I.
On Monday afternoon I was at my dad’s nursing home here in Baltimore. One of the residents, Miss Annie, was celebrating her 108th birthday.
You read that correctly.
Despite her daunting age, Miss Annie stands straight as an arrow in her crocs and pajama pants. She has no need of a wheelchair, walker, or even a cane. Born ten years before the U.S. entered World War I, she is, so far as I’m concerned, Baltimore royalty.
This nursing home is just over a mile from Mondawmin Mall, where the first riots broke out that day while I was finishing my visit with my father and admiring Miss Annie. The mall, which I find myself at every other month or so, is
less than two miles from my house as the crow flies. It has a Target and a Shoppers supermarket. Until recently, there was a Maryland state department of motor vehicles office where I would register my car and renew my license.
But the city’s largest park, Druid Hill, sits between my white neighborhood of Hampden on one side, and the black neighborhood of Mondawmin on the other side. Either going around Druid Hill Park or wheedling through it makes going to the mall a full 10 minute drive, and the two neighborhoods of Mondawmin and Hampden feel like different worlds, even if some of the kids from Mondawmin attend school in Hampden.
The gathering that erupted into violence at Modawmin Mall around 3 PM was organized on social media under the banner of #BaltimorePurge. The idea was that after school, teenagers would gather at the mall and then lead a protest march to “The Avenue” in Hampden, my neighborhood’s major commercial strip.
There had been some tense protest moments during the weekend, and when students showed up at Mondawmin Mall, the cops were already there. How many cops? Either too many or not enough, depending on your outlook. Either way, it soon turned into the riot, which then spread across parts of the city. A good map outlining the initial events can be found here.
The protestors never got anywhere close to my neighborhood. After things turned chaotic, the eastward move towards Hampden never materialized. Instead, most of the action went south and west into other African American neighborhoods, before bouncing across the city like embers in a swirling breeze.
In fact, if you look at this crowdsourced map of the action from Monday, April 27 and the early morning of the 28th, you’ll see that Hampden and the area east of Druid Hill Park is like a little bubble of calm.
It’s a facile cliché, but it’s also true on some level: there are two Baltimores.
II.
Once things got bad, and then worse, the usual dialog surrounding riots emerged. I’m not talking about the grotesque racists who come out of the woodwork to infest social media. I mean serious conversations.
On one side you had people like Baltimore native, former Baltimore Sun journalist, and The Wire co-creator David Simon. He bemoaned the tragedy of violence and made ardent calls for peace. In Simon’s words:
The anger and the selfishness and the brutality of those claiming the right to violence in Freddie Gray’s name needs to cease. There was real power and potential in the peaceful protests that spoke in Mr. Gray’s name initially, and there was real unity at his homegoing today. But this, now, in the streets, is an affront to that man’s memory and a dimunition of the absolute moral lesson that underlies his unnecessary death. If you can’t seek redress and demand reform without a brick in your hand, you risk losing this moment for all of us in Baltimore.
Then there were voices like Baltimore native and senior editor for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who reminded us of the endemic violence perpetrated by the Baltimore Police Department for decades. Political officials may be well meaning, he said, but are nonetheless responsible for overseeing the kinds of policies that led to Freddie Gray’s death. Therefore, when they call for peace without offering a rationale for his death or any concrete plans to prevent future police violence, they are complicit in his death. In Coates’ words:
When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is “correct” or “wise,” any more than a forest fire can be “correct” or “wise.”
Both Simon and Coates are very smart social critics and darlings of the political Left. And though they seem to stand at odds on the issue, both of them are actually correct despite their opposing views.
Yes, riotous violence betrays the movement for change, causes far more damage than good for all involved, and everyone would be better off without it.
Yes, the riotous violence in many ways is a reaction to earlier action, and that initial, ongoing action (police abuse) is actually a far more serious and endemic problem than this temporary reaction; you cannot honestly sever the two.
But more importantly, I believe, both Simon’s and Coates’ smart, thoughtful, and heartfelt pieces, which were issued in the heat of Monday night’s riot, are missing the bigger picture.
III.
Riots are like wars in at least one very important respect: they are forms of social violence.
As the actions of a larger society, both war and riot are fundamentally different from individual acts of violence. Whether organized and planned like warfare, or chaotic and spontaneous like a riot, social violence is initiated and perpetrated by a society, not by one or even a small group of people.
Because of that, it makes little sense to analyze warfare and riots the way we would analyze the actions of an individual.
