For me, teaching students about the uprising was really visceral and intense in a way that I wasn’t really prepared for because there's so much in our curriculum that I can put into abstraction. But to have students whose homes were set on fire, to have students who were out there taking pictures, who were out there protesting, to have students who were afraid to go out because there was violence actually in their neighborhood… that was an experience that I wasn’t really prepared for.

       And the thing I keep thinking about is I give my students current event [assignments] to do and the last thing they always have to do is put a negative prediction for what could happen as a result of a current event. Students used to always suggest that a negative thing that could happen as a result of what [they] read about is that people could riot. I used to give that response half-credit because if you had asked me a year ago or two years ago I would have told you that, in my estimation, that was a pretty unrealistic hypothetical. Until a year ago the last race riots in modern history happened in 1991, before my students were even born, and now I have to accept that answer as completely in the realm of possibility.

     What is your perspective on the militarization of police?

     There’s a creeping influence and it doesn’t hit you until there's a tank on your street and the tank says "Anne Arundel County Police Department" and [you think] "What the heck does the Anne Arundel County Police Department need with a tank and why is it on my block?" This summer I spent four days in Germany and in my time there I did not see a single police officer. I flew into Dulles coming back and on the drive home on the Dulles toll road there was literally a tank next to us.

     It just throws into such sharp contrast how militarization has been happening out of people's sight for a very  long time. It's in the weeds of policy, because your average citizen isn’t going through policy approprations and seeing where and how money is being spent and where all of these materials are going. It has to do with the fact that the weapons industry -- the arms industry -- is incredibly powerful. They use their political influence to create a demand for all of their product. I mean the Kevlar and the tanks and the assault rifles, and the issue is that police and the military are supposed to do comepletely different things. They have different goals and different objectives and because of that they should not, absolutely not, be using the same tools. There's no reason. What works for one is absolutely not applicable in another situation.

     The first president who talked about the Military Industrial Complex was a Republican. It was Dwight Eisenhower. It was part of his farewell address and he was president, but he was also somewhat of an expert on the topic because he himself came from inside the military. Him speaking out against the Military Industrial Complex that early, at the end of the 1950s, was in a lot of ways remarkable when we consider our current politial climate and how a Republican would never be able to make that statement today.

     Our language for talking about war has really suffered from the fact that we don’t experience it in the same way that, for instance, Syrians do. Most Americans don’t experience the level of destruction, we're not used to experiencing the level of destruction, that people in other parts of the world experience on a continual basis. So as jarring as it is for us to see tanks rolling down North Avenue, in some ways it's bringing us more in line with parts of the world where war is not an abstraction. For Americans, war is something that happens far away.