Photo via Twitter
Paying attention to mainstream media’s take on police killings and the protests that followed over the past year has been a sobering affair. It has reinforced to me that the effort spent manufacturing our perfectly contrived American worldview has paid off for those who’ve been carving it. Here we were being sold anew on the idea that the recent public outcries, triggered by severe police brutality, are in fact a byproduct of the tainted moral core of black people ("Whyyy are they destroying their ownneighborhoods, I just can’t understand it"). During the Baltimore riots, the black representatives of the city were marched out before us to recite respectability talking points. Any attempts to give the incidents surrounding the murder of Freddie Gray a context within America’s long history of race division were dismissed in lieu of victim blaming. America’s ego insisted that we are now, magically, "better than that". We’ve climbed that hill already; we solved this old-world ill when Obama was sworn in as chancellor of white people’s America. Cool? Cool.
The fight against racism has many fronts. What that means for me, personally, is hard to say—I am embroiled in my own network of poverty traps that I barely understand. But with public opinion on matters of race being so heavily curated by the media, it can be empowering to resist the dominant political theatre and seek an informed overview. It is the first step in converting ideology into practice. From that vantage point, a thought experiment emerges: What if black people could acknowledge this sustained crisis with a new kind of unified action against white supremacy? Seeing as that we have been locked into this permanent labor class, imagine if we responded like a labor force, and answered it with a strike. Imagine a strike within the fields where we are most visible, where we generate a shit load of money and where we assert the most influence—music, dance, film, design—colored people could refuse to be complicit in a multilayered, denial/exploitation machine that serves pockets of wealth both founded and sustained by the ownership and oppression of blacks. With that cultural H-bomb of a hypothetical in mind, let’s take a brief jaunt down History Lane to explore my reasoning.
The truth is that race hierarchies designed centuries ago still define all of our sharply segregated U.S. cities. Baltimore’s history with upending black lives along with the citizenry’s record for responding with unrest shouldn’t surprise anyone—and the story is hardly limited to Baltimore. The city’s character has been defined by neglect. Rather than using 2015 as a better-late-than-never moment to start unpacking the causes for the state-sponsored abuse at play in black ghetto realities, our media and our leaders instead offer empty promises and oversimplifications at best, judgement, condescension and dismissal at worst. But residents know this uprising is consistent with Baltimore’s history.
The city’s economic peril is firmly rooted in its history of segregated housing policy during all of the 1900s. Policies that allowed the working class to build equity through the The New Deal established the just labor laws through The Fair Labor Standard act, and gave shape to an American democracy in the 1930s that only pertained to white citizens and their wealth building, leaving blacks explicitly out of the flow of resources and uniquely vulnerable. With no chances of building equity in the '30s, low-income month-to-month housing in the form of "contract sales" became commonplace for black families and central in cementing the ghettos that still remain. The Housing Authority of Baltimore City specifically designed substandard separate housing programs to stop black encroachment, reinforcing The New Deal's exclusionary zoning provisions. 'Slum clearance' and Urban Renewal laws would go further to designate a tight network of black slums in the form of high-rise projects around the downtown area through the '50s. The ghettos that arose from the multilayered segregation shaped harsh economic realities for blacks in Baltimore coming into the '60s.
By the 1970s, with most of these longstanding policies going unchallenged by weak reform, the largely black populace of Baltimore enjoyed a specifically substandard mode of living. The disappearance of the industrial powerhouses that made Baltimore the center of Maryland’s economy and attracted black job seekers fleeing the Jim Crow laws of the South leveled the standard of living for blacks substantially. This eventually gave way to widespread predatory lending, symptomatic of the housing crisis from the past 30 years, resulting in unprecedented foreclosures and the sea of abandoned buildings clustered in mostly black neighborhoods today. From that sustained low tier of urban life going unchallenged by and large, as though it were an inevitability instead of an engineered crime against humanity, a battery of new traumas amassed all through black life in Northern cities.
These conditions gave way to prohibited economies and in cities like New York also birthed a cultural fission known as hip-hop in the '70s. Bronx youth pieced together beat-driven loops from record collections, rapped chants and boastful stories, rendered electricity from street lamps and formed alliances all in service of these inspired safe havens where bliss was possible within the urban decay. By now we know that extreme poverty and general hopelessness suggests criminality under our law’s hawkish watch. Within that twisted logic, hip-hop was the cultural sludge oozing from the hotbed of black rage, portrayed as a language of criminality. Society clung to the broken windows theory and state-sponsored use of force worked, in congress, with the terrifying cultural stigmas attached to blackness. Rolling back gains from the Black power zeitgeist aimed at some of the white American wealth building mandates we haven’t found the political will to correct.
So, how does this fear of the encroaching "minority" menace in America continue to ring relevant in 2015? During the recent Baltimore uprising, network news anchors were drooling over property damage, leading questions with calls for subdued black voices, and reinforcing the Otherness of these black youth to no end. The current state of neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester and Harlem Park in West Baltimore (where Freddie Gray was murdered and the disparity between the life expectancy of whites who live north of slums in West Baltimore and the blacks trapped in the worst slums is 19 years) reflect these century-old policies in the depth of their complete removal from the white economy. Conservative agendas are appeals to power, and seeing them used to describe Baltimore’s cry for justice sends a clear message. The powers that be see a deviation from the norm of black ghettos in our social order as a threat to their balance sheet, proving that economics should never leave the platform when attacking our traditional race hierarchies.
For me, the thought experiment of an art strike conjures dreams of what could happen if Black Art and Black Wealth was harnessed against white supremacy, not for it. Artistic black labor has particular cultural and economic resonance and obscuring the origin of these arts goes a long way in disallowing the very concept of black ownership. And because we self-identify as the low-tier worker class that America always insisted we be, income trumps macro issues. Individual wealth draws us away from this collective need for a systemic overhaul. American arts, forged in the simultaneous scorn and commodification of the black experience, serve media corporations that cement white wealth. Reclaiming our cultural givens as Black American Artists creates our equity. Would it be enough to carve out a wealth-base for those owners of capital rooted in a specific, hard-fought cultural birthright? I’d say that answer is above my pay grade but that’s kind of the point. The root of the black identity is a contrivance born out of torture. New Americans need options to combat modern systemic extensions of this brilliant, ongoing heist, not enabling them. These imaginings may sound radical to some but an objective assessment of general black living is kind of radical.
But we are the great assimilators. We are the New Blacks (thank you, Pharrell), who socially engineered our conception of wealth around our bountiful labor and purchasing power, worshipping the wealthy exceptions amongst us. We remain steeped in denial over the societal tools that keep our worlds inferior to those of our white counterparts. Capitalism thrives off of scattering collective power and discouraging the poor from meaningfully organizing, lest they achieve a representative voice in the political process, we know this. So we should be wary of what prejudices are being summoned when blacks are deemed to be thugs, and what systems those prejudices are holding in place.
Arresting or extra-judicially murdering dudes for running from police keeps the threshold for justice unbelievably low. All of these seemingly isolated black problems are parallel to and endemic of the imperialism that the U.S. enforces globally in its quest for securing its economic interests. So when our most marginalized young people buckle under the pressures built into their ghettos, and our eyes are averted from the ruin defining their community, we are watching those interests assault our sense of justice. We are watching piles of money informing morality. And that’s some dangerous shit.
Regan Farquhar is a rapper and producer who goes by Busdriver. His latest album, Perfect Hair, came out last year. He can be found on Twitter @busdriverr.