As FBI drones circled the skies over Baltimore, the day after Gray’s funeral, Obama gave his statement, interrupting a summit with Shinzo Abe. This seemed markedly less scripted than those hitherto, stepping gingerly from phrase to phrase, balancing statements of support for police with those for the Gray family; noting that peaceful demonstrations never get as much attention as riots; fumbling a description of rioters as “protesters”—before recognizing the faux pas and quickly swapping in “criminals,” then escalating and overcompensating with a racializing “thugs”; linking Baltimore to Ferguson and locating the ongoing chain of events in “a slow-rolling crisis” that had been “going on for decades”; calling on police unions not to close ranks and to acknowledge that “this is not good for police.”
But most notably, the race contradiction which had described the polar tensions of Obama’s rhetoric now receded into the background, while the problem over which “we as a country have to do some soul searching” became specifically one of poor blacks, impoverished communities, the absence of formal employment and its replacement with the illicit economy, cops called in merely to contain the problems of the ghetto; this was the real problem, though a hard one to solve politically. Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton too was falling over herself to express an understanding of core social issues at play in these struggles.* Even the conservative Washington Times declared Baltimore’s problem to be a matter of class, not race, and spoke sympathetically of how “residents in poorer neighborhoods feel targeted by a police force that treats them unfairly.”† The contrast with the 1960s was striking: where ultra-liberal President Johnson once saw black riots as a communist plot, now the entire political class seemed to agree with the rioters’ grievances: black lives did indeed matter, and yes, ghetto conditions and incarceration were problems.
The surprising degree of elite acceptance here might perhaps be attributed to the very different possibilities facing these two Civil Rights Movements, old and new. Where the first threatened substantially transformative social and political effects, challenging structures of racial oppression that dated back to Reconstruction’s defeat, and brought the prospect of dethroning some political elites along the way, the new politics of black unity seemed to be kicking at an open door that led nowhere. Where the first could offer the prospect of incorporation of at least some parts of the black population into a growing economy, the new movement faced a stagnant economy with diminishing opportunities even for many of those lucky enough to have already avoided the ghetto, let alone those stuck in it.‡ Aspira tions to solve these problems were good American pipe dreams, easily acceptable precisely because it was hard to see what reform might actually be addressed to them beyond anodyne steps such as requiring more police to wear bodycams.
The contrast between Ferguson and Baltimore is testament to the enduring power of black political leaders—together with those of churches and gangs—to contain uprisings. In Ferguson, where there was only a minimal infrastructure of black political representation, the initial week-long uprising was repeated several times, each time politicizing new swaths of black youth, turning the small and hitherto obscure town into a national center for the new activism. By contrast, black elites in Baltimore moved quickly to quell unrest by indicting the police officers involved in Freddie Gray’s death, winning State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby accolades, and shrouding the streets of Baltimore with a pall of silence, interrupted only by panics about a “Ferguson effect” on the city’s crime rate. The first judgment on a police officer in the Gray case came in May of 2016. He was predictably exonerated.
The existing black elite is willing to embrace the “New Jim Crow” rhetoric as long as it funnels activists into NGOs and helps to consolidate votes—but always within a frame of paternalism and respectability, sprinkled with Moynihan-style invocations of the dysfunctional black family. Here initiatives focus on such things as mentoring to improve individual prospects, thus sidestepping social problems. Meanwhile churches function both as substitutes for the welfare state and as organs of community representation—roles they have proved willing to embrace and affirm in the context of this movement.* But it is probably significant that the word “thug” was first deployed here by those same elites—and Obama. While people across the spectrum of black American society and beyond could easily affirm that all those lives from Trayvon Martin onwards certainly did matter, what could they say to rioters from Baltimore’s ghettos? Could the bonds of racial solidarity that were stretched across the class divide still hold when the stigma of criminality pushed itself to the fore?
6.
The question of “black criminality” is overdetermined by decades of liberal vs. conservative acrimony, dating back to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 lament over the state of the “Negro family.” Approximately three distinct sets of diagnoses and prescriptions stake out the rhetorical perimeter of this triangular debate. Conservatives condemn cultural pathologies and a lack of stable two-parent families, seeing this as the source of high crime in black neighborhoods; the solutions thus become promotion of religious observance and black fatherhood, paired with condemnation of rap music. Liberals defend rappers and single mothers from patriarchal conservatives, and condemn racist cops who exaggerate black criminality by over-policing black neighborhoods; thus the solution becomes police reform and fighting racism. Finally, social democrats will agree with conservatives that black crime is real but point to structural factors such as high unemployment and poverty, themselves driven in part by present and past racism; the solution thus becomes a Marshall Plan for the ghetto.
