Many have recently condemned the unrest in Baltimore as “counterproductive.” At best, this standard narrative inadvertently diverts attention from the crux of the situation, and at worst it deliberately undermines any effort to seek redress and reform.

At the risk of oversimplification, to clarify what I mean by standard narrative, I mean the one-two punch of (1) what happened to Freddie Gray is sad, but (2) there is no excuse for rioting. Government officials, including the President and AG Loretta Lynch, have used this in their remarks. Even David Simon, creator of one of my favorite TV shows, has written as much. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the President, AG Lynch, and Simon in their calls for reform, but I find it confusing that they would waste their bully pulpit to explicitly denounce the rioting.

Condemning without understanding, understanding but not condoning

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a compelling takedown of this narrative:

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is “correct” or “wise,” any more than a forest fire can be “correct” or “wise.” Wisdom isn’t the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.

At the core of this is the tension between the violence of the state’s officers in the death of Freddie Grey and the violence of the rioters in their burning of cars and CVS stores. Coates attempts to bridge this by calling out the standard narrative as hypocrisy: it is inconsistent to require those who lack power to remain nonviolent while simultaneously glossing over the sustained, structured violence of the state against minorities. The critique then is predicated on the observation that the standard narrative does little to address the state’s violence; it paints Freddie Gray’s death as an isolated tragedy worthy of judicial examination but certainly not the result of a broken system operating off of broken policies with broken actors. I wouldn’t expect the President or the Attorney General to ever concede this much in public, but Coates’ point is that they must if they are to invoke the principle of nonviolence.

It’s not just intellectual consistency which Coates is calling the standard narrative out on. The implications of this lead to a second critique: failure to address this inconsistency is either an act of willful ignorance, political convenience, or deliberate sabotage. Coates rides with the middle option, pointing out that the very same people calling for calm are also charged with “enforcing the policies that led to Gray’s death” and because they “can offer no rational justification for Gray’s death,” they instead “appeal for calm.” Even a more favorable view implies a condemnation of the rioters without a proper understanding of what could possibly motivate such a group to act.

Effectively delivering this critique isn’t the easiest (admittedly my first read of Coates’ article left me confused as to what exactly he was advocating), but as Deray McKesson concisely puts it, “I don’t have to condone it to understand it.” This distinction is critical, and one that is likely lost on some individuals: the idea of either condemning or condoning rioting is a false dichotomy.¹ Both Coates and McKesson certainly condemn violence, but they choose to not make it a centerpiece of their rhetoric, as the standard narrative does. Since both clearly advocate for principled nonviolence, they could spend time denouncing both state violence and rioter violence, but they don’t really need to address the latter; their involvement in nonviolent direct action speaks louder than words.

Realpolitik

There’s a second reason why Coates and McKesson don’t constantly condemn rioters: they recognize that denouncing rioting doesn’t actually stop rioting, either removal of oppressive structures or offering a nonviolent alternative does. This is precisely what MLK described in a speech delivered in 1967:

I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

Assuming the above, then denouncing rioting, as in the standard narrative, has no positive impact. If anything, it focuses attention on the wrong actors and delegitimizes the reform movement. Rioting incurs a heavy cost, drawing support away from the protesters and towards the state, and talking about it in public forums only helps reinforce that cost.

That being said, even if rioting is prima facie bad, its undeniable that it can be an effective way of attracting attention. In the case of Baltimore, Obama pretty much admits this in his recent remarks:

The violence that happened yesterday distracted from the fact that you had seen multiple days of peaceful protests that were focused on entirely legitimate concerns of these communities in Baltimore, led by clergy and community leaders. And they were constructive and they were thoughtful, and frankly, didn’t get that much attention. And one burning building will be looped on television over and over and over again, and the thousands of demonstrators who did it the right way I think have been lost in the discussion.

Arguably the goal of the Baltimore protests is to raise awareness and bring about change at scale, and the primary prerequisite is some percentage of the populace caring about it. Combating apathy is therefore of the highest priority. Again, Obama:

If we really want to solve the problem, if our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could. It’s just it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant – and that we don’t just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, and we don’t just pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped. We’re paying attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids, and we think they’re important. And they shouldn’t be living in poverty and violence.

Obama gets it: unrest is media-worthy, and media attention is necessary but not sufficient to effect real change. Many others don’t get it though; they instead rail against the rioters and cite the Civil Rights Movement as evidence to demonstrate the power of nonviolent direct action. Though it certainly is an exemplar of nonviolent tactics, it’s important to recognize that the success of those tactics depended on particular contexts in the 1960s.

Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law professor and Baltimore native, developed the “backlash thesis,” which he uses to demonstrate the indirect role that Brown v. Board had on race relations. While many scholars have previously conceded the limited, immediate impact Brown had on school desegregation, Klarman persuasively argues that the Brown decision led to a backlash in the South which ultimately resulted in reform.²

While Klarman’s backlash thesis is remarkably interesting³, what is most relevant for the purposes of this discussion is the fact that the Civil Rights Movement became mainstream (i.e. received Northern white attention and galvanized them to act) only when nonviolent black protesters were met with brutal police violence. As Klarman describes:

By the early 1960s, King and his colleagues had basically given up on convincing southern whites of the wrongness of racial segregation and had redirected their energies toward converting northern whites to the civil rights cause by exposing the true evils of the Jim Crow system. Yet events quickly demonstrated that even blatantly illegal southern responses to civil rights demonstrations were not sufficient to arouse national outrage or to evoke a presidential response. Opinion polls from the early 1960s show that the public began to rank civil rights as the most important issue facing the nation only when demonstrations produced violence and social disorder, not when they led simply to mass arrests of peaceful participants.

