The right's response to the riots in Baltimore shows how riots can seize the attention of those who otherwise can't be bothered.
Cross posted from Pruning Shears.
This week there's been a lot of conservatives speaking out against the rioting in Baltimore; Susan of Texas picked apart Megan McArdle's entry for just one example. They all say basically the same thing though, and in any event they aren't as interesting for their text as their subtext.
Rioting like that in Baltimore - in minority neighborhoods, typically sparked by some kind of injustice - inspires the right to denounce it without qualification. It's always wrong and never achieves anything - or does so at too high a cost. Of course, rioting isn't always wrong in their eyes. When it's done in response to, say, a sporting event then the rioters are described euphemistically as fans or some such thing. (Cf. how white suspects get yearbook photos and are called wrestlers, black suspects get mug shots and are called, well, suspects.)
In certain special circumstances - such as when America launches a war of aggression, annihilates a country's political infrastructure, and stands by as a state of nature emerges - rioting can even be a totally, completely understandable reaction by people who have suffered decades of injustice. Given the right situation conservatives will start talking like the worst kind of equivocating, lily-livered bleeding heart liberals. So it's good to keep the right's moral relativism in mind when reading their absolutist tone. What we've had this week has just been the wrong kind of rioting.
Even more interesting, their claim that rioting doesn't accomplish anything is contradicted by the very fact that the commentary has been written. The right covered neither the Freddie Gray story nor the initial protests. It wasn't until rioting broke out that they began to pay attention. It's as though a black man having his spine mostly severed for looking at the police wrong was not sufficiently unjust for them to write about.
Nor did it prompt them to connect it to anything that might be traced back a few years, or, you know, a century or more. To be fair, they aren't alone in this. National media tends to ignore festering but urgent issues, shine a spotlight when things start catching on fire, then go back to more, um, important issues when it's over. The fact that CNN was more interested in the Village's annual circle jerk than in the rapidly escalating situation in Baltimore is proof of the former. That more Pulitzers were awarded for Politifact's 2014 lie of the year than for the unrest in Ferguson is proof of the latter.
Still, it's very striking that the right doesn't pay any attention to the brutal oppression many cities live under unless there is a riot, because that is a great illustration of why rioting is a considered, rational response in Baltimore. If conservative media was consistent either way - ignoring those communities all the time, even during riots; or focusing on them during both calm and turbulence - then they could credibly say rioting wouldn't help anything at least as far as they themselves were concerned. If they could say: we're ignoring you either way or paying attention either way, then it makes sense to say rioting won't produce any good result.
But to do what they're doing now sends the opposite message. We won't pay attention unless you riot. Sure, it will be critical coverage, but readers will need context. Freddie Gray's name is now very well known across the political spectrum. He's been mentioned by pundits that would not have done so otherwise. Sure, it's in the context of condemning the violence that followed or, in Brooks' case, the service of a threadbare narrative about the breakdown of norms (for God's sake David, just stuff all those insights into a diary and make it a book when it hits 300 pages). But people now know what happened to Freddie Gray. They didn't until there were riots in Baltimore.
Functionally, that means rioting works. It causes political and media elites that otherwise ignore the issue of community policing to pay attention, if briefly. Would you like to know how these elites will make their own little contribution to the next riot? By ceasing to pay attention once the trial ends, by treating it like a Law and Order episode that runs credits once the verdict is read, by reporting on it in a vacuum, each new story an isolated event that somehow never forms a pattern. That's part of what sets the stage for the next riot. It's why the current one worked and was effective, it's why it made a relevant political point, and it's why the next one will too.
It doesn't have to be that way, of course. But the alternative - sustained attention and confronting the systemic evil that causes these conditions to persist generation after generation - is too hateful for us to collectively contemplate. So riots it is then, now and going forward.