It’s tempting to look at Baltimore and think that this is an urban event, impacting the lives and futures of relatively few who are relatively insignificant. It’s convenient to think of a ‘riot’ as breakdown of civil society, but civil society broke down long ago. The streets of Baltimore are the parallel to Reagan’s fantasy view of America. They reflect a reality that in spite of the effort to hide and marginalize it won’t go away. It proves that no matter how much we try to argue otherwise, our collective fate must honor all those who are part of it, not just the few.
Freddie Gray wasn’t just murdered by the ‘depraved heart’ of the cop driving a police van; he was murdered by our collective ‘depraved heart.’ Reagan had a small view of America, one no more expansive than the wealth of his comfortable and intellectually limited circle of friends would allow.
His America is an America of fear: fear of each other, fear of change, and fear of our possibilities. Freddie Gray is merely its newest and most well known victim. There is no way out of Baltimore that doesn’t begin with rewriting the legacy of Ronald Reagan.
Let’s start at the top. The racism and police violence that killed Freddie Gray didn’t start with Ronald Reagan, but the governmental indifference to the poor and minorities that have militarized police departments and estranged members of the underclass in America did. Freddie Gray (and Michael Brown etc.) are the legacy of the conservatism of Reagan that stopped the civil rights movements of the 60s in their tracks and put us on the path that leads to the events in Baltimore. Freddie Gray was killed not for violating a statute or breaking a law but for not knowing his place.