There was death and there was anger. There were lootings and there were arrests. There was a president consoling his people, telling them that education would solve the day, and there was a lifted curfew.
But now what?
The story of the Baltimore riots paints an all-too familiar picture. With around 70 unarmed black people having now been murdered by US police (TIME magazine), it’s obvious that the only consistent form of change that is happening is the increasing number of names being added to the extermination list.
The death of Freddie Gray on 19th April, an unarmed 25-year-old African American man who sustained fatal spinal injuries whilst kept in policy custody, provoked protests from many of Baltimore’s ethnic communities.
Instead of focusing on the brutality and injustice of the treatment of Freddie Gray, many media outlets instead decided to centre reports on the violent minority of Baltimore’s protesters. According to Brian Spector, writer for The Baltimore Sun, what we need is ‘…an all-out “war on thugs”. But I beg to differ. What we need is an all-out war on racial hatred and the misuse of police power. What we need is to realise that racism not only still exists, but that it exists in an incredibly institutionalised form and needs to be addressed. Besides, by using the word ‘thugs’, Spector fails to acknowledge the preliminary cause of the violent protests.
Tim Keller, an American preacher, once wrote that the root of all anger is love, which at first appears an incredibly incongruent analogy to make. After all, the word anger is imbued with so many negative connotations whereas love is, well, love. But think about it: why does it anger us so much when our next door neighbour decides that, despite the total lack of soundproofed walls, 3am is the perfect time to Skype a friend? It’s because we love our sleep. Or, on a more serious note, why does the thought of anybody speaking badly of our family make our blood run cold? Because for most of us, family is the one thing we love and treasure above all else.
And the same sentiment applies to the riots. Whilst I do not condone the violence expressed in Baltimore, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t moved by it, as it seems that stemming from the protests was the deep love the men held for their fellow African Americans, many of whom are still forced to feel the excruciating pain of years and years of racial oppression.
There’s something about the shared experience of oppression that draws people closer together. Of course this is not always the case. I know from first hand experience that in many instances it is black people who are the instigators of racial prejudice against other members of the black community and we ought to be ashamed of this. However (and yes, you can call me an idealist) I’d like to believe that the hearts of the rioters were bleeding over the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and the many other unarmed black men who have been brutally murdered by so-called law-abiding policemen without even being given a spot in their states’ weeklies to show for it.
Obama was right in suggesting that ‘…law is not always applied evenly’ in America. One need only recall the US Department of Justice’s refusal to charge George Zimmerman with committing a hate crime following his shooting of unarmed Trayvon Martin. However it would be far from right to claim that the USA is the only nation with a history of racism- institutional or otherwise. It still baffles me to think that it took the British justice system almost 19 years to convict Dobson and Norris of Stephen Lawrence’s death when it is likely that the names of the suspects were in reach of the Metropolitan police just a day after the attack took place (BBC News).
The truth of the matter is that we live in a world where a policeman can murder a man in cold blood simply because of the colour of his skin and turn a blind eye to it. We live in a world where people can see the statement ‘Black lives matter’ and, through words, deeds or thoughts, brush it off, and say: “No, they really don’t.”
