common core.

a moment of clarity.

words. 

"...Gray’s death is part of a tableau of frustration in which the dateline seems increasingly incidental. In the three years since Trayvon Martin’s death, in Sanford, Florida, public attention has been successively directed to Jacksonville, Florida (Jordan Davis), Ferguson, Missouri (Michael Brown), Cleveland, Ohio (Tamir Rice), Chicago, Illinois (Rekia Boyd), Staten Island, New York (Eric Garner), North Charleston, South Carolina (Walter Scott), and Tulsa, Oklahoma (Eric Harris)—a blurred collection of terrible redundancies. Rice was a twelve-year-old boy who was playing with a toy gun in a public park when he was shot by police; Boyd was a bystander, killed when a police officer opened fire on an unarmed man nearby; Gray led police on a foot chase prior to his arrest; Harris allegedly tried to make an illegal handgun sale in the moments before he was shot by a volunteer deputy, who said he thought he was holding his Taser. The Black Lives Matter movement, which has sprung up in the context of these deaths, looks at those disparate stories as sharing a common bond based in race. A too cavalier acceptance of the use of lethal force, even against those who may have committed a crime, serves to make the deaths of people like Boyd and Rice all the more probable.

...A decade ago, Baltimore achieved an undesirable recognition as the birthplace of the “Stop Snitching” movement, which popularized the idea that residents should not coöperate with police when they have information about a crime. The irony has not been lost on those within the city who see the mystery surrounding Gray’s death as a product of a police department unwilling to pronounce its own wrongdoing. The demonstrations on Saturday were mostly peaceful. Still, as the stadium emptied, under a heavy police presence, brushfires of violent protest broke out in the West Baltimore neighborhood where Gray was arrested. The common presumption was that there would likely be more such nights in Baltimore before all was said and done.

The sliver of hope that Baltimore might not fully teeter into bedlam went up along with the neighborhood CVS, the police vehicles, and the buildings that were ignited on Monday. The day began with a plea for a moratorium on protests from Fredricka Gray, Freddie Gray’s twin sister, so that her family might bury her brother in peace. But by the afternoon, there was no peace for Gray’s family, nor any other in the city. On Monday afternoon, the governor of Maryland issued a state of emergency. Flyers for a Saturday rally issued by the Black Lawyers for Justice urged protestors to “shut the city down.” Two days later, the city is a theatre of outrage. The flames leaping into the sky underscored a crucial concern: if the pleas from Freddie Gray’s family could not forestall violence in the streets of Baltimore, the difficult question will be what can prevent more of it."

THE NEW YORKER: Baltimore and the State of American Cities

SEE ALSO:

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