Arthur Wang: Portrayal of Baltimore riots by media ignores societal context
By Arthur Wang
April 30, 2015 1:24 a.m.
Baltimore is burning – and you’d be lying if you said you didn’t see it coming.
In remarks on the city’s unrest, President Barack Obama said that “this has been going on for decades.” By “this,” he was referring to cyclical poverty, substance abuse and incarceration occurring in neglected, mostly black, urban communities. Mere blocks in Baltimore mark a 20-year disparity in life expectancy between residents of rich and poor areas.
These are the structural factors contributing to urban decay that the media has largely failed to mention, opting instead to contribute to a narrative that is more interested in individual rather than societal wrongdoing.
Peaceful protests and riots erupted after the death of Freddie Gray, who was arrested for possession of a switchblade on April 12 in one of the city’s poorest areas. Under suspicious circumstances, he suffered severe trauma and spinal injuries while in police custody and died on April 19. Protests began soon after, but only received national media attention when they turned violent on Saturday.
Gray’s death, in the custody of law enforcement, is the latest tally for a deeply unsettling body count of people of color killed by police. It brings to mind the shooting of Charley Robinet at Los Angeles’ Skid Row in March, Eric Garner’s choking death in New York in July and, of course, the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Mo. The #BlackLivesMatter movement has emerged to call attention to a shocking amount of police brutality exacted against people of color.
At this moment, popular discussions of the Baltimore riots remain fixated on two components – that of a mother “smacking” her son who participated in the unrest, and reports of cars burned and CVS stores looted. The broadcasting of protesters attacking police or setting cars on fire is not only newsworthy, but also shapes a media narrative suggesting that the situation on the ground is predominantly violent and criminal rather than a complex site with peaceful protests and even rival gangs searching for answers.
The concept of personal responsibility, a contemporary notion that social problems can be entirely pinned on individual behavior rather than failed government policy, should be called into question. So should the belief that riots are irrevocably criminal and unproductive. Both conceptualizations ignore broad-based social issues and institutional failures that have given rise to another spate of unrest.
The viral video of the mother, Toya Graham, hitting her child has made her an American hero because – let’s face it – there are millions of Americans who also want to “smack” the rioters, and then some. The spectacle of a responsible black mother hitting her irresponsible, “thuggish” black son is a convenient distraction from the larger circumstances – like the fact that a startling percentage of young black men are killed by homicides because of aggressive policing and living in dangerous neighborhoods – that sustain the bifurcation of America between rich and poor, black and white.
I am not suggesting that smashing windows and looting stores is legal or that individuals can pin the blame on amorphous “social forces” for their actions and expect not to be prosecuted. However, Martin Luther King Jr., the famous advocate of nonviolent resistance, whose words and image are often appropriated to counter black protest, did not blame rioters for their violence, because he understood it as a symptom of a group’s plight.
King said, “A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last 12 or 15 years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met.”
The sad truth is that King’s words still ring true today, because half a century later, decades of reporting, research and popular scholarship indicate that Baltimore isn’t the only place where communities of color are being neglected. This country as a whole has failed black America and has allowed systemic and institutional discrimination to persist – look no further than the drug war-fueled mass incarceration of black men or the fact that black Americans’ GDP per capita is only about half of that of the country as a whole.
Baltimore is burning. It’s just the latest desperate cry to be heard from one part of the country to another. They should be ignored no longer.
