In the summer of 1966, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach warned that there would be riots by angry, poor minority residents in “30 or 40” American cities if Congress didn’t pass President Lyndon Johnson’s Model Cities antipoverty legislation. In the late 1960s, New York Mayor John Lindsay used the fear of such rioting to expand welfare rolls dramatically at a time when the black male unemployment rate was about 4 percent. And in the 1980s, Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry articulated an explicitly racial version of collective bargaining – a threat that, without ample federal funds, urban activists would unleash wave after wave of racial violence.
“The first version of the riot ideology assumed that not only cities, but also whites could be reformed; the new version assumes that America is inherently racist beyond redemption and that the black inner city needs to segregate itself from the larger society.”
“I know for a fact,” Barry explained, “that white people get scared of the [Black] Panthers, and they might give money to somebody a little more moderate.”
This brand of thinking, which I call the riot ideology, influenced urban politics for a generation. Perhaps its model city was Baltimore, which was consumed in 1968 by race riots so intense that the Baltimore police, 500 Maryland state troopers and 6,000 National Guardsmen were unable to quell them. The “insurrection” was halted only when nearly 5,000 federal troops requested by Maryland Gov. Spiro Agnew arrived.
Since 1968, Baltimore has proved remarkably adept at procuring state and federal funds, but never really recovered from the riots. And the lawlessness never fully subsided. What began as a grand bargain to avert further racial violence after 1968 descended over the decades into a series of squalid shakedowns. Antipoverty programs that had once promised to repair social and family breakdown became by the 1990s self-justifying and self-perpetuating.
In the wake of the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 2015 West Baltimore riots, a new riot ideology has taken hold, one similarly intoxicated with violence and willing to excuse it, but with a different goal. The first version of the riot ideology assumed that not only cities, but also whites could be reformed; the new version assumes that America is inherently racist beyond redemption and that the black inner city needs to segregate itself from the larger society.
“The West Baltimore rioters of 2015 didn’t call for more LBJ-style antipoverty projects, but for less policing... the rioters see police as both to blame for black criminality and as an embodiment of bourgeois white values.”
The West Baltimore rioters of 2015 didn’t call for more LBJ-style antipoverty projects, but for less policing. In a “keep off our turf” version of belligerent multiculturalism, the rioters see police as both to blame for black criminality and as an embodiment of bourgeois white values. The old riot ideology referred to mostly white urban police forces as occupying armies; the new version sees even Baltimore’s integrated police force, under the leadership of a black mayor and (until recently) a black police chief, as an occupying army. Withdrawing the police from black neighborhoods is the only acceptable solution.
This new racial politics is not only coalescing around activists claiming to speak for urban blacks – represented publicly by groups like Black Lives Matter – but also is expressed in the writings of best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates. And Baltimore is once again center stage.
In his memoir, “The Beautiful Struggle,” Coates described how his father, a former Black Panther, drove his son around West Baltimore “telling me again the story of the black folks’ slide to ruin.” Whites had “plundered” what belonged to blacks, his father explained, as they had done with once-great African kingdoms.
Coates, who lived in fear of black street toughs as a teen, sees the police as a greater threat to black well-being than the drug “crews” and gangs roaming the streets of West Baltimore today. His vision, in part, is to free gang-ridden areas from the malign grip of white standards and aggressive policing. Coates has adopted his father’s view that “our condition, the worst of this country’s condition – poor, diseased, illiterate, crippled, dumb – was not just a tumor to be burrowed out but proof that the whole body was a tumor, that America was not a victim of a great rot but the rot itself.” Not even a hurricane of violence, says the new riot ideology, justifies a vigorous police presence in black localities.
The cops, complains Coates, “lord over” young black men with “the moral authority of a protection racket.” There is a touch of truth in this. But, Coates goes on, the problem with the police “is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.” The solution, he implies, is a black population released from the ideals of the American dream and from the “false morality” of white Americans.
A man, a city, a movement and a moment have met: Baltimore has, for the time being, been liberated from American morality. Let’s judge Coates’s vision on how that plays out.
This piece originally appeared in Orange County Register as an adaptation from City Journal's Autumn 2015 Issue
This piece originally appeared in Orange County Register