Baltimore and the Limits of Non-violence

When I think about Baltimore last night, and I see the usual pious calls for non-violence, I increasingly feel confused.  I know we're supposed to embrace the paradigm of Martin Luther King, Jr., and preach non-violence, but any such call sounds hypocritical in view of the violence visited upon marginalized communities.  King said that a riot is "the language of the unheard."  The riots that have occurred in the wake of known or supposed police brutality against African Americans are the voice of people who have been speaking politely to the powerful for decades, but who have systematically been ignored. The only time their voices are heard is when they threaten property and public order. In other words, when they inconvenience those in power.

If you were an attentive student of history, what sort of lesson would you take from this?

Non-violence is wonderful, but it only works when both sides agree there's a problem and on the general parameters of that problem. Otherwise, the threat to violence and public order is the only weapon in the arsenal of the powerless. Once violence erupts, those in power seek to quell the violence and then do the bare minimum, in their estimation, to prevent further outbreaks. Efforts are made at addressing symptoms, but never at getting to the root problem which in this case is, sorry conservatives, systemic racial bias.  Until this is addressed, events like Baltimore will play as though on repeat.

Those of us in white America, who shake our heads and conflate the actions of rioters with those of a few malefactors among the multitudes are the problem. Yes, there are those taking advantage of the situation for their own benefit and, yes, rioters are destroying property and engaging violently with police.  But, again, we must put ourselves in the position of those protesting.  Their voices have not been heard.  The police deployed in quasi-military gear which does not signal peacekeeping, but preparation for war.  And there is a long history of violence visited on African Americans by those in power, violence which the powerful claim is the result of a “few bad cops” and which many African Americans see as the result of a system tilted against them.

Violence may not be the ideal response to violence, but it is a perfectly rational one. And, let's be honest, African Americans are justified in feeling themselves under threat.

In another time, or another country, we would be more apt to praise an oppressed people who stood up to a regime that valued them little and denied them basic rights and opportunities available to others.   We applauded when Arab countries rose up in the Arab Spring and did not attempt to discredit the entire movement when violence occurred as happened against Coptic Christians in Egypt.  We recognized these as the result of bad actors, a courtesy we are loath to extend in our own back yard.

Which is odd, because that story is OUR story, or at least the one we like to tell: of a people denied their basic liberties who, after reason failed resorted to force. When we learn in school about the words "Give me liberty or give me death," we are presumably filled with admiration for the clarity of Patrick Henry's vision and the force with which he articulated it—and perhaps with a cringe at the hypocrisy of a slaveowner complaining about being enslaved.

There is, then, a certain cynicism at play in the calls for non-violence.  Once violence stops, there is no longer any urgency, and we can safely go back to ignoring the underlying reasons for it, writing it off as due to the local circumstances.  This is the gentleman wish of, especially, conservatives, that we can marginalize the arguments of the rioters by de-legitimizing their violence, and by conflating all protestors with the bad actors among them.

Henry’s cry is the cry issuing from the streets of Baltimore and of Ferguson and of countless other places, a call no less (and perhaps, all things considered, more) worthy than when it was issued by white men bitching about "unjust" taxation. Those men secured their rights by force, not by non-violence. 

This is a truth of history.  It wasn’t reason that secured American independence, westward expansion, the liberation of enslaved African Americans, the rights of workers, and the civil rights of minorities.  It wasn’t satyagraha that secured Indian independence. It was force…violence…or the fear of it.

Can we be at all surprised when others do the same? Will we have any moral standing to tell them not to?  These are big questions, and questions those in power should ask themselves. And then, perhaps, a third: What is to be done?

I don't have the answer to that one either, but I know it has something to do with paying attention when people are talking not just when they are shouting. Riots, remember, are the language of the unheard.  If those in power only act when this language is spoken, they may find it the only one in which they are addressed.