“Why is there so much anger?” If you were wondering that before you read the Washington Post‘s “primer,” you’re probably still wondering. (photo: Algerina Perna/Baltimore Sun)
The Washington Post (4/28/15) offers:
A Freddie Gray Primer: Who Was He, How Did He Die, Why Is There So Much Anger?
The “who was he” part comes from the “no angel” school of journalism—stressing his the “frequent run-ins with the law,” sniffing that he “lived off” compensation for childhood lead-poisoning. It’s not all negative—friends recall him as “loyal and warm, humorous and happy.” But as in other pieces in this genre, there’s a sense that the point is not to humanize the victim but to allow readers to judge whether he deserved to live or die.
In this section, Post writers Peter Hermann and John Woodrow Cox describe Gray as “at the moment…the nation’s most prominent symbol of distrust in police.” Does he really symbolize “distrust in police”—or police violence against black men?
But the Post can’t refer to him as a symbol of police violence, because as far as the paper is concerned, there’s no way to tell whether any police violence occurred at all; in the next section—”How did he die?”—his death is presented as a complete mystery. Which is not surprising when you look at the sourcing for this section:
The officers said…. Officials say…. police officials said…. Officials said…. Baltimore police have acknowledged…. Police have said…. Those involved in the arrest…. City officials have promised…. Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said….
This is a good example of what Adam Johnson calls “a friendly local media whose default position is to simply repeat ‘official’ accounts, no matter how illogical they may be.” The only independent source of information offered on Gray’s death comes from “video shot by a civilian bystander,” which “shows officers dragging Gray, who appeared limp, after he was handcuffed.” But the Post follows this up with “officials say he was able to climb into the back of a police van.”
You can see the video here. When you can watch a person being dragged into the back of a police van, apparently unable to walk, and you know that he later died of spinal cord injuries, is it reasonable to suggest, as the Post account does, that his death might be attributed to the fact he “was not seat-belted after being placed in a transport van”? The Post offers that as one of the “significant errors” that are “acknowledged” by police—along with denial of medical attention and failure to call an ambulance—a phrasing that frames Gray’s death as a mistake and treats exculpatory claims by police as revealed fact. (You don’t “acknowledge” a deceptive claim.)
Freddie Gray: The Post doesn’t see his brutal death as sufficient to explain a community’s anger.
The final section is “Why is there so much anger?” The question implicitly plays down Gray’s importance as an individual—isn’t the fact that police killed someone in a particularly brutal fashion with no credible explanation reason enough for a community to be angry?—but the article does tie Gray’s death to “what activists say is a much larger national issue: police mistreatment of black men.” After listing some of the more infamous instances of black men or youths killed by police—Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Walter Scott–the piece continues:
Those tensions were only heightened in West Baltimore, where relations between residents and police have long been strained.
First of all, a series of deaths are not “tensions”—they’re actual violence, with real lives lost. Nor is “strained” the appropriate word to use for relations between police and residents where police have repeatedly killed those residents.
An ACLU of Maryland report found 109 people killed in police encounters in the state in a five-year period from 2010-14. Sixty-nine percent of those killed were black. (Maryland is 29 percent black.) Forty-five were not armed in any way; 80 percent of these victims were black.
You get a good sense of the human lives—and the racism—behind these statistics in a Baltimore Sun article (9/28/14) about the city’s police brutality settlements, summarized by Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic (4/22/15).
But none of this information was included in a passage that purports to explain “why is there so much anger”—though the section does find space to mention “violent rioters who set cars ablaze, looted businesses and injured more than a dozen officers.”
Messages can be sent to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
The corpress paints a portrait of “a city on fire”
But avoids the question of who lights the match
I don’t know what’s worse, the murder, the manner of the murder, the viciousness of the murder, the fact that the murderers were police officers, the fact that they haven’t been indicted, the way the media, including the Post and the NY Times, focus on the rioting and ignore the cause, or the way elected officials, including the Baltimore Mayor and the Maryland Governor focus on the rioting and ignore the cause.
And almost NONE of the coverage yesterday connected the next dots…
What is life like for someone living in a neighborhood like those on the TV news in Baltimore?
The parents are shat upon by the media and elites for (a very few) of their children’s actions while the fact that IF they can even GET a job (or TWO or THREE), they’re paid well below a living wage…and have little or no time or energy for their kids…
And the dominant paradigm holds out having kids as the highest duty that a USAmerican can perform…and then disses people for following their suggestion too well…
Folks are dissed for being “obese” while the fact that it’s a 3 hour round trip to the nearest source of wholesome, affordable produce is ignored. But the neighborhoods are riddled with overpriced “markets” (gee, why burn an absentee owned corner market) with a shriveled up head of lettuce or carrot to “choose from” or the fast food joints selling McPoison…
Some folks torched a CVS pharmacy…a SYMBOL of otherwise unreachable corporate America and a symbol of the raw inaccessible nature of “health care” in those neighborhoods, and the check cashing place that charges up to 1000% “interest” and the press can’t figure out why?
I heard a(n obviously white) Baltimore “investor” on BBC this morning talking about rethinking his “investments” in “distressed properties” in the neighborhood in flames, how he and his class are the potential saviors that “those people” are driving away. I couldn’t help thinking why didn’t their altruistic practice of being slum landlords or bankrolling fast food joints “repair” the situation by now, eh?
And NO MENTION of the phony “war on drugs(tm)”, the major excuse for the oppressive, deadly, racist tactics of the occupying force called “Police”.
Face it, these are the forgotten people. No jobs, limited transportation, no access to decent food, no access to health care, distressed, under-funded schools along with the affluent public’s assumptions that most of them will end up in prison, behind a cash register at mickie-d’s, or swamping out an office building in downtown at night.
These are the people used by the dominant paradigm to keep EVERYONE’S wages down.
These are the easy low-hanging fruit, the targets of the phony drug war and the fodder to fill the cells of the Gulag of the USAmerican criminal-injustice system…
These are people with no hope for a future that doesn’t look like the oppressive present…or worse.
And more of the capitalism that CREATED these ghettos will NOT heal them…
Well at least a few more victim blaming ancestral humans will realize their mediocrity and become enlightened as a result of this,
@chetdude
Thank you for your incisive remarks. For much of the white US, “ghetto” is a word they think they understand, yet, for most of them, they haven’t a clue what it means to those condemned to live in one. Being charged 25-50% more for a staple because a store owner can do so and get away with it, doesn’t escape the notice of those who must live with this kind of ugly opportunism. De facto segregation never disappeared and those who would exploit the wholesale civil incarceration inherent in ghetto-life, as you elucidated, shouldn’t be surprised what repressed anger can do when set loose, even for a single evening in April.
And if a payday advance or check cashing business was truly destroyed in the process, then notwithstanding the shit storm of criticism leveled at the looters, perhaps it all will have been worth the trouble.
“You can see the video here.”
“This video has been removed as a violation of YouTube’s policy against spam, scams, and commercially deceptive content.”
???
Video linked above removed
Alec C, the Baltimore DA did lodge murder complaints against the six officers Friday.
Doug Latimer
” ” @ Doug: The corpress paints a portrait of “a city on fire”
But avoids the question of who lights the match” ”
And they end up claiming the person holding the match is the real victim, because they burned their fingers holding on to it.