Okay okay OKAY BALTIMORE. I would like to write something large, furious, and comprehensive about what is going on right now, but that is not happening because of reasons. Regardless, no one should be surprised about what is going on right at the moment. Freddie Gray – and I know next to nothing about him – was his own private individual, who died because of maltreatment in police custody. He appears to have committed no serious crime – possession of a blade? I don’t know the specific laws in MD regarding blades, but surely, were this a white-crime case, it would be considered an incommensurate and tragedic response. Naturally, the community in Baltimore has drawn direct parallels to, firstly, the death that has become the national byword of black male fatality at the hands of the police, Michael Brown. But they have also connected Gray’s death to the tens of other black deaths, male especially but also female and trans, that have unfortunately occurred since Ferguson (of course there were uncountable pre-Ferguson deaths, but the particular self-referential phenomenon I find particular to events that have happened after Ferguson). And yet, the national, white-dominant media discourse, as it has too often in the past months especially, has mirrored the stance of Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, declaring violence that has broken out in the city as the work of ‘thugs’.
      This is a blinded perspective. There is so much that has been said since last August about the structural underpinnings that have resulted in the deaths of these individuals: quite apart from lack of equal opportunity for most non-white communities and frequent segregated housing & education based on residential and socio-economic factors (which are themselves products of post-bellum structural racism), there remains in the US today a pervasive discourse which defines ‘criminal’ (both in act and in person) as other, marginalized, misplaced, targetable, black. Yes, Rawlings-Blake herself is black; this exception does not disprove the standing norm where black males are the disproportionately incarcerated at the highest rate in this country which is so fond of restricting freedoms; where black women as well as men are mistreated with impunity by those forces meant to keep the public order; where the high rate of black trans deaths goes unnoticed, even in the few months we’ve had of 2015, even after Laverne Cox, and especially after (the commendable) coming-out by such a celebrity as B Jenner. Rawlings-Blake has in this instance chosen to side with the hegemon – she is upholding public order in the time-honored American manner supported by those who Know Best: the white bourgeoisie and upper class. This also cannot surprise us. Violence, in our country, has been alienated from the public face of the population. It is assumed, and has been since the 80s at least, that ‘violence’ is no longer a possible mode of action for civilized humanity. Violence has, in other words, become displaced onto those who don’t fit the desired model of modern civil society: those unruly peoples in far-off lands who don’t submit to the post-Cold War international order (‘oy, Afghanistan, we no longer fight ze USSR, so maybe stop ze violence, eh?’), but also, and more importantly for this discussion, the marginalized black and brown members of the American populace. Violence is displaced to all those who are supposed to represent the subversive element, the criminal class, the foreign-born, those who don’t belong. And, of course, that judgement is not based on well-documented evidence of criminal behavior on the part of an individual or of a group (as though ‘criminal behavior’ could be apportioned to a socio-economic and cultural community), but rather, on pre-existing prejudices which are both supported and produced by our modern capitalist mode of existence. They are moreover affirmed by a sensationalist media and become talking points for all the elections we, the representative democracy and alleged leading light of the civilized world, put on.
       Violence does not happen here. At least, it does not happen without the consent of the people, it is assumed. And yet, we live in a swirling confusion of violence – as humans ever have done. Americans, western Europeans, express righteous alarm and dismay at jihadi violence, and these days, of course, the transgressions of ISIS. The general drift of commentary is to single out ~those barbarians~ for the way they instrumentalize violent acts, and to condemn them for it. Meanwhile, Ta-Nehisi Coates, among others, have strove to recall our own, extremely violent past. For most individuals within the black community, there is no telos to that violence: it has not ended, but rather, they continue to experience violence in an ongoing and entirely present fashion. By this, I in no way mean to invoke tired tropes about gang culture or the criminal poverty of certain neighborhoods. Yes, violence exists there; but it is more worthwhile for all of us to examine how such violence has been and continues to be the product of convoluted nexuses of racial policing, communal segregation and disempowerment of (largely black) working-class communities, and similar state- and federal-directed policies toward these communities, rather than deploying such violence to essentialize it as a fundamental characteristic of them.
      Moreover, beyond the issue of domestic violence, there is the issue of how violence is conceived of and dealt with abroad. Or, in another frame, how our administration views and deals with violence abroad redounds directly onto our home turf. Obama has become notorious (or, at least I would like to believe that he has) for his moralizing disposal of ‘terrorist’ targets (who often turn out to be civilians) via drones in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and other locales. It is a different approach from previous administrations’ openly declared wars in these regions, but the rhetorical location of violence remains analogous. These tribal, religious fanatic, product-of-the-authoritarian-state, non-Western groups are judged to commit a level of violence simply unconscionable in the civilized West today. For our administrations, this is sufficient rhetorical justification for the elimination of such threats, whether for ‘international order’ or ‘national security’ concerns. Or, to put it another way, the establishment and maintenance of a fundamental cultural difference that operates along fault lines of violent/nonviolent (among other things) facilitates the exercise of US & Western state violence on non-state ‘terrorist’ group, in part through the nullification of any legitimacy the latter might claim within their own domain. So what happens when this excisive gaze is redirected toward ‘home’, to the variegated citizens of the land of the free?
      On the one hand, nothing. This is nothing new for the supposed masters of violence in the contemporary sphere of our country – black men and women have been subjected to police violence, and previous to masters’ violence, long before it became categorizable. In that sense, such violence, largely unrecognized by the ruling classes, is a deplorable same-old. And what has changed are certain elements of the national teleology of freedom, in which the popular election of a black man is supposed to ensure or symbolize the growing irrelevance of racial politics in the US. Obama certainly speaks pretty words about black manhood in America – which he no doubt understands intimately – and in condemnation of unwarranted violence against black individuals.
      And yet, on the other hand, another ‘nothing’. Members of marginalized communities are as much, if not more so, subjected to the burgeoning state apparatuses of civilian surveillance and regulation, and yet the police retains it apparently total writ for the exercise of violence against those most violent individuals themselves, black America. As comedian Cecily Strong put it at the recent White House Correspondents Dinner – that national self-exoneration farce – the only law enforcement agency in the country that will get in trouble if a black man is shot is the Secret Service. In spite of his posturing, Obama is either ill-inclined or ill able to effect any structural domestic change in terms of policing or judicial practices. Even as he eliminates those who dare to be violent abroad, Obama overlooks the sources of violence on his home turf; through inaction, moreover, he reinforces the national discourse centered on the irascible thuggery of a certain, racially defined and economically circumscribed, subset of the American populace. If such riotous violence does occur, as is happening in Baltimore now, and happened in Ferguson and St. Louis late last summer, it is not because the people have real and reasonable greivances, accumulated over time and through much trial, but because of their thuggish elements. Or, as Philadelphia’s DA Seth Williams, commenting on the protests sparked by the December police shooting of Brandon Tate-Brown, opined, ‘I don’t think any of them are from Philadelphia.’ Thus persists the obvious sense of difference or foreignness underlying mis-apprehension of precisely the nature of the popular movement that has been gaining speed since last summer, if not before.
      AS an introductory statement to themes I hope to continue writing on the future, I suppose this will have to suffice. It is poorly sourced, but as it is 5am I hope to revisit this in the future to reformat and provide more thorough citations. As it stands, it is a rough compilation of thoughts that I didn’t quite want to let go before trying to sleep. I hope some find it worth reading!
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