In the early months of 2011 what soon became known as the Arab Spring arrived from Tunisia to Egypt, to Cairo, to Tahrir Square. And what did its arrival bring? It brought street protests of a rather heterogeneous nature. There was a small but telegenic cadre of idealist youth demanding a new politics, if not a specifically democratic politics. There were legions of Muslim Brotherhood foot soldiers demanding sharia law. There were smatterings of ordinary Cairenes who saw an opportunity, perhaps, to drive the rentier military-bureaucratic regime from power. There were criminals who took the opportunity to loot stores, burgle homes, set diversionary fires, and raise maximum feasible hell—and in reaction neighborhood groups formed and took to the streets to protect their property. And what one grievance did all these otherwise disparate groups share in common? An exasperation with, mounting in many cases to an outright hatred toward, the police—an arrogant, brutal, unaccountable, and, above all, parasitically extractive plague on Egyptian society.
Any of this sound familiar? Maybe a little like an arrival from Ferguson via Cleveland and Staten Island and North Charleston, South Carolina, maybe with a Baltimore accent? Heterogeneous street protests? Check. Idealists present? Check. Organizations with their own agendas present? Check. Ordinary fed-up citizens present? Check. Criminals and looters? Check. Diversionary fires? Check. Property owners patrolling their own property and stores? Check. And a deep-seated, long-simmering disdain for the police? Check, check, and triple check.
The American media, and with them probably most causal American viewers of what was going on in Cairo, Tunis, and elsewhere in the region in those heady days, could not find the police. They left their posts for the most part, and for good self-protective reasons. In their absence most Americans, projecting their own mental/historical frameworks onto others, thought they saw a democracy movement. They thought they were seeing the equivalent of “people power” as in the Philippines some years earlier. They thought that the “Arab Spring” was a harbinger of a democratic dawn. They thought that the resignation of Hosni Mubarak was tantamount to a revolution and to “regime change.”
None of this was true, of course. This irrational exuberance, born of Americans’ lowest-common-denominator Enlightenment naivety—and a louder repeat of early expectations about the so-called Color Revolutions in places like George and, yes, Ukraine—soon began to give way to a sobering reality. Except perhaps in Tunisia, nothing is better and most things are much worse for ordinary people in Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere. Already weak state structures in the Arab world have been shattered by the “Arab Spring.” Several societies have already dissolved into Hobbesian chaos. Some fearful states have been pushed to self-destructive forms of self-help. Stronger neighbors have seen their ambitions of regional hegemony stoked.
Americans were chumps to see the early evocations of the Arab Spring in a positive light. As Don Marquis once had Archie say, “An optimist is a guy without much experience.” But I’ll take an optimistic American chump any day over a standard-issue, more experienced European cynic.
So what do the American media, and most Americans with them, think really happened in Baltimore last week? Are Americans optimistic chumps when it comes to Baltimore, cynics, or something else again? Of course the situations—Cairo then, Baltimore now—are not really analogous except superficially. Besides, Americans are voyeurs when it comes to the Arabs, but Baltimore is us. We can afford the indulgent luxury of baseless optimism when it comes to Egypt or Syria or Yemen. If we’re optimistic about Baltimore, we’re bound to expect a happy ending that logic, no matter how we twist and turn it, cannot readily predict. We should have had the reality of Baltimore in mind when we were thinking about Cairo in spring 2011, and we should have the reality of Cairo in mind now when we think about Baltimore.
Again, not that the situations are really analogous. But it doesn’t do any harm to compare them out loud.
The government of Egypt is composed of Egyptians, and of Egyptians who are not starkly different in terms of class or creed from ordinary citizens. Yet these Egyptians do not know how to provide adequate education, jobs, health care, or decent housing for large numbers of citizens. They do not know how to balance the budget or curb corruption or pay for the pension obligations they have amassed. Above all, they do not know how to create a sense of confidence, loyalty, and community between those who govern and those who are governed despite at least rudimentary forms of accountability. And they do not know how to control the police.
The municipal government of Baltimore is composed of normal people from Baltimore, and both the present and previous democratically elected Mayors of the city are black women. Three of the past four Mayors have been black. Much of the city council and school board is composed of black members, too—as is about 40 percent of the police force. Yet these leaders do not know how to deliver quality education to the children of the city, especially those from poorer families. They don’t know how to deal with anxiety-ridden children growing up without a father, amid neighborhoods infested with gangs. They don’t know how to provide adequate nutrition to children so that they are ready to learn in school. They don’t know how to make landlords paint their lower-rent properties so that little kids like Freddie Gray don’t eat lead paint chips, or how to make heroin-addicted mothers (like Freddie Gray’s mother) sweep the floors to prevent their kids from eating lead paint chips. They don’t know how to control the trade in illegal drugs (Freddie, at age 25, had been arrested 22 times for drug-related crimes), to balance a budget, to pay pension obligations, to inspire confidence—or to control the police. You need not have watched The Wire to know all this, but it certainly would have helped.
What am I trying to say here? Simply this: Cairo and Baltimore suffer from serious structural social dysfunctions. The problems in each are not the same, but both sets of problems have multiple and compound sources that are varied, engrained, poorly understood for the most past, and largely immune to fast-working policy fixes from on high. Leaders cope with problems if they can, manage them if they are very lucky; they cannot solve them, either because they lack the power, or because they don’t know how, or both.
Getting rid of Hosni Mubarak alone was never going to solve Egypt’s problems. Getting rid of the current crop of Baltimore politicians is not going to solve Baltimore’s problems. Democracy, were it possible, might eventually have saved Egypt from itself, but it was not possible and will not be possible for generations. An end to the perplexing amalgam of race and class divides, were that possible, might eventually redeem Baltimore, but that is not something that can happen easily or very soon either.
This is why neither slogans nor conspiracy theories nor the slinging of biographic-inflected blame are helpful. Baltimore needs omnidirectional flows of forgiveness and empathy, but instead it is a city locked in fear and resentment. And that is due in no small part to the fantasies afoot that the city’s problems are simple and easily fixed, “if only” this, or “if only” that. That is the reality of the Baltimore Spring.
