The Counterpublic Papers vol. 3 no. 9

Sonja Sohn (best known for her role as Officer Kima Greggs on “The Wire”) has made Baltimore her home since "The Wire" ended. She started a non-profit soon after the show shut down and between gigs has been a Baltimore staple. Over the past couple of years she’s been working on a documentary about the Baltimore Uprising and its aftermath. Baltimore Rising premiered last week, and I finally got a chance to watch it last night. It’s only an hour and a half long, and there’s so much going on in Baltimore that it can be hard to contain it all, but the essence of her narrative trots out a number of older and problematic stories about urban and black life, and misses the opportunity to be more critical.

So remember last week when I wrote about the officer who was murdered? Victim #309 this year? Not a half hour after I sent the newsletter out, I get word that he was supposed to testify against an elite squad of police officers indicted for corruption. Though I’m not normally one for conspiracy theories, the Baltimore Police Department has a long history of corruption, long enough that when I got word and thought about the way the police put the neighborhood on lockdown and went door to door looking for information, it began to remind me of a larger scale version of the Carol Stuart murder.

This history doesn’t appear anywhere in Sohn’s narrative. We do know that in 1974 the Maryland General Assembly passed one of the first police officer bill of rights bills in the country—a bill giving police officers far more rights to defend themselves than regular citizens. (We don’t know the context in which this bill occurs—why 1974?) And we actually see Tawanda Jones during a West Wednesday protest—Jones’ brother Tyrone West was killed in an encounter with police and has been protesting his death for approximately 225 weeks straight (week 208 here)—but the viewer doesn’t know who she is, nor why she’s protesting.

Instead, we get stories about individual police officers and their attempts to work for the community.

Baltimore is the first city in the country to pass segregation laws. Take a look at this map.Then this one.If you’ve been a long time reader or live in Baltimore you’ve probably become familiar with these maps over the past few years. The first is Baltimore’s redlining map, created when the government got into the mortgage business. The second is a more recent map spatially plotting a range of Baltimore social ills. Notice the overlap?

This is the type of thing Sohn could’ve covered in the Title Sequence, but didn’t. 

Which opens the door for "common sense". Sohn interviews Gray’s lawyer, civil rights attorney Billy Murphy. Now Billy Murphy is one of the best lawyers in the city, and probably the country. A long history of civil rights activism.

But to hear him tell it, Baltimore’s black community had a perfectly decent relationship with Baltimore’s police in the fifties, when people knew one another, we had a number of black businesses in the same neighborhood, and officers walked the beat rather than travelled it in patrol cars.

No.

Besides being empirically wrong—read Matthew Crenson’s new book about Baltimore if you want a richer account—it’s politically problematic.

Because Baltimore’s so small I know most of the people involved…but the one person I don’t think I’ve ever seen before is Shadow, a former gang member and social worker. Shadow has a day job—he’s a social worker. But in the aftermath of the uprising he spent as much time working with gang members as he did on his paid gig. To hear Shadow tell it the best way to deal with the problems facing Baltimore is three fold….jobs, more fathers, and more police-citizen engagement. He has more than one deeply personal and emotional encounter with police commissioner davis, telling davis about generations of kids born without fathers and the effect it has on them. If you think that Gray was killed because police didn’t really know him well enough, then you’re going to think that the solution is getting police and citizens together more often. If you think the Gray was killed because he was unemployed and fatherless, then you’re going to think the solution is more jobs and more dads.

Councilperson Carl Stokes is interviewed at the very beginning…he talks about giving a national journalist a walking tour of the city. The journalist, seeing all of the boarded up buildings, notes to Stokes that the riots “really tore up the city.” Stokes corrects the journalist. “Look again, look at the boards on those homes do they look like they were tacked up yesterday? No they’ve been there twenty years, maybe longer….”

Sohn never comes back to this moment. Never builds on it.

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So after I watched the uprising documentary on Youtube it pointed me to an Omar Supercut—a 2.75 hour “movie” splicing together all of the scenes in The Wire featuring Omar.

If you’ve already watched The Wire it’s worth seeing, because the “director” if you’d call him/her/they that did an excellent job, it really does look like an entire movie on its own.

