The Class Warfare Logic of a Baltimore Protester

In June Steve Inskeep recorded an interview with Kwame Rose, who was one of the protesters against the death of Freddie Gray, a black man being transported in a police van. Excerpts:

KWAME ROSE: He called us thugs and criminals. And you don't know the story behind each one of those individuals. I was one of the people he called a thug and a criminal because I was out there. ...
ROSE: Yeah, but even in a notion to differentiate peaceful - when I was there, firsthand experiences, watching people run in the stores, I didn't interpret it as violence. I interpreted it as a survival skills - as a survival tactic. ...
ROSE: No. I've - I don't think the president has done enough for black people.

This shows some of the Baltimore street hustler logic also found in Ta-Nehisi Coates' white supremacy articles. For example, skid logic: "I was ... called a thug and a criminal because I was out there." (Below, there will be excerpts from Inskeep's interview in which President Obama responds to Rose's accusations.)

Kwame Rose's argument has the class warfare characteristics of:

1. Justified by an overriding emergency
2. Rejection of the rule of law
3. Double standard — the plight of the oppressed trumps the principle of equality — see "moral primitivism" (1)
4. Specific rejection of pluralism (that is, unconcern for anyone not like us)
5. Disregard for the public good (those who loot and destroy a drug store in the name of racial affirmation force sick people of that same race to travel farther for medicine they need to survive)
6. Rejection of the powerful just tools of liberal democracy (Obama: "You have situations in which, suddenly, friends of mine in Baltimore - their mothers, who are elderly, have to now travel across town to get their medicines because the local drug store got torn up. And making excuses for them, I think, is a mistake. There are ways of bringing about social change that are powerful and that have the ability to pull the country together and maintain the moral high ground. And there are approaches where I may understand the frustrations, but they're counterproductive. And tearing up your own neighborhood and stealing is counterproductive." (Emphasis added.)
7. Specious justification of violence ("survival skills")
8. Rejection of universalism ("I don't think the president has done enough for black people"; that is, a black president should show favoritism toward black people in preference to serving all equally.)
9. Implied the-end-justifies-the-means logic

Steve Inskeep's follow up interview with Obama ("What I would also say, though, is that if somebody is looting, they're looting."):

Let me ask about a passionate young person that we met along the way. His name is Kwame Rose.

Yeah.

He is an activist now in Baltimore. He was active in the protests after the death of Freddie Gray ...

Right.

... who was in a police van, and died later, as you know.

And he was unhappy with a statement that you made at the time, when you were supportive of peaceful protests but also criticized what you called criminals and thugs who had looted stores.

He felt that you were being too harsh and went on to say in our interview that you were speaking from a position of privilege, his suggestion being that maybe you didn't quite get what was going on in the streets.

What would you say to him?

[Obama] Well, obviously, I don't know him personally, so we would have to have a longer conversation.

What I would say is that the Black Lives Matter movement has been hugely important in getting all of America to — to see the challenges in the criminal justice system differently. And I could not be prouder of the activism that has been involved. And it's making a difference.

You're seeing it at state and local levels, and the task force that we pulled together in the wake of Ferguson has put forward recommendations that were shaped both by the people who organized the Ferguson protests as well as police officers. And it turns out that there's common ground there, in terms of how we can be smart about crime, smart about policing, respectful to all communities and try to wring some of the racial bias that exists in the criminal justice system out of it.

What I would also say, though, is that if somebody is looting, they're looting.

-*--
 
(1) Moral Primitivism: An earlier post concerning Coates' fallacies argued that Coates does not see a society of equal, rights-bearing citizens, 

"caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," but a polity irrevocably divided between oppressed race and oppressor race. "Once that fact is acknowledged," Kevin D. Williamson suggests "then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress." (Emphasis added)