trained, possibly racist, internally fractured police departments need.
Baltimore needs an overhaul.
Baltimore needs healing of supernatural proportions.
Baltimore needs something as obtuse as proven trust between cops and citizens.
Baltimore needs to disarm its black boys of rocks and bricks and instead arm them with ways to meet violence with
peacefulness.
But not until we can prove to all black boys they’ll live to see themselves grow to be black men who can vote, work, graduate from school, procreate and teach their own children well, be heard without being dismissed or murdered and that they are more than profiles, statistics and news blurbs.
The irony isn’t lost on me that the National Guard encamped itself around Baltimore’s Western District.
This is the same Baltimore geography brilliantly depicted in The Wire, with its Shakespearean plots of wiretaps, drug thugs, beleaguered cops, crooked, posturing politicians, Russian drug smugglers.
Watching Baltimore is like watching HBO.
Only I don’t have cable and I can’t switch it off.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Apr 29 – May 5, 2015.