When an individual commits an act of violence, we can ask, Why did he do that? with the hope of untangling the perpetrator’s motives. Indeed, understanding motive is essential to criminal court proceedings.
She was surprised to see her lover with another woman, flew into a rage, and attacked the other woman. Or maybe he hated his rival and carefully planned an assault. In other words, someone made a conscious decision and then acted on it, whether in the heat of the moment or in premeditated fashion.
But large social actions are more complicated. They don’t work that way, even though we want to believe they do.
For example, we often think that a nation going to war is a simple thing. The king or the president says we do, so we do. Simple, right?
But in reality, there are usually complex calculations and mechanisms involved in declaring war, and always exceptionally complex processes involved in manifesting it.
How do cultural and political concerns guide the declaration of war? How do you find the money to wage it? How do you gather and arm the thousands or even millions of soldiers? How do you devise and execute your plans of action? Who can fight, must fight, or has an option, and how is that determination made? What are acceptable forms of violence and what are not? What happens to your soldiers who transgress acceptable violence? What happens to people who are supposed to fight but disagree with the declaration? Who is not allowed to fight? And what are allowable actions, thoughts, and expressions by your non-combatants? Must they help? If so, how? Can they protest? If so, how? And if they disobey, what happens to them?
In other words, the rationale for war may seem straightforward on the surface, but war itself is a social form of violence, and so explaining it requires we explain how the society functions, and how it doesn’t.
When considering a war, it typically requires a whole book to adequately explain all of those questions and many more.
Riots, like wars, are a social forms of violence. They differ in that they are generally more spontaneous and chaotic than warfare, and often (though not always) perpetrated against the state instead of by it. If war is the social equivalent of premeditated murder, then a riot is the social equivalent of a spontaneous fit of anger.
But despite the spontaneity, a riot is still a form of complex social violence, originated and manifested by social factors instead of relatively simple individual motive and action. And because they are usually spontaneous and highly chaotic, riots can be even more difficult to understand and explain than warfare.
The Baltimore riots in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death have been a social action, perpetrated by hundreds of people in various locations around the city. And so, as with war, in order to understand why and how these riots happened, we also have to start asking questions not about individual motives and actions, but about how society works.
IV.
On Monday, I posted a simple little aphorism to Facebook that did very well, with dozens of people “Liking” it. I think I coined the phrase, but my apologies if I did not. It read:
Want to eliminate riots? Build a middle class.
Lots of people want to believe that. I want to believe it. That a riot, as Martin Luther King put it, “is the language of the unheard.” The poor, the desperate, the oppressed: that’s who riots. Middle class people don’t riot, because they have no reason to. So if we can eliminate poverty and oppression, we’ll eliminate riots.
Except it’s just not true.
Middle class people never riot. Unless their sports teams lose. Or maybe win. Or unless they’re on vacation during Spring Break.
The truth is, just as any individual is capable of individual violence, any society is capable of social violence. And so any society is capable of going to war or rioting.
This is made abundantly clear by the fact that middle class whites, who have no conceivable “reason” (individual motive) to riot, occasionally and almost predictably riot over the most inane shit imaginable.
The police crippled and killed Freddie Gray without any apparent justification vs. My team lost. Think about that for a moment.
Either middle class whites are the most horrible, selfish, violent people on the planet, or we have to face up to two basic facts:
1. As a form of social violence, riots are explained by social factors, not individual motives.
2. Any society is capable of the spontaneous, chaotic social violence we call “riot.”
So when politicians and concerned commentators such as David Simon decry the violence, it’s easy to agree with them, but such sentiments actually offer no insight. And when they chide or plead with “the rioters” to stop being violent, their statements, while well meaning, are almost nonsensical.
There’s no individual rational actor to appeal to about a riot. It’s a spontaneous social action, not an individual person who can be swayed by the power of your rhetoric. Unless you have that very rare and magnetic charisma capable of rallying thousands, and the moment and social chemistry are just right, your words, not matter how logical, correct, moving, or well meaning, are just rain drops on the ocean.
Likewise, it is virtually impossible to predict the exact moment when, or even if, a riot like the one in Baltimore or Ferguson, Missouri will happen. All of the ingredients might have been in place for quite some time, but they have to form the perfect social cocktail before anything can happen, and even then, there needs to be an impetus at just the right moment, something that can swirl it into a deadly potion.
Even in the current environment, there is no knowing why it was Freddie Gray’s death that catalyzed events. Why wasn’t it any of the more than 100 instances of police abuse during the last 5 years that were so egregious, the City of Baltimore was compel
led to payout a total nearly $6 million in damages to settle them?
