What I found so moving about A Beautiful Ghetto is that it really changed the way I perceived the Freddie Gray riots. It drew a really sharp contrast for me about my experience of the Baltimore riots as a freshman approaching final exams at Loyola, and the experiences that these protestors, and that Devin Allen, must have had.
What was I worried about? How did I experience the riots? The curfew meant that some of my exams had to be rescheduled, or I was given less than the full 3 hours to take them; that was annoying. Could I still go out tomorrow night, or would I be arrested for being out after the curfew? My mother wouldn't stop calling me, texting me, threatening to force my dad to drive down and come get me, it was irritating. Our CVS got set on fire so I had to Uber all the way to Giant if I wanted study snacks or something. It all seemed sort of ridiculous, didn't the protestors know that some of the police who drove Gray to his death were Black? Didn't they know that, by destroying community property, they were just making things worse? And what did that solve anyway? I fell asleep to the sounds of helicopter blades chopping above my 5th floor suite. I walked out of a bar in Towson blinded by the flashing lights of no less than 7 or 8 police cars, with cops screaming at people to get in their Ubers and leave, that they weren't supposed to be out. People panicked, seeing all those lights and hearing the helicopters overhead. But all I saw were those cops, nobody trashing cars or holding signs. Did our Uber driver get in trouble for coming to pick us up? I wanted to text my friend who had been at that Orioles game when the violence broke out, what did she see? What was it like? I sort of wanted to go downtown and witness it. I'd never experienced this before.
When I think about all of those things, I'm appalled at myself and I'm appalled at my school, for not educating us more about what was actually going on. They told us we were safe, and that things would die down, and to focus on final exams. They did not tell us that there were toddlers putting their hands up when they saw police officers because that's what they had been taught even if they didn't know why they were doing it. Looking at Allen's photographs from the riots chilled me, because it opened my eyes and made me stare at the reality that people in Baltimore were, and still are, facing. These riots were not about one man, they were about a system rigged against an entire group of people from the very beginning. And I knew a little about that, but I didn't really know why it was such a huge deal. Looking at these photos though, really brought it home for me. I was annoyed at the minor inconveniences and interruptions to my daily routine, and fascinated by the idea of rioting, something I had never been so close to before. While I was annoyed, others were terrified, passionate with anger, wrecked with grief, and trying to find power in a situation where many must have felt incredibly powerless. I was annoyed about CVS being damaged, didn't understand what destruction of property would solve. Protesters were infuriated that people were more moved by property destruction than the destruction of lives. I was experiencing the riots as final exams stress, while my community around me was experiencing the riots as an essential and long-building fight for life or death.
Seeing the other side so vividly in these photographs really made me stop and re-evaluate my experience, if it can even be referred to as an experience of the riots. Encased in my Loyola bubble, I was so removed from things happening just up the road, and so removed from the greater issues that had been simmering under the surface until now. Particularly impactful to me were photos of the children. I found myself stopping and sitting with some of these pictures. It felt wrong for some reason to be examining them in the student center over Starbucks. To answer my title question: Allen's photos are each worth a thousand words, absolutely. I know this because I read articles about the riots, I read depictions of what Camden Yards looked like, and what the Inner Harbor looked like, and the massive clean up efforts that were underway. But reading all those news articles and first-hand accounts didn't penetrate through me unless the articles had photos with them. I stared the longest at those, and now, faced with a book of largely only photographs, I realized how impactful they were. I think sometimes writing, especially writing made to be consumed by news readers, can be de-sensitizing. It's removed, even when it's a first-hand account, because the reader is left to see it in their mind and does not really see real people, at least I didn't. For some reason, it feels like you can choose to stop reading a long article, but there's something about Allen's photographs that you know you can't flip through or look away from. There's something too important and intense about them, like you would be choosing ignorance over awareness if you just shut the book and put it away without taking it in. Allen's photographs, and then the poems that followed, really moved me because it made everything painfully real.
When I went to Service yesterday, I watched my kids in wiggling in their seats and trying to write advertisements about chocolate bars and imagined them in the photographs, looking scared or confused or smiling because they weren't really sure what was happening. It struck me over and over how sharp the reality was about what could happen to these kids. I think that Allen's photos changed my view of the riots because, with photographs, you're hit with the realization that these are real people and real events and real emotions fueling real actions. It's an intensity that I think is dulled out of the news that I was reading, and the conversations that Loyola was having. I did not feel the life and death implications of the riots then (not that I pretend I could possibly understand them now).
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