After a week in which the Baltimore riots have received round-the-clock coverage and analysis in the US media, it has become increasingly noticeable that many of the most intelligent comments on the situation are made by people who do not belong to the professional commentariat. In a short interview with Vice television, for example, a 25-year old chef named Melanie spoke to the rioters’ frustrations, expressed sympathy for the policemen trying to containing the violence, offered a brief account of the city’s economic decline, its longstanding problems with “blatant violence against people of colour,” rebuked the media’s penchant for violent news, and then drew a telling comparison between the marginalization of her local community and the repeated slights to the authority of the country’s first African-American president. “We have people in office who don’t even respect our president,” she said. “We have people who disrespect an African-American man who is responsible for this entire nation. Why would they respect us? They don’t have to respect the man that leads them. Why would they respect us?”
Another memorable statement came from the Chief Operating Officer of the Baltimore Orioles baseball team, John Angelos. After his organization postponed a game with the Chicago White Sox, Mr. Angelos, via Twitter, deflected much of the blame away from the protesters and spoke about “the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle-class and working-class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others.” This contemptuous indifference towards working families had “plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation” and imposed on them an “ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.” In a similar vein, when asked about the riots the Orioles’ manager refused to pontificate saying “It’s a pet peeve of mine when somebody says ‘Well, I know what they’re feeling. Why don’t they do this? Why doesn’t somebody do that? You have never been black, OK, so just slow down a little bit.”
Serious discussions about Baltimore’s grievances have also appeared on the website of the writer David Simon (creator of the hit HBO television series The Wire) and in other online forums. The emerging consensus places Baltimore’s decline — and the poverty, crime, and police violence associated with it — within a larger story of growing social inequality and urban decay in the United States. Recent analyses of these problems — such as George Packer’s The Unwinding (subtitled “An Inner History of the New America”) or Matt Taibbi’s The Divide (subtitled “American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap”) have recounted in detail the greed and anti-social policies which underlie much of Baltimore’s current problems. The books also suggest that government efforts to address these problems have often been misdirected.
While the US has spent an estimated US$15 trillion on poverty alleviation in the last 50 years, it has tended to do it in ways that reinforce the social divisions that give rise to many of the problems that exacerbate poverty, and it has unwittingly adopted policies that facilitated the ghettoization of the working poor. Minority communities may have received housing assistance or larger budgets for education, but, ultimately, precious little has been done to lessen their exclusion from the wider society. As New York Times columnist David Brooks notes in his latest Op-Ed, “the real barriers to mobility are matters of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home and a neighbourhood that either encourage or discourage responsibility, future oriented thinking, and practical ambition.” Most government aid, Brooks suggests, has failed on these fronts and served “as a cushion, not a ladder.”
There is much to be learned from what has happened in Baltimore, especially within the Caribbean, where poverty has rarely, if ever, been treated as a political priority and rising social inequality has largely been addressed by the creation of gated communities. Not only should we learn that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, we should acknowledge that sooner rather than later, even in the world’s largest economy, deep-seated social problems that have been carefully downplayed (racism, social marginalization, crime, poverty) return to centre stage, to haunt the bureaucrats and politicians who ignored them, and to overturn the fragile progress that has been made in communities which tried, often with little help, to build something better.
