Baton Rouge in Context
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What’s the context of the Baton Rouge police murder and protests? LSU professor Christopher Tyson, an African-American and city native, as well as the 2015 Democratic nominee for Louisiana Secretary of State, explains the deep divides in the city:
It’s only by crossing that line that one can reconcile the more affluent neighborhoods of south Baton Rouge with the city’s grim statistics. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2013 Baton Rouge ranked first in the nation for estimated H.I.V. and AIDS case rates per 100,000 people. For many years we’ve been one of the nation’s top murder capitals. Black men in East Baton Rouge Parish had a 46 percent high school graduation rate in 2011-2012. One-third of black residents live below the poverty line. And a vast majority of them are concentrated in north Baton Rouge
Recently, there was an organized effort to form something called the City of St. George. The goal was for south Baton Rouge to break off and form a new city, a move that would have exacerbated our community’s growing stratification. The effort ultimately failed, but we now all live in a city in which we know that a significant percentage of our neighbors want out.
Too many view the lives of people in north Baton Rouge as the cumulative result of poor choices, weak values and dependency. This is more than just lazy thinking. It’s an intolerable lie predicated on the erasure of all of our city’s and nation’s history. Like many urban communities, north Baton Rouge is the result of specific policy choices, social patterns and the toll that all of it eventually takes on neighborhoods, families and individuals. It’s a very American story of how black people have systematically been denied the opportunity to live in safe and stable neighborhoods. No amount of “individual responsibility” or “bootstrapping” will ever change that.
In the past few years, many of us have worked to bring attention to the challenges facing north Baton Rouge. A lack of access to reliable public transportation, quality health care, youth mentors and nutritious food are among the many crises that define day-to-day life in this half of this city. One example of what activists are working on: the lack of an emergency room in north Baton Rouge after the area’s public hospital closed its doors.
This past weekend teenagers from the Baton Rouge Youth Coalition, a college-prep mentoring organization I co-founded, planned and led a peaceful march attended by more than 1,000 people. There is a dedicated, multiracial coalition of civic and justice-minded folks working hard toward a more equitable and humane future. But the suffering grows every day, and there simply aren’t enough of us doing this work.
This is the context within which a man is led to sell CDs at midnight to feed his family. This is the context for the anger, frustration and exhaustion erupting not just from the corner of North Foster and Fairfields, but from all over the city. When I first visited Mr. Sterling’s memorial two days after his death, I spoke with other people there about our responsibility to his family and this city. We affirmed our linked fate with each familiar greeting and new introduction. We dapped up and exchanged hugs. We contemplated our next steps. We questioned the adequacy of our efforts. We all felt a need to be there, for Mr. Sterling, for each other and for our city.
In other words, structural and intentional white supremacy combine to keep African-Americans poor, the police ready to crack heads, and racial tensions high. It’s surprising there aren’t more violent upheavals given these conditions.