And for that matter, why was the death of Michael Brown the spark in Ferguson, Missouri? After all, before his fatal altercation with police, Brown had just committed a crime and was hardly your prototypical martyr.
But that’s exactly the point. No one sits around and reasons out whether or not Freddie Gray or Michael Brown should be the spark who lights a fuse that leads to a riotous explosion. Riots aren’t individual actions explainable by individual motives.
The truth is, there is no way of knowing precisely when a riot will happen because riots are spontaneous social actions. They typically happen because a complex social equation unfolds; if circumstances are just right, and a viable spark appears at the right moment, then it can happen. It might happen. Then again, it might not. But if everything is in place, that spark only need be viable, not “justified” or some other version of “reasonable” thinking we associate with individual action.
So if we want to prevent riots before they happen, or at least learn from them after the fact, then instead of giving speeches or making moralistic appeals, we need to ask deeper questions about the nature of society. Questions like: What social factors actually caused the Baltimore riots?
Many, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, have pointed to systemic violence, in the form of police abuse, as the social factor that caused these riots. And while I think police abuse is an important problem that needs to be addressed, I disagree that it is the fundamental cause.
Yes, longstanding police violence, which then crystalized in the Freddie Gray case, is what sparked the Baltimore riots. However, both the chaotic, eruptive violence of these riots and the ongoing, systemic police violence that led to them, are symptomatic of larger issues. Both stem from a much deeper truth about Baltimore society.
This city is broken.
V.
In too many ways, Baltimore is a broken city, and it is broken primarily because of larger social forces.
It was larger social forces that led to Baltimore’s founding in 1729 as a port town at the far northwestern edge of the Chesapeake Bay. It was social forces that allowed it to grow and prosper as a major player in the trans-Atlantic trade, buying, selling, and shipping products ranging from agricultural produce to human slaves. Later, other social forces led Baltimore to grow and transform into a booming industrial city during the turn of the 20th century, reshaping it into something as much Northern as Southern. And beginning in the 1960s, it was yet more social forces that led to Baltimore’s gutting; as de-industrialization ravaged the U.S. econommy, the city hemorrhaged population and bled money, and Baltimore was recast as the eastern fringe of the Rust Belt.
More recently, newer social forces have allowed Baltimore, and other down-on-their-luck American cities, to bounce back to some degree. More than a dozen colleges attract skilled professionals like myself. So do a host of hospitals and some financial institutions. And of course there’s the city’s tourist economy that centers on the Inner Harbor and features dozens of bars and restaurants, two sports stadiums, a casino, and a convention center.
However, the Baltimore renaissance, which began in the 1990s, remains limited because far too much of the society remains broken. There are too many people living in poverty. Too many people caught up in the drug trade and the accompanying plague of bullet strewn violence, massive incarceration, and crippling addiction. There are too many people lacking basic education. And I don’t mean they never went to college; I’m talking about functional illiteracy in letters, politics, mathematics, and finance. There are too many people with few if any discernible job skills. And there are too few jobs for them either way.
Some small percentage of exceptional people have the ability to overcome the long odds of deep poverty, and with a mystical combination of luck and hard work, they do so. But most people, by definition, are average, and they will not, unless they are exceptionally lucky. They will remain mired in poverty. As, most likely, would you, me, and most of the middle class people reading this essay.
The old adage says: Give a man a fish, and you’ve fed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you’ve fed him for a lifetime. But this only makes any sense at all if our man lives near a lake well stocked with fish.
For those at the bottom of Baltimore’s society, there is no lake. There’s not even much of a working harbor anymore. De-industrialization and mechanization killed that, along with the world’s largest steel plant, the Noxema factory, the London Fog factory, and countless other sources of decent paying unskilled and semi-skilled jobs. As in most of America, it’s been a downward spiral for the working poor ever since. Now they’re just plain old poor.
Parts of Baltimore, particularly the middle class sections, do work pretty well. Good schools, good restaurants, world class museums, and so forth. But too much of this society, because of larger social forces, is severely broken. And of course no one, and I mean absolutely no one, regardless of their many fanciful claims and deep faith, knows how to fix it.
That’s because while individual decisions and actions by individual people are important and do affect our society to some degree, no one action, or even one person, now matter how powerful, wealthy, or influential, is enough to explain why a society is the way it is. Rather, the society is an almost incomprehensibly complex and ever changing stew; its members form it, exist within it, and interact with it. But no one of them can be it or fundamentally change it.
