What is happening in America? The city of Milwaukee in the State of Wisconsin was convulsed in violence after the fatal shooting of a black man by police officers on August 13. The riot went on for two days.
Milwaukee is a powder keg. Long histories of racism combined with recent incidents of police shooting held the city on edge. “It’s a series of things that have happened over a period of time,” said Sharlen Moore, who runs Urban Underground, a non-profit group committed to ending violence in communities of colour. “And right now,” says Sharlen Moore, “you shake a soda bottle and you open the top and it explodes. This is what it is.”
Sharlen Moore’s statement from 2016 echoes that of writer James Baldwin’s declaration from 1960. In the heart of urban poverty in America, wrote Baldwin, rage festers. Tension increases and the police appear more and more like an occupying army. “One day, to everyone’s astonishment,” wrote Baldwin, “someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.” It is the “astonishment” that rankled Baldwin. How can one be innocent of the social crisis in urban America? A riot ensues. “Before the dust has settled or the blood congealed,” Baldwin noted, “editorials, speeches and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened. What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men.”