One month ago, riots erupted in Baltimore. There was no excuse for these riots. There was no excuse for the relentless violence and $9 million worth of damage that ensued.
However, there was and is no excuse for institutional racism, police brutality and racial profiling. And above all, there was no excuse for unlawfully taking the life of an individual with impunity, regardless of race.
Despite the media’s portrayal of Baltimore from both the fanatical right-wing and left-wing assessments, the riots and looting were not launched simply as collateral damage for the deplorable institutional racism that continues to plague this country today—six decades after the Civil Rights Movement. The scenes of police brutality and violent demonstration speak of much deeper causes—causes that are not exclusive to just Baltimore but apply to every impoverished urban area in America.
Through a combination of failed Democratic policies and the disastrous right-wing War on Drugs agenda, cities like Baltimore have witnessed a glaring division among the community, especially between black members and the police force, where institutional racism flourishes and probable cause is heavily neglected.
The roots of Baltimore’s discontent can be traced back to the 1960s, when a string of riots known as the “Long Hot Summers” erupted across the nation. These demonstrations resulted from the fact that African Americans had continuously been victimized by poor education, the unavailability of decent employment, slum conditions and excessive police brutality. Partially in response to these uprisings, the liberals, lead by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, passed a wave of domestic reforms known as the “Great Society,” with the overarching goals of eliminating poverty and racial injustice.
In order to accomplish these goals, the Democrats completely transformed the structure and purpose of government welfare. Instead of being a time-controlled program intended for widows, Social Security was converted to a comparably open-ended program that ignored whether or not a recipient ever acquired a job.
Furthermore, due to the tax restructuring of Social Security, marriage became discouraged, which inevitably lead to a rapid increase of minority single moms and fatherless black children around the country. Today, over 57 percent of black children in America are living absent their biological fathers, which only continues to fan the flames of the racial stereotypes that plague our communities today.
However, the disastrous “Great Society” policies are not solely to blame. In 1971, Republican President Richard Nixon declared a “War On Drugs.” He rapidly increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies, as well as ushered in measures such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants. This paved the way for the catastrophic Rockefeller Drug Laws, which essentially placed non-violent drug trafficking crimes on par with murder. These laws were racist, as they inordinately applied to victimized and underprivileged African-Americans. In these communities, probable cause has been destroyed by the drug war.
Unfortunately, the War On Drugs is still very prevalent today. Police officers are assigned to the poorest neighborhoods, and inevitably, encounters are violent, lives are lost, young men are taken to prison and the vicious cycle starts all over again.
For Baltimore and numerous other impoverished cities, the solutions to end these vicious cycles have revolved around increased government spending. In 1980, antipoverty spending exploded in Baltimore. Ever since, educational spending has been on a continual rise. This past year, Baltimore was ranked fourth in the country in educational spending per pupil at $16,578—52 percent higher than the national average.
However, more than a quarter of all high school students in Baltimore will not graduate this year. SAT scores are more than 100 points lower than the national average. Over the last 30 years since the spending programs were launched, poverty rates in Baltimore have barely decreased by 2 percent to the present-day rate of 24.8 percent. Our government has not taken responsibility for these horrendous and failed policies, and as a ramification, the people who have been most affected by these policies have been incited to riot, in hopes that our leaders will finally listen and act.
It would be wrong for me to declare that all federal efforts have been a failure because millions of individuals have benefited from programs like TANF and SNAP. Living standards have increased and burdens have been lifted for our nation’s poor.
Nevertheless, billions of dollars have been wasted on futile community experiments in an attempt to integrate the poor minority population into the mainstream economy.
Despite the realized benefits for millions of people, the cushion of government welfare has become so large that people are losing incentive to climb the economic ladder. With a lack of incentive, many generations of families become trapped in a life of poverty and government dependence, which only perpetuates the racism and bigoted stereotypes haunting our country.
Specifically in cities like Baltimore, the combination of misapplied benevolence from the federal government and unwarranted profiling, through the disastrous “War on Drugs” initiative, have trapped much of black America in a new economic plantation.
The answers to solving these entrenched problems and increasing upward mobility obviously do not rest on increased federal spending, and they obviously do not rest on a disproportionate increase of vigilantes and law enforcement.
Rather, the answers are rooted in the transformations of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home, the encouragement of individual responsibility, neighborhood accountability, visionary thinking and positive ambition. Whether here on campus at DU or on Capitol Hill, only through continuous, bipartisan dialogue and action will these solutions begin to manifest themselves.
