When the editors of City Paper told me that my column should be about what’s happening in Baltimore, about Freddie Gray, about the protests, I wondered how they could imagine I could write about anything else. I’ve been writing about what I’ve been seeing over at my personal blog because I’m a writer, and the only way I know to make sense of what I see, feel, think is to write.
And then there's the round of well-earned chiding, the reminders not to forget the context for the uprising (see what I did there, that switch from riot to uprising? I could write another column just about that). Here comes the rush of pieces detailing the historical roots of disinvestment from West Baltimore, the ways urban renewal—or "negro removal," as James Baldwin would have it—produced the wealth of the Inner Harbor via appropriation from the very people and neighborhoods it now blames for all the city's ills. You steal from the poor to give to the rich, and here are the chickens, coming home to roost. This is capitalism working like it's supposed to, and if we don't hang on to the critical analysis in this moment, it'll go right back to that work as soon as the shut down stops shutting things down.
There are also the conflicting takes on the militarization of Baltimore. There are those voices crying out for more National Guard sooner, more police more places. And it isn't just the cop-loving flag wavers making this call—many have decried the lack of police protection in the very neighborhoods whose over-policing some blame for the death of Freddie Gray and the mass incarceration of black men from West Baltimore for allowing them to burn. Why are all the Humvees in the bike lane around the Inner Harbor and ringing Harbor East when people are being shot over on Monroe? Others want the military out of the city, NOW. Know what incites a riot? Riot gear. It's called interpellation—you hail me as a rioter, and I become one. Still others are there to remind us that the National Guard will leave, but it will leave behind a police state that we've become disturbingly comfortable having, persistent in the idea that it'll keep us safe, all evidence to the contrary.
So much writing, so many trying to make sense of what is happening even as the sense-making is, in many ways, what is happening, and so few frames being slap-dashed on, recycled from the last cycle of this. I'm trying to think of what I might write about in this column, but it feels like so much has been written already, so many takes have been taken, so many of us are hustling to have our words be the ones you read, the ones that do the sense-making for all of us, that perhaps what I should do is just shut up for a minute, be patient, get outside, do some listening and talking with people live and in person, and learn to tolerate the discomfort that comes with not knowing what's happening right now and not having much to say about it just yet.
