Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
The Rebellion in Baltimore: Uprising Against Austerity, Claims Top US
Academic
Ed Vulliamy
Saturday, May 2, 2015
The Guardian (UK)
For Baltimore to be the setting for the latest in a recent spate of
high-profile police murders and riots in America - after Ferguson, New York and
North Charleston - is especially compelling in the public imagination because
the city was also the location for David Simon's brilliant TV series The Wire.
Baltimore is the city from which Simon wrote for this newspaper in 2013
about "two Americas" in the "horror show" his country has
become, one crucial element of which is that the US is "the most
incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of
people we've put in American prisons".
The Wire, he said, "was about people who were worthless and who were
no longer necessary", most of them black, and who become the assembly-line
raw material for "the prison-industrial complex". At an event hosted
by the Observer that year, Simon said: "Once America marginalised the
black 10% of the population it no longer needed, it set out to make money out
of them by putting them in jail."
The Baltimore Sun last year documented a litany of police abuse of black
people - mostly but not entirely men (one was a grandmother in her 80s) - as
routine as it was savage, and compensation payouts of $5.7m since 2011 for the
few cases pursued and vindicated. This in the city where Wells Fargo paid
millions to settle a lawsuit claiming it steered black people in particular
into subprime mortgages they could not afford.
But these events are variations on old themes that have not gone away since
segregation, across time and across America. Read the Kerner commission's
report into the race riots of 1967 and it seems to describe much of what has
recently happened in Ferguson and Baltimore, where angry protests followed the
death in police custody of a young black man, Freddie Gray. "What white
Americans have never fully understood, but what the Negro can never
forget," the report said, "is that white society is deeply implicated
in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and
white society condones it."
A leader in the New York Times last week cited the prescient work of the
sociologist William Julius Wilson, which explained how deindustrialisation and
reduced demand for low-skilled labour created "poor, segregated
neighbourhoods in which a majority of individual adults are either unemployed
or have dropped out of or never been part of the labour force" and why
most were black.
Black writers since Wilson have set out to develop his labour-based
research to examine the wholesale exclusion and criminalisation of black
people. One of the foremost, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, put it this way in a recent
lecture: "The US is more segregated by race and income now than in
1960."
Gilmore is a professor of geography at City University of New York, and her
book The Golden Gulag was awarded a prize by the American Studies
Association; it is set in California, which has America's largest prison
population and has pioneered much of the punitive legislation adopted by other
states. She charts the engineered progression of a multibillion-dollar
boom she calls a "prison-fix" to four entwined surpluses: capital,
land, labour and state capacity. Recommending the work, writer Mike Davis calls
this "the political economy of super-incarceration".
Despite declining crime in California, the state's prison population has at
its peak increased by 500% since, in 1982, the state embarked on building a
massive system of prisons, many the size of large towns, better hidden from
view than they are from the state's annual budgets and legal manoeuvres designed
to increase sentencing. "Your innocence will not save you," was
Gilmore's starting point. "If an injury to one is an injury to all, then
the criminalisation of one is the criminalisation of all."
Speaking to the Observer on Saturday from Milwaukee, Gilmore explained her
view that "black people are profoundly marginalised politically, and the
fact of the guy in the White House obscures that marginalisation. More
marginalised socially and more marginalised spatially, because of the organised
processes of capital flight. The legacy of federally enforced residential
segregation for both home ownership and social housing from the late New Deal
forward underlies today's situation.
"However, one change that has happened over the past 55 years is that
poor people are more and more concentrated with other poor people - either
isolated by capital flight in cities or deported by gentrification and moving
into the old inner-ring suburbs. Detroit is the most famous case of isolation,
but there are countless others that share both qualities, including
Baltimore."
One of the measurements Gilmore uses to illustrate extreme inequalities is
premature death: in her writing she defines racism as "the
state-sanctioned or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated
vulnerability to premature death. Premature does not refer exclusively to the
untimely deaths of young people, but to any preventive death occurring in
people of all ages, including the elderly - whether from treatable disease,
neglect, accident, self-inflicted harm, or homicide."
Entwined with - and crucial to - these measures of marginalisation is the
criminalisation that is the body of Gilmore's work: "Two-thirds of the 2.5
million people imprisoned in America," she says, "are people of
colour: black, brown, yellow, red." But in the southern state of
Louisiana, for instance, "that'll be about 95%, and most of them are
black. Such criminalisation has become so normalised in the United States that
the ideology seems to have turned a policeman's line from Melvin Van Peebles's
bitter 1970 satire Watermelon Man from comedy to commonsense: `He did
something. We don't know what it is.'"
Gilmore is eager, she says, to emphasise that the "prison-fix"
described in her book is not - "as it is commonly seen" - an
encroachment by the private sector into a public sphere, but "the policy
of the state: mass devastation, mass criminalisation and mass deportation into
jails. Of all those in American jails, 92% are in publicly administered institutions.
The public money turns through the system in the salaries of public employees,
and falls into the hands of the private sector selling food, services and
utilities, because these prisons are cities. Fundamentally, this is the state
reverting to a default legitimacy in the age of austerity: the state saying:
`What else can we do?'"
Gilmore charts the shaping of sentencing legislation in
California, which, as she puts it "makes it harder for judges not to put
people in prison". She recalls: "I was here in Milwaukee, promoting
the book after it was published, and a sheriff who had read it declared: `We
live in an age of legislated criminality' - and I said: `You've put it in
straighter terms than I do.'"
Asked about the targeting of the black American male, Gilmore said:
"As far as we can tell, there's no really good data, because forces are
not required to gather and report it systematically to the United States
department of justice. Is it every 28 hours? Is it only twice a week?
"There's some truth in the apparent fact that the cases we learn about
are most usually men, that the police are pulling their guns on, shooting or
assaulting in a deadly way, black men. But there are cases and cases of other
kinds of people. Take a city like Albuquerque, New Mexico, where one in five
homicides is a police killing: most of those are Native Americans. Elsewhere,
it's probably somebody else - it's whoever's poor, whoever's down and out,
marginalised."
She also points out that "whoever is on the receiving end of organised
violence and criminalisation, the forefront of the struggle against it has long
been women, black women", as related in the final third of her book.
She says that "these things don't happen because a bunch of white
people wake up one day and say, `let's start chattel slavery so we can oppress
black people'; and now slavery has gone, `we'll have the Jim Crow laws'; and
now they've gone, `we'll have a prison-industrial complex'. These things have
to do with how capitalism works. In my view, the rebellions in Ferguson and
Baltimore and beyond are uprisings against austerity, sparked by police murder
and about all of the relationships and conditions that made the murder
possible."
She concludes: "I think many people respond to these high-profile
police killings by thinking: `They can kill us because they can lock us up.'
But I think it goes the other way: they can lock us up because they know they
can kill us, because they can kill with impunity."
Ed Vulliamy is a writer for the Guardian and Observer, and author of
Amexica: War Along the Borderline.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore; Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and
Opposition in Globalising California, published by the University of
California Press, 2007 http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520242012
[1]
Source URL: https://portside.org/2015-05-04/rebellion-baltimore-uprising-against-austerity-claims-top-us-academic
Links:
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.
Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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