Nonviolent Protest and the False Flag of Civility
Talia Trigg ’22
At 8:39 a.m. on April 12, 2015, Lieutenant Brian Rice made eye contact with Freddie Gray. Within an hour, Gray’s spine was mostly severed. Within seven days, he was dead. His crime? Running away when he saw the police and having a legal pocket knife in his jacket. Soon after Gray’s imprisonment and subsequent death, mass protests began in downtown Baltimore, the site of the incident and Gray’s home. By April 25, some of the protests turned violent in response to the heavy police presence, leading to the destruction of two police cars and a CVS pharmacy, as well as many injuries. This turn of events was met with public statements of disapproval from those in power and calls for protestors to “remain peaceful” and nonviolent. 1 But what is nonviolence, in this context? Historically, nonviolent noncooperation with the demands of those in power has been harnessed to great effect. It is a powerful tool available to even the most oppressed, which is rooted in the temptation of violence and the belief that a human life — and its potential for sacrifice — is stronger than the ability to kill. But the calls for nonviolence following Freddie Gray’s death were not calls for resistance; they were calls for compliance. They were, in essence, calls for civility. The term “civility” may seem to be similar or in line with nonviolent protest — and by extension, noncompliance and protest — but it enforces norms that are antithetical to the radical resistance that characterizes nonviolent noncooperation. That is, civility and nonviolence are not synonymous, but rather antonymous. To understand the deeper problem at hand, one must dive into the violent and oppressive past of the notion of civility. Since the fifteenth century, with the birth of the idea of races as broad social groups defined by skin color, one of the primary motivations and justifications for European colonization was the “civilization” of lesser peoples. This stemmed from an understanding of non-white people as inherently inferior and bestial, an idea first put into print by Gomez de Zurara in 1453. 2 The white man’s burden — the belief that white men held a divine duty to colonize, convert, rule, and oppress other races in order to bestow the gift of European civilization upon them — evolved based on this narrative. Its primary function was, and continues to be, the justification of the economic and material exploitation of colonized nations, as well as the creation and continuation of the institution of slavery.
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1
Baltimore Police Department
2
Kendi
