The Rhetorical use of Violence by Citizens: when the Stronger Fail to Recognize the Oppression of the Weaker.

The black community has been exploited, harmed, and even killed, in our streets by police for decades. In places like Baltimore, Maryland and, most memorably, Ferguson, Missouri, for instance, black Americans have experienced a range of abuses: from shake-downs by local governments and their increasingly militarized policing agents to routine incarcerations over inability to pay petty fines imposed by the state to even being gunned down by police. In fact, the DOJ, under AG Eric Holder, substantiated these abuses and more,

However, and quite remarkably, the black community has always been an incredibly law-abiding, civically driven people. They have readily fought in our wars and have defended and respected the institutions of this country, despite the horrendous history of hereditary racial servitude in which many of those institutions were born. 

They have also met the challenges of institutionalized white supremacy by utilizing the legal system to address the targeting of black people and the rampant racism that has plagued this country since before and long after the first Civil Rights Act of 1864 and the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation before it.

Leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and scores of others before and after have endeavored to use peaceful and legal means to promote racial equality and harmony and to rid this country once and for all of systemic racism. But more than 150 years later, black men and women are losing their lives in this country in record numbers at the hands of police as though the Civil War had never happened. 

Despite the hard work of many generations of African Americans up to the present and those from other communities, the sentiment that nothing has worked is beginning to take hold in the black community.  Many decades of complaints of abuse, discrimination, and even death in places like Baltimore and Ferguson have fallen on deaf ears, and the unconscionable and horrible treatment of a segment of our population has continued unabated. 

Violence has long been used as a way a weaker element in a society endeavors to communicate some idea or need to another, much stronger, often oppressive element in that society  This use of political violence by the weak, or non-state actors, to get the strong, usually a state, to listen or act or stop acting in some way when no other method has worked is precisely what is happening on US streets at the present.

This is how the weak equalize their position with that of the strong, especially in cases involving non-state actors against state actors. Since such individuals are almost always operating from a position of significant weakness with respect to the much stronger power, they may use violence as a means to equal the playing field and force a kind of rhetorical communication to take place.

In similar fashion, after the countless deaths of African American men in American streets over the course of decades, violence was employed as a means by which the weaker segment in society, ordinary citizens, communicated its political requirement that it be treated in a fair, equal manner by the more powerful state.  

It is clear, however, that the occurrences of such actions often result in massive tragedy and are therefore undesirable and unnecessary. For instance, a tremendous number of innocents lose their lives on our streets. We must do better, and doing so involves courage and honesty.

That way forward in this country must begin with coming together and beginning a serious dialogue about racism, the attitudes that keep it alive, and the state violence against citizens that protects that system. When citizens employ every legal method available to them to protect and serve them, and that system ignores them, allows them to be continuously victimized, then how can we be surprised when they take to the streets? Isn’t that the American way?