To be successful, then, King’s strategy required the unwitting assistance of southern police chiefs in creating, or at least tolerating, sizable racial conflagrations. When southern law enforcement officials acted as Laurie Pritchett had in Albany - illegally but peacefully arresting civil rights demonstrators - neither the country nor the administration paid much heed. Moreover, because the public evidently tends to condemn even nonviolent direct action tactics - only 22 percent of those polled expressed approval of the Freedom Rides and only 31 percent of Freedom Summer - the civil rights demonstrations could succeed only if the public’s negative attitude toward the civil rights “provokers” was outweighed by its condemnation of their violent repressors. Appreciating this fact, King and his lieutenants devised the strategy of “creative tension”: Peaceful civil rights demonstrators would provoke and then passively endure violent assaults from southern law enforcement officers and mobs, with the hope of harvesting a public opinion windfall from a horrified viewing audience. The success of this strategy required not only that the demonstrators remain generally nonviolent and that their objectives be widely perceived as legitimate but also that such political figures as Bull Connor in Birmingham and Jim Clark in Selma “cooperate” by so brutalizing peaceful demonstrators as to mobilize national opinion behind a legislative assault on Jim Crow. As one SCLC leader put it, the movement “had calculated for the stupidity of a Bull Connor.”

King’s strategy required that the demonstrations take place before Connor was evicted from office. As Wyatt Walker observed retrospectively: “We knew that when we came to Birmingham that if Bull Connor was still in control, he would do something to benefit our movement. We didn’t want to march after Bull was gone.” The strategy proved brilliantly successful. After relatively lackluster initial marches that Connor met with uncharacteristic restraint, the dam soon burst, as Connor’s men deployed vicious police dogs and high-pressure water hoses against the demonstrators, many of whom were children. Television and front-page national newspaper coverage immediately followed, with photographs of police dogs attacking demonstrators and editorials condemning the violence as “a national disgrace.” President Kennedy reported that the famous photograph of a police dog lunging at a nonresisting demonstrator made him “sick.”

With this as a backdrop, consider how the Baltimore situation compares:

1. The public is more apathetic. This observation is motivated solely by the fact that technology has dramatically increased the number of alternatives that compete for the public’s attention, ranging from social media to mobile games. In the 1960s, the public was a more captive audience, and the speed with which public sentiment changed between 1962 and 1965 speaks to how efficiently news of the violent South spread.
2. The objective of protest is less clear. Whereas the organized movements in the 1960s could describe in specific detail the various forms of de jure and de facto discrimination, the Baltimore protesters have yet to present a clear articulation of what their demands are. This is less a commentary on the skill of Baltimore protest organizers and more a reflection of the current state of affairs. In the 1960s, one could very clearly point out how the Jim Crow laws directly resulted in state-sponsored discrimination, and one could reasonably present a case for federal legislative reform that would prevent state and local governments from engaging in such practices. In Baltimore today, there are no laws or police handbooks that openly specify mistreatment of minorities. What is at stake is perhaps more nebulous, less susceptible to legislative action, but yet equally weighty: how can we ensure the state’s officers remove their prejudices and fairly treat minorities? The Baltimore movements face a distinctly postmodern problem; just as there are no longer hostile nation-states to defend against, or entrenched political ideologies to fight, so too are there no longer racist laws to easily repeal.
3. The media is less equipped to tell a favorable narrative. In 1963, the mainstream media found the Birmingham violence newsworthy, and concisely captured the exact juxtaposition MLK wanted: representatives of the state violently attacking peaceful black protesters. One picture could fully illustrate that the government was systematically oppressing black Americans and that black Americans were peacefully registering their opposition to this oppression. Current harms, protest objectives, and legitimacy of the Civil Rights movement could be conveyed all in one go. I’ve already discussed why its difficult for the Baltimore protesters to delineate their objectives, so it’s no surprise that the media isn’t really capable of doing so either. Though the media can cover the Freddie Gray case, it’s primarily presented as a single incident caused by rogue officers rather than a byproduct of systemic, long-term violence.⁴ On the flip side, since there is no clear set of actors, the media presents a view of the rioting that tends to overestimate the criminality of the Baltimore citizenry as a whole, doing no favors for the nonviolent protest movement.
4. It’s more difficult to construct “creative tension” (i.e. police forces are no longer being led by Bull Connor). MLK depended on sanctioned police violence against protesters to receive the media coverage that would ultimately mobilize national support for civil rights reform. The Baltimore protesters cannot rely on such stupidity; the Baltimore police is sufficiently trained to limit provocation and violence against protesters, thereby limiting the possibility of media-worthy moments that support the protest movement.

In short, it seems substantively harder for the Baltimore protesters to motivate a broader swath of the populace to care. If rioting didn’t take place, there would be little reason for the media to dedicate more than a cursory amount of attention.⁵

To be clear, with my limited knowledge and expertise, I’m not sure I can conclude that a dash of violent unrest in Baltimore can achieve more than a strictly nonviolent movement, and even if I could, I’m not sure that the cost of violence to the community outweigh this incremental gain. But from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s nevertheless important to recognize that rioting can result in outcomes that are beneficial to protest movements, and these outcomes are not easily substitutable by any other form of direct action.

The discussion above only scratches the surface in terms of the numerous complexities that surround the current situation in Baltimore, and it’s because of this that I find the standard narrative so useless. It oversimplifies to the point of inanity and not only does nothing to address the issue at hand, it actually distracts from it. If you’re looking for a more succinct response to the standard narrative, Buck Showalter can help you with that.