LEARNING FROM BALTIMORE
Marginalization takes many forms
Q I’m going to quote from President Obama’s statement on Tuesday: “There’s no excuse for the kind of violence we saw yesterday. It’s counterproductive. When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they’re not protesting, they’re not making a statement, they’re stealing.” I just wonder, though, with so many people dying at the hands of police in the United States, is it reasonable at this point to expect or demand non-violence?
A I think expecting and demanding non-violence from protesters is a point on which Obama misspoke. He should be asking for an end of violence from the police. This is where this started. This started because a man’s spine was 80 per cent severed. His voice box was crushed. He died a week later. ... So he is speaking to the wrong people. He’s speaking to the people who were reacting to violence, who were reacting to marginalization. He needs to ask the people who are doing the violence to stop the violence.
Q Does the violence help in any way?
A We need to realize that what happened in Baltimore didn’t start with Freddie Gray. What happened in Baltimore started decades ago. We’ve got people disenfranchised. Eighty-five per cent of the students in Baltimore qualify for a free or reduced lunch. There’s poverty, there’s a loss of jobs, there’s so many different points of marginalization that led up to this point. Freddie Gray, and the lack of response from the mayor, from the police, from everybody, is what lit this match. We also need to realize that there was peaceful protesting as well.
Q How much of the violence itself do you think was directly related to the anger and the frustration, and how much of it was just opportunistic? You give people a chance to riot, some people are going to riot.
A We’re getting a mix of things. Everybody who’s out there is not protesting. There are people who are out there who are being opportunistic; there are people who are out there protesting. I think riot is a term that I would move away from. I would more call it a rebellion. It is a different form of protest. Also, that protest, that violence that we’re seeing, it’s cathartic. These are people who feel so disenfranchised, who feel like they have nowhere to turn, who are lashing out. Am I saying I agree with it? I’m not saying I agree with it, nor am I saying I don’t agree with it. I see value in that violence.
Q What is the value in the violence?
A It’s cathartic. It’s people who feel like they have no power whatsoever. They have no power to feed their children, they have no power to find jobs, they have no power to step out of their poverty. They have no power even to stop one of their own from being brutally murdered. It’s just like Martin Luther King said, because lots of people like to quote him: He said that a riot is the language of the unheard. These people are not being heard — how else are they going to be heard?
Q The situation in Baltimore, if you look at their most disadvantaged communities, it’s very difficult to compare to, really, any Canadian city, certainly in terms of the black community. Do you see lessons from what’s happening in Baltimore and the U.S. in the wider sense, for what’s going on up here?
A When we look at the “Black Lives Matter” movement, it’s not just people are being murdered by the police. It’s speaking about so many different kinds of marginalization. So we can see echoes of that in Toronto with the push out/dropout rate of black youth. We’ve got carding where, actually, more people are being stopped per capita than we are seeing with stop-and-frisk in the United States. There are so many points of disenfranchisement. We have unemployment disparities. There are a lot of echoes that we can see there, and it would be beneficial for us to learn and fix our problems before we have something like that on our hands.
Q Conservatives are clearly much more skeptical, I think, of the police than they were, say, 10 years ago. Do you think society at large — Canadian, American, or both — is finally begin- ning to come to terms with the level of violence that police are capable of doling out?
A I don’t know, because there are many people who are extremely supportive of the police. So I don’t know if people are becoming more aware. I don’t know if this is just a flash in the pan. I don’t know if this is a watershed moment. I would hope so, but there are levels to this. ... We have to look at the larger prison-industrial complex and all of the ways in which we’ve got this cradle-toprison pipeline for black people. It’s more complex and it’s good that some people are waking up. Even Bill O’Reilly spoke about police violence. That’s a big move — he’s a bit of a bigot. But whether it’s a watershed moment, I’m not sure. We had a chance to change carding and we didn’t.
Q The video of police shooting Walter Scott in the back in South Carolina, then apparently planting a taser on him, then lying about basically everything that happened afterward — you have to be so set in your ways to look at that and see anything other than just a horrible situation. I wonder what you think of the images and if you have any thoughts on body cameras, because that’s one of the solutions that people mention.
A Well we talk about Walter Scott and we talk about Eric Garner, which was a miscarriage of justice, but then we also have to remember Rodney King. So, we’ve had video before, and you would think that we would say, “Here’s you on video doing a thing that is against the rules and against the law, this should stop things.” But we haven’t seen that happening. Are body cameras a step in a direction, that’s possibly the right one? Yes, but there are lots of police who turn off their body cameras or cover them, just like the G20 (in Toronto) when police covered or took off their name tags. So is it a step in the right direction? Possibly, but we need to look at the underlying issues here. Policing has a racism problem, and we need to deal with that. They have a racial profiling problem and we need to deal with that. Body cameras — I feel like it’s putting a band-aid over a bullet wound.