At about an hour in, Omar has a conversation with Detective William “Bunk” Moreland. Turns out Omar and Bunk went to the same high school (Edmondson), only Bunk was a bit older. To hear Bunk tell it, he was this close to following the type of life Omar followed, but the gangsters in an example of “tough love” pushed him in another direction. To Bunk, Omar represented a way of life that was so much more nihilistic and soul sucking than the way of life they both grew up in. In Bunk’s day, for example, people would fight with their fists rather than with sawed off shotguns. The encounter ends up affecting Omar—who even given his “occupation” has a pretty rigid moral code—significantly. Now this scene occurs because David Simon needs the relationship between Omar and Bunk for certain reasons later on in the series….but it also reflects Simon’s own thinking about what’s going on Baltimore and other cities like it. Based on the age of the actors Bunk and Omar are three to six years older than I am, which means that the period they’re talking about is the mid eighties. In 1984, the year Bunk probably graduated from high school there were 215 homicides in Baltimore, when it had a population of 767,536, translating into a victim rate of 27.3/100,000. Here’s a link of Baltimore murders over time beginning in 1992. In 1993 the rate was something like 48 homicides per 100,000 residents while in 2015 the rate is something like 55 homicides per 100,000 residents. Unlike even I believed, this is a pretty significant change, statistically and substantially. But where does it come from? For Bunk it comes from culture, from a set of cultural norms that have atrophied over time. Gangsters used to use their hands, now they don’t. Gangsters used to not wage war on a Sunday, now they don’t care. Gangsters used to not sell drugs to kids. Now they don’t care. Etc. Etc. All these things may very well be true.

But are they causes or are they politically produced consequences? Baltimore’s turned over 40 recreation centers over to private hands, and many of these have shut down. They’ve spent over $1 billion on subsidies to the two major sports stadiums and the new Under Armour development alone. What’s the effect of these political decisions, combined with the continued legacy of housing and neighborhood discrimination, on these dynamics?

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A documentary like this usually requires a few individuals to serve as anchors. Along with a couple of police officers and Shadow, Sohn looks a few Baltimore activists, focusing on Makayla Gilliam-Price (a high schooler at the time of the filming), Dayvon Love and Adam Jackson (two of the leaders/founders of Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle), and Kwame Rose (disclosure—again, Baltimore’s small…I know Gilliam-Price, Love, and Jackson personally. Oh. Sohn too.).

In contrast to the others, the activists understand that what happened to Freddie Gray was a political act. Long before the encounter between Gray and the police, Jackson and Love had been working on the police officer’s bill of rights, while Rose and Gilliam were both radicalized by Gray’s murder. Sohn’s right to spend at least some time focusing on them, but their understanding of the fundamental causes, consequences, solutions are limited as well. In focusing solely on them, Sohn reproduces an analysis that suggests that Gray’s death was solely a function of his race.

Which again is empirically wrong, and is politically problematic—Gray was killed because he lived in the neighborhood that is more surveilled by police than any other neighborhood and is the poorest neighborhood in the city. The racial analysis enables Gilliam, Rose, Love and Jackson to stand in for larger communities of black people—as a result Sohn doesn’t need to hear from anyone in Sandton-Winchester (there are only two or three brief interviews with Gray’s family members), we don’t need to actually get a sense of what they want as residents, and none of the activists thinks a disjunct exists between them and the residents they fight for because of class differences. Juxtaposing the activists against people like Shadow generates a bit of political tension—neither Jackson or Love would likely be caught dead trying to meet with the Commissioner to make sure another uprising doesn’t happen, while Shadow is willing to do so if it means the gang members he knows can get jobs and be saved from surveillance—but Sohn treats all of them as symbolic stand-ins rather than individuals with specific interests that may or may not coincide with those of the people they really want to work for.

Sohn effectively captures what could be called micro-political tension—when Rose is arrested and has to raise money for his own trial no organization is there to help him, Gilliam’s family briefly questions her decision to postpone college for a year—but Sohn doesn’t effectively wrestle with larger political questions. If Rose were a part of an organization for example, it’s possible he wouldn’t have had to raise money on his own.   

Sohn’s documentary won’t be the last word on this. There will be others. I hope they are able to combine Sohn’s eye for shots, with more critical commentary.

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(Ony have way through but She’s Gotta Have it 2017>She’s Gotta Have It 1986)

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(I know, I just sent one out….last wednesday maybe?)

See you next week.