By Sikivu Hutchinson
“Thugs”—that was virtually the first word the world heard
out of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s pedigreed mouth during her press conference on the uprising
against state violence and the death of 25 year-old Freddie
Gray in police custody. Facing intense backlash,
Rawlings-Blake tempered her comments at a black church where, fittingly,
disgraced and/or contrite members of the black political elite often go for
redemption. The epithet “Thugs”, as it’s
been pointed out numerous times, is a word that has an egregiously racial/black
association. While there are corporate
thugs, police thugs, suburban thugs, crown thug oligarchs and imperialist thugs
(historian Michael Parenti aptly dubbed
George W. Bush the “biggest thug to occupy the White House”) the term is mainly
trotted out in the mainstream when black youth are involved; conjuring up titillating neo Birth of a Nation scenes of ghetto chaos, criminality and macho swagger. “Thugs” was law enforcement’s slur du jour in
the aftermath of the Los Angeles uprising following the Rodney King Beating
verdict in 1992. The Baltimore uprising
coincided with the twenty third anniversary of civil unrest in L.A. There has been little improvement in the
socioeconomic climate of South Los Angeles where much of the rebellion was
focused. The current
jobs’ climate in South L.A. is bleaker than in ‘92 when the region was reeling
from the decline of the aerospace industry and the region leads in the number
of incarcerated youth. Similarly, the decline
of the shipping and manufacturing industries in Baltimore has gutted black
incomes. Despite being in the majority, African
Americans in Baltimore make approximately half the income of whites and the
unemployment rates of black males are over three times that of white males.
Poor black youth in the city have high rates
of exposure to violence, homicide and sexual assault and suffer from all of the
mental and emotional health traumas associated with these disparities.
But there was no reference to these
institutional factors in the mayor’s comments.
There was no indictment of the thuggery inherent to the apparatus of state
violence and racialized wealth inequality that Baltimore’s black political
elite have cosigned. While condemning
her constituents lawlessness, there was no recognition of her complicity in or
accountability for the abysmal state of socioeconomic and educational
underdevelopment that’s festered on her watch. As one Baltimore resident “sitting on the
steps of a boarded-up brick row house” stated
acidly, “We ain’t talking about color.” Masters of expediency, bourgie
disconnected system-identified black liberals are always comfortable
trafficking in the slurs and platitudes of up-by-your-bootstraps reactionaries. Desperately grasping at the reins of power,
Negro politicians have always been adept at regurgitating the ruling class’ language
in order to deflect from their own record of neglect, disservice or outright
dereliction.
The dire poverty and segregation of
Baltimore may be in the national spotlight now but the real question is what will
conditions in the city be like for disenfranchised black residents in a decade when
the cameras have gone away, the furor has died down, Rawlings-Blake has moved
up the political food chain and her “liberal” colleagues, Negro or otherwise,
have become more savvy with their demonizing terms of choice.
Twitter @sikivuhutch