Many in the black middle class are skeptical of liberal denials of black criminality; many have family members or friends who have been affected by crime. Often open to structural arguments, they are also tired of waiting for social democratic panaceas which seem ever less likely. Noting their own capacities for relative advancement, it’s easy for them to contrast the condition of the black poor to the supposed success of other racialized immigrant groups. They are thus drawn to conservative conclusions: there must be something wrong with their culture, their sexual mores, and so on. This is not just a matter of the Bill Cosbys and Ben Carsons. It is the position of influential liberal academics like William Julius Wilson and Orlando Patterson. It has also increasingly become the position of many supposed radicals: Al Sharpton raging against black youth culture and its “sagging pants” at 2013’s National Action to Realize the Dream March; Cornel West decrying the “nihilism” within black culture and identifying religion as a solution.* This is what Black Lives Matter activists mean when they object to “the politics of respectability.”
Such objections are, of course, essentially correct: it is stupid to blame crime on culture.† Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow is a key reference point for these activists. Alexander points to racial disparities in drug-related incarceration: blacks and whites use drugs at similar rates, but blacks are arrested far more often, and sometimes receive longer sentences for the same offense, with the implication that these disparities are the work of racist cops and judges. Such liberal responses to conservative arguments tend, however, to come with a blind spot. By concentrating on low-level drug offenders—who even many conservatives agree shouldn’t be serving time—Alexander avoids some thorny issues. Among prisoners, those classified as violent offenders outnumber drug offenders by more than 2 to 1, and the racial disproportion among them is as high.‡ But with violent crimes it is hard to deny that black people are both victims and perpetrators at much higher rates.§ Here the explanations of the social democrats are basically right, even if their solutions look implausible: black people are much more likely to live in urban ghettos, faced with far higher levels of material deprivation than whites.
With their endemic violence, these places are the real basis for the high “black-on-black crime” statistics that conservatives like to trot out as evidence that responsibility for the violence to which black people are subjected lies with black c
ommunities themselves. Understandably reacting against such arguments, liberals have pointed out similarities between intra-racial murder rates: 84% for whites and 93% for blacks.* This seems a polemically effective point: shouldn’t white communities thus take more responsibility for “white-on-white crime” too? But again, something is being obscured: according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, black people kill each other 8 times more often.
It is not necessary to accept the rhetorical logic by which acknowledging this appears a concession to conservative moralizing. Aren’t high crime rates to be expected in the most unequal society in the developed world? And isn’t it entirely predictable that violent crime should be concentrated in urban areas where forms of employment are prevalent that do not enjoy legal protections, and which therefore must often be backed up with a capacity for direct force? Arguments that avoid such things often involve implicit appeals to an unrealistic notion of innocence, and therefore seem to have the perverse effect of reinforcing the stigma of crime; here the critics of “respectability politics” reproduce its founding premise.†
While the prospect of the underlying problem being solved through a gigantic Marshall Plan for the ghetto looks like the most forlorn of hopes, many policy proposals from Black Lives Matter activists merely amount to some version of “more black cops.” The history of police reform in places like Baltimore, where the police and “civilian review boards” have long mirrored the faces of the wider population, clearly demonstrates the insufficiency of these responses. But those who make the more radical claim that the demand should be less rather than better policing are in some ways just as out of touch.‡ The troubling fact—often cited by the conservative right, but no less true for that reason—is that it is precisely in the poorest black neighborhoods that we often find the strongest support for tougher policing. When Sharpton, in his eulogy for Brown, railed against the abject blackness of the gangster and the thug, some of the activists were horrified, but his message was warmly received by many of the Ferguson residents present. This is because Sharpton was appealing to a version of “respectability politics” that has roots in the ghetto. Ta-Nahesi Coates, who grew up in West Baltimore, has acknowledged that many residents “were more likely to ask for police support than to complain about brutality.” This is not because they especially loved cops, but because they had no other recourse: while the “safety”’ of white America was in “schools, portfolios, and skyscrapers,” theirs was in “men with guns who could only view us with the same contempt as the society that sent them.”*
In this precarious world one must survive with little help, and any accident or run of bad luck can result in losing everything. It is no surprise that people get sick or turn to crime when they fall down and can’t get back up. The police are there to ensure that those who have fallen don’t create further disturbances, and to haul them away to prison if they do. People who are thereby snared are not just those nabbed by the cops, but people—not angels—caught in the vectors of a spreading social disintegration. At the same time, broader populations—fearful of looking down—develop their own cop mentalities. This gives the lie to anti-police slogans that present the police as an imposition on the community, that hinge on assumptions that these communities would do just fine if the police stopped interfering: where community and society are themselves in states of decay, the police offers itself as a stand-in; bringing a semblance of order to lives that no longer matter to capital.
For much the same reason, it is more or less impossible for the state to resolve the problem by changing the fundamental character of the police. A full-scale reform that did away with the present function of the police as repressive, last-resort social mediation would require a revival of the social democratic project. But with burgeoning levels of debts, states lack the key to that door. Meanwhile the softer reforms around which Black Lives Matter activists can unite with a bipartisan political elite—things like decarceration for low-level drug offenders and “justice reinvestment” in community policing—only raise the prospect of a more surgically targeted version of the carceral state. The brutal policing of black America is a forewarning about the global future of a humanity made economically surplus to capital. Escaping from that future will require the discovery of new modes of unified action, beyond the separations.
7.
Drawing in people from across a vast span of American society under the heading of “black,” to protest over issues deeply entwined with racializing structures, this wave of struggles has displayed a peculiar capacity to unite diverse socio-economic strata. Blackness as a unifying term carries a certain weight when set against the orien-tationless groping towards unity of other recent struggles such as Occupy, which foundered in the process of trying to compose a coherent movement from its “99%.” But while political composition has tended to present itself as a fundamental, unsolvable riddle for such movements, they have not been compositionally static. In the global wave of 2011-12, there was a tendency to produce glimpses of possible new unities as the worse-off entered and transformed protests initiated by the better-off: occupations initiated by students or educated professionals over time attracted growing numbers of the homeless and destitute; university demonstrations over fee hikes gradually brought out kids who would never have gone to university in the first place. Later, the Ukraine’s Maidan protests, kicked off by pro-European liberals and far-right nationalists, mutated into encampments of dispossessed workers. In England, such modulations terminated with the crescendo of the 2011 riots, as the racialized poor brought their anti-police fury to the streets.*
If the riddle of composition, for movements like Occupy, had stemmed from the lack of any already-existing common identity, blackness seemed perhaps to offer one. Early activists within this wave had consciously sought to solve Occupy’s “whiteness” problem, hoping this would lead to a broader-based movement. In the event, Black Lives Matter was able to attract many more of the poor and excluded. But it was also able to draw a surprising degree of support from celebrity and political circles. From Beyonce and Jay-Z’s bailing-out of Ferguson and Baltimore protesters, to Prince’s post-Baltimore “rally4peace,” to Snoop Dogg’s associations with the Brown and Davis families; from Barack Obama’s personal identifications with the victims of racialized violence to Hillary Clinton’s careful alignment with decarceration activists—these struggles managed to secure a level of symbolic endorsement from the upper echelons of American society that would have been unimaginable for the French riots of 2005, or the English ones of 2011.
This kind of vertical integration of diverse social strata is a commonplace of American history, in which the racial bonds among whites have always been stretched over even greater spans. Slave owner and yeoman farmer, postbellum landlord and poor white sharecropper, WASP industrialist and Irish immigrant had even less in common than black political elites have today with the predominantly poor victims of racial violence. Yet the yeoman joined slave patrols and fought to defend slavery in the Civil War; the white sharecropper (after the brief interracial alliance of populism) would help to maintain Jim Crow segregation through lynch terror; and the Irish immigrant, though initially racialized himself, would brutally police black neighborhoods on behalf of his Protestant betters. Historically, whiteness was able to span these great vertical distances not because of some affinity of culture or kin, but because it was embodied in the American state itself. Now, however, that state was topped by someone ostensibly outside this construct. However tenuously, blackness too now seemed capable—at least in principle—of spanning comparable social distances. From the impoverished East Baltimore resident, clinging onto the edges of a fraying social fabric, to the US president: it is a rare movement that can seem to unite such diverse people behind a substantive social cause. But there’s the rub. Stretched across such an unequal span, it was probably inevitable that the unity at play here would be correspondingly thin. At such extremes, postulations of a single black identity appear increa
singly lacking in social content.
That blackness can seem to offer something more substantial is an effect of its peculiar construction: a social content forcefully given by its role as marker of subordinate class, but also an identitarian unity enabled by its ultimate non-correspondence with class. These poles in tension have long identified the specificity of black struggles: proletarian insurgency or “race leadership”; blackness as socio-economic curse or as culture. But as the divide between rich and poor gapes ever wider, and as the latter sink further into misery and crime, gestures at holding the two poles together must become ever emptier. To reach towards the social content one must loosen one’s hold on the identity; to embrace the identity one must let go of the content. It is practically impossible to hold both at once. Is the core demand to be about police reform? Or is it to be about ameliorating ghetto conditions in which police violence is more or less the only check on other kinds? If blackness seems to offer itself as a space in which these demands might not actually be at odds, this is only by the indistinct light from the gloam of older capacities for solidarity, when the black middle class too lived in the ghetto and shared its fate; when the black working class could reasonably hope to see better days.
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