No politician knows how to fix the schools. No politician knows how to stop crime, though they’ll claim the credit when it drops. No politician knows how to create enough jobs with decent wages for people with limited skills. And no politician knows how to stop riots from occurring.
Why? Because no politicians know how to fix society. Or maybe because those who have some good ideas are bogged down by a sluggish political system. Or they lack the resources. Or one of a hundred other reasons, but the bottom line is, it’s beyond them.
Now insert the regular old civil servants into this broken society. Everyday people earning a middle-middle class salary, who are ostensibly there to shepherd and serve a functional society. What chance do they have in a society this dysfunctional?
New teachers burn out and quit at an alarming rate; half of them are gone within three years.
Social workers face a similar fate.
And the cops? Caught up in an endless wave of deadly violence that its own government refers to as a (drug) war, is it any surprise that many of them are dehumanized by their job, and in turn, begin to dehumanize perpetrators and even potential perpetrators who haven’t actually done anything wrong?
Let me be perfectly clear: In no way whatsoever am I excusing the police violence endemic to Baltimore and, important to note, many other cities. And I’m not excusing the rioters either.
But do you want a viable explanation for all this violence or not?
“Rioters are a bunch of thugs,” just doesn’t cut it, especially when the vast majority of protestors since Freddie Gray’s death did not riot. Likewise, “Cops are a bunch of pigs” doesn’t cut it either, especially when there are many good cops out there who took a dangerous job for noble reasons and really do try their best to protect and serve.
We need to face the truth. Both the riots and the systemic police abuses that sparked them are forms of social violence. And in this case, both forms of social violence spring from a very broken society.
VI.
Every Baltimorean knows it. There are two distinct Baltimores, a tightly stitched patchwork repeating itself all over the city. One Baltimore, such as on this side of Druid Hill Park, is where middle class white people like me and David Simon live, and where the ice cream truck came through and played its song Monday night; the other Baltimore, such as on the other side of the park near Mondawmin Mall, is where poorer African Americans live, where Ta-Nehisi Coates is from, and where there was a riot Monday night, and now a military occupation.
That, of course, is an oversimplification. For example, there is actually a very large African American middle class. In fact, the current and previous mayor are both black women, the city council president is black, the city council is mostly black, the police chief is black, the police force is nearly half-black, and many of the city’s business and charitable leaders are black.
At the same time, in a city wracked by poverty, there is also a substantial number of poor whites, although they are greatly outnumbered by poor blacks as Baltimore is nearly two-thirds African American. But you never have to look far to see poor whites. They live in my neighborhood. Some of them go to black neighborhoods to score drugs, like the two white junkies I saw on Tuesday just south of Mondawmin Mall, as a friend and I drove there with an eye towards cleaning up some of the wreckage from the riot.
These simple categories, such as rich white Baltimore and poor black Baltimore, are real, but they’re hardly the whole story and they can get us only so far. The story is more complex than that. Society is more complex than that.
Furthermore, Baltimore is no different than most American cities, which also suffer from deep racial and class segregation. Much of America is gripped by deep poverty, scarred by racial animus and fear, and offers no viable path forward for far too many people.
So why did these riots happen? You can lump that in with questions such as: Why are the schools bad, Why is there so much crime, Why is there endemic police abuse? and even Why do middle class whites sometimes go apeshit when their team loses?
The simple answer is, any social gathering is capable of rioting, with or without a “rational” cause, as middle class white Americans have proven time and time again. But when there are far more serious factors in play than a sporting event, and when so much of a society is so very broken, it’s probably just a matter of time.
There may always be some riots, just as there may always be some war, no matter how much we dream. But if you want to reduce the chances that society will witness an outbreak of riots like the recent ones in Baltimore and Ferguson, the dozens of Rodney King riots of the 1990s, or the hundreds of urban riots during the 1960s, then you need to improve the societies themselves. You need to create good job opportunities and/or better social welfare policies for the poorest, least skilled members, so they can raise up from poverty. You need to continue the centuries-long effort to vanquish racism and other forms of bigotry from our culture. You need to get a handle on drug addiction and the drug trade.
There are no silver bullets to cure any of these problems, just a bunch of competing politicians who pretend to have answers. But should American societies ever lift themselves up and find a way to eradicate the worst of poverty, racism, and drug and alcohol addiction, then there will likely be far less police abuse, and as a result, far fewer Baltimores, Ferguesons, Detroits, and Watts.
And then, maybe, we can leave the rioting to the “thug” middle class sports fans and Spring Break vacationers.