Watching Baltimore
In the middle of a thread on the blog about plurality, vulnerability and difference, I feel that I ought to talk about yet another case in which an unarmed African American died at the hands of police.
In the wake of the death of Freddie Gray, sustained peaceful protests were overshadowed in the media and among politicians by incidents of violence, a discourse critiqued by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Two kinds of responses stood out to me: the response in politics and the response in baseball.
First, Hillary Clinton had a significant reaction to the events, calling for a reassessment of policing and an end to the penal policies shaped in large part through her husband's influence. She is certainly the most important politician I have ever heard use the term "mass incarceration".
This stood out to me partly because she was taking a risk she did not strictly need to. She has no progressive challenger. She might very well have followed the president and insisted on the importance of law and order for a few minutes and ended with a vague and tone-deaf plea for some kind of "soul-searching" about a slowly-developing problem that doesn't seem to have a name or clear attributes.
That was a relief, but what more stood out to me was what happened in baseball. The timely response I noticed came not from a tenured poststructuralist, but a trust-fund baby sports executive. The COO of the Baltimore Orioles said that anyone talking about riots and disorder has to think of a much larger picture of economic abandonment and disproportionate suspicion, of a system with failures that have accounting in other than fatalistic terms.
It was heartening to see a reflective and conscientious sports officer from back home for a change, and the manager is with him too.
The bigger news in baseball was that because of security choices, the Orioles played the Chicago White Sox without any spectators allowed to attend, a first in the game's history. Of course, there is the symbolism of the game between teams whose iconography is metonymic for two distressed black communities with decades of history of police abuse.
Beyond that for me was the image of the empty stadium. Because of accounting of the franchises' records and preservation of the schedules, the league's rules meant that the game had to go on.
The importance of keeping up business meant that the abandonment of people was just an incidental feature that caused no significant disruption.
On Wednesday, that unwatched game seemed to me a striking metaphor for the programs and processes that have transformed the urban spaces in ways we so often celebrate in contexts other than like this.