Monday on MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes,” Michael Eric Dyson said the riots in Baltimore that grew from initially peaceful protests over the death while in police custody of 25-year-old Freddie Gray are a result of the lack of an “equitable distribution” of capital.
Dyson, while discussing Jesse Jackson eulogy, noted Jackson alluded to these so-called forces.
“The forces of oppression that have besieged that urban terrain,” he said. “The fact the ways which the Baltimore ravens and Orioles, with their tax exempt status and being tremendous goodies to stay in the city. So you have the urban blight contrasted to the extraordinary capital for some people.”
He also noted the extraordinary rise of capital, but just not the equitable distribution of it.
“The great Martin Luther King, Jr., whose noble crusade of nonviolence, said riots are the language of the unheard,” Dyson said. “He said I refuse to condemn of what’s going on in the inner city of Watts and Detroit and many urban cities across America without also talking about the contrasting and broader landscape against which that violence is pitched. He talked about the American government in our case, I think we have to talk about state brutality, because police people are the most immediate emblems of the authority of the state to protect them or subvert them.”
“Many white Americans who feel protected when they see the police or hear the sirens coming, they don’t feel a sense of horror or terror,” he added. “They don’t feel like oh, my, my life may be ended. They don’t feel like when a cop stops them they will run. it seems irrational to others except for those of us that have been subjected to this arbitrary form of terror. So that forces us to come to grips with something that doesn’t happen until there’s violence.”
“Your cameras, our commentary would not be in Baltimore talking about the slow terror of expulsions from schools,” Dyson said. “The rising rates of lead poisoning. The export of jobs to places across the waters that have no ability to refuel and recycle that capital back here. So when you put all that together, it’s easy to point a of analysis and shoot them with the bullets of our condemnation instead of saying we have to together find a way out of this.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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