Baltimore is burning, and it is our fault. In the wake of Freddie Gray’s untimely death, riots are breaking out in the city of Baltimore. Gray was a detained black man who died from complications of a spinal cord injury under the watch of the police.
That is the kind of sentence that has become all too common in recent months.
Naturally, his death and the subsequent rioting — some of which has grown violent — is gaining considerable attention across the country. Unfortunately, much of this attention is ?focused on the wrong things.
The media focuses on the conflict itself. It questions the violent nature of the protests, the virtue of burning down a CVS, whether the property cost is really worth “all ?the ruckus.”
They show clips of a mother taking her son out of the protest — rather violently — and tout her as the “mother of the year.” It becomes a story about the protests and whether the protesters are in the right and not a story about why they are protesting in the first place.
These protesters are trying to get our attention so we can start a conversation. Well, they got our attention, but we are having the ?wrong conversation.
As you all watch the coverage of these riots and consider your own participation in the ensuing conversation, I plead with you to consider President Obama’s statement.
He said solving this problem will require “that we don’t just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, and we don’t just pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped, but we’re paying ?attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids.”
We have to stop debating whether there is a race problem in this country or not: there is. We need to stop talking about whether these communities are justified in their anger or not: they are. And we need to stop talking about whether the crowds are protesting up to our standards or not: our standards are irrelevant.
We need to start talking about this question — when we walk into a poor community, why we get scared without being given a reason to be?
We need to start talking about why we care more about the tax rate of millionaires or who is to blame for Benghazi than we do the wellbeing of the most vulnerable in our society.
And we need to start talking about why these protesters feel the need to do what they are doing — because there is a reason, and whether you like it or not, it ?is justified.
At a certain point we must decide whether we care about the poor communities in our country or not. If we decide we don’t, then the actions you are seeing in Baltimore are things we’ll just need to learn to accept as a part of our lives.
But if we decide we are going to treat them with the dignity they deserve, then we need to shut up about the protesters and get to work.
thompjak@indiana.edu
