Journal Entry #6
April 29, 2015
Last night, while cooling off after a late evening Muay Thai class, thoroughly exhausted both physically and mentally yet with too much adrenaline left in my system to sleep, I found myself perusing through videos of the Baltimore riots. Although I had read newspaper articles on the subject earlier that morning, seeing the raw chaos and violence unfold from the perspective of the people who witnessed it took on a quality altogether different than reading intellectualized accounts.
The first video I found was filmed from the perspective of a group of white people taking shelter inside a bar. At first a few of them were standing outside, possibly because they didn’t anticipate what was to come or they wanted to catch the event on video. The rioters began hurling open bins full of garbage at them, and two of which hit women in the group near the person filming. The assailants may have targeted the women intentionally, either anticipating that they would react more slowly to the projectiles or to deliberately antagonize the men they were with. One of the larger thugs came over to the group near the person filming and punched a bystander in the face several times before running back to the group of rioters. Those that chose to fight back got caught up in a huge brawl and from the video it is unclear what happened to them.
After a draining bout of kickboxing, my first reaction in as I took this all in wasn’t anger. I found myself imagining what it would be like to be thrust into a situation like that. I started to envision what the best strategies would be to remain safe, and which self-defense measures would be most effective. Reacting to the violence with more violence would most likely not have a good outcome, but it would be hard to stand idly by and watch as others were hurt without stepping in to defend them. The violence simply rolled through the streets like a surging wave, welling up suddenly like a flash flood that threatened to overtake anyone in its path. To reverse the course of the riot or assert control over it seemed like more than any one person could have accomplished. Another video showed a huge black man with his arms outstretched, forming a barrier between the police and protesters to discourage violence. This struck me as incredibly brave. Finally, I watched as a news reporter interviewed one rioter as others slashed a fire hose to disrupt firefighter’s efforts to control a fire inside a CVS that was set by arsonists after looting it.
I went to sleep disturbed by what I had seen, so over breakfast I sent Sweeney, my girlfriend, a link to a NY Times article reporting on the the effects and aftermath of the event in order to discuss it with her and hear her opinion. It was my favorite of the articles I had read on the issue. The article includes an interview with an African American social reformer in Baltimore, who watched dumbfounded as a multimillion dollar housing project for senior citizens he had worked on for years was burned to the ground. The article also describes the difficulties that government officials have had in getting any corporations to invest in the troubled neighborhoods prior to the riots, with specific reference to the CVS that was destroyed.
Sweeney responded that the article doesn’t explore the perspective of the rioters, so I sent her the video of the fire hose slashing which includes a man hiding his face as he rants to the reporter; quite possibly to distract the news camera as the other rioters converged on the hose.
As disturbed as I was by the videos, that feeling was compounded by the film The Sorrow and the Pity, which we finished in class today. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the story was not enriched in any way by including the interviews of men who had been high up in the Nazi military during WWII. Neither of them were apologetic about their role in the war, and I have trouble buying into any rationalization they may employ as for what motivated their involvement or their knowledge of the full scope of the evil of the Nazi party. I was also put off by the way they chose to end the film., It went into a detailed portrayal of the injustices committed after the war and the innocent people that were condemned by the French after they were liberated from Nazi control. Although the scale and scope of the injustice that went on after the war differed drastically from what went on during the occupation, the film spends a good deal of time delving into it and ends on that note, as if to insinuate that everyone was guilty of some form of inhumanity not just the Nazis. The documentary went so far as to include at the end a former Nazi recounting his woeful tale of being spit on after the war ended.
The ending of The Sorrow and The Pity reminds me in a way of the Mel Gibson movie Apocalypto. The whole movie is about the persecution of one small tribe by the Mayan Empire. The movie ends with the tribes spotting Spanish ships on the horizon for the first time, and is suggestive enough that the viewer may question “Well, if that’s how the tribes treated each other before the Spanish arrived, and then was the process of colonization really that bad? Maybe that’s just the way their history is.” This is along the same lines of people saying “the Africans were enslaving each other before Europeans even got there.” To me, the documentary is making a deliberate statement by focusing so much on the way that political prisoners were treated post liberation at the hands of their own people instead of the Nazis. It is as if to say “it’s not just the Nazis who were criminals. Atrocities were committed on all sides and no one is completely innocent. You can’t judge the Nazis for what they did”
Both the documentary we watched in class and the news reports from the riots in Baltimore made me question, what exactly is the value of a narrative? When telling a story, are some narratives and perspectives more valuable than others? When crimes and atrocities are committed that have implications greater than the individual perpetrators, is the best way to get a balanced view of both sides really to include their narrative? Although rioters in Baltimore may have committed petty crimes, or in some cases felonies and more serious crimes, to me this doesn’t put them on the same level as the atrocities, genocide, and crimes against humanity of the Nazis, however parallels do exist in the way that their story is told and the sense that the individuals committing the crimes stand for something larger than themselves.
There are many arguments that can explain the side of the rioters and make their cause relatable. The social reformer who was quoted in the NY Times makes the case that the acts were a senseless reaction resulting from underserved and underprivileged youth who, filled with anger, didn’t realize the repercussions of their actions. Statistics can also reveal that the areas affected the most are home to a populace that is generally not well educated. Hearing the explanations in that article, it isn’t hard to relate to the justifiable anger of the youth there. As a teenager I could imagine myself protesting or rioting with no thought of consequences, and I didn’t have half the problems that the youth in those communities are faced with. When the argument is correctly framed, the action of those rioters is compelling in a sense. It has actually caused me to put more thought into the specific ways in which members of those communities are disenfranchised, and issues of racial inequality, than I otherwise would have. The problem is that by interviewing the rioters themselves, you get none of those kinds of answers. Just a spout of reactionary hatefulness from the mouths of those who are too ignorant to realize that their actions are hurting themselves and their community just as they are damaging the livelihood of the targets of their random aggression. We know what their motivations are. We don’t need to hear it directly from the perpetrators of the crimes. Their opinion is not likely to build a productive dialogue or have any real value. It is better to understand their perspective in other ways. Similarly, I think it is more productive to learn the intricacies of what really made the Nazi’s tick by taking a sociological or psychological approach. For example studying the impact on the Nazis of the propaganda they were exposed to, or to gain an understanding of the underlying social or historical forces that were at work. I fail to see what can be gained by focusing on the smug reminiscing and contrived excuses or people who took part in atrocities under the banner of a genocidal regime. The narrative of a crime’s perpetrator isn’t necessarily the best way to put their actions into context.