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I have to say I completely agree with Sibelian. I'm getting out of this city too, because after eight years, it's turning me into a racist. It's completely ridiculous, and so, so sad. Me, a racist. A thirty-one year old bleeding heart liberal New Yorker with a post-doctorate. A racist. WTF?
This city really could have so much to offer. Two major sports teams, a harbor, so close to 95, a walkable downtown area, and lots of colleges! I mean, it really COULD be a phenomenal city! But it's not, and I'm leaving, for various reasons. But honestly, right up there is the fact that I am starting to dislike the attention that I've started to pay toward race and behavior. Because I KNOW FOR A FACT that I had never had a racist thought until I came to Baltimore. Just like I know that not all black people in Baltimore are poor, uneducated, loud, obnoxious, lazy, dishonest, and dangerous. But man, it is getting harder and harder not to make those terrible generalizations.
I have NEVER been anywhere LESS diverse in my life than Baltimore. To me, diversity is not and never has been about race. Sure, you have white and black, but you also have German, Polish, Korean, Irish, Ethiopian, Pakistani, Chