Go home, David Simon. Without justice in Baltimore, there can be no peace
Version 0 of 1. No riot in the human history has ever been about just one person. What happened in London in 2011 wasn’t just about Mark Duggan; LA in 1991 wasn’t just about Rodney King; Paris in 2005 wasn’t just about Bouna Traoré or Zyed Benna. The events in Baltimore, clearly, aren’t just about Freddie Gray. They definitely don’t have anything to do with David Simon – or, at least they shouldn’t. On Monday, Simon – the acclaimed creator of The Wire – posted on his blog a short response to the riots and unrest in Baltimore in which he told those causing the trouble to “go home”, that they were derailing the progress made after Gray’s death and that they were “an affront to that man’s memory”. (Those were sentiments shared by Gray’s family.) Simon then added that “the anger and the selfishness and the brutality” needed to cease. It doesn’t get much more out of touch or tone deaf than a successful, white, middle-aged man telling disenfranchised young black people who are routinely victimised by the police to stop being angry and selfish after another young man was killed in police custody and his spine was almost severed. At worst it’s arrogant; at best terribly misguided. But whatever it is, it’s clearly the wrong message, at the wrong time, coming from the wrong person. Simon knows better than most that’s happening in Baltimore isn’t just a one-off, opportunistic smash and grab. As Ta-Nehisi Coates, another Baltimore son, wrote: “Wisdom isn’t the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the rioters themselves.” Coates is referring to the egregious use of undue force by the Baltimore police that forced the city to pay $5.7m to people assaulted by police officers since 2011. When officials talk about thugs, they should look closer to home: the “anger and the selfishness and the brutality” that Simon should have been criticising is that which has been coming from the Baltimore Police Department for years, not strictly that seen on the streets last night. To tell people to go home – and, by extension, trust the same officials who oversee institutions that have consistently failed Baltimore’s black residents – just does not cut it as a response from the man whose acclaimed television series depicted precisely those failing, culpable institutions, no matter how horrendous the scenes shown on television were. At the Gray funeral on Monday, Jamal Bryant had repeated the chant “No justice, no peace”. There was a palpable anger at not only what happened to Freddie Gray, but what’s been going on across America for decades. No one can challenge what Simon achieved with the Wire: beyond even the hype, it remains an incredible achievement that forced issues about which no one was talking to the front and center of American public life and changed the way many people think about the so-called “war on drugs”. But you could say the same about Richard Price’s ability to capture the fraught police/criminal relationship in Clockers, or Elmore Leonard’s understanding of the criminal underbelly, and neither of them adopted the same holier-than-thou, I-speak-for-this-city approach Simon does. Simon is no longer just a journalist or a writer: he’s become a de facto translator for middle class audiences looking to understand elements of black America. When Richard Price was asked about the Eric Garner case recently he said: “It is the sort of dilemma that would make me want to write a novel the size of a barbell”. He didn’t offer his thoughts on how to end deaths in police custody; he saw his position clearly as an author. We need David Simon the writer to, through drama and writing, present something so powerful and moving that it changes the way we think about an entire city or issue. But David Simon the social commentator? To use his own words: Turn around. Go home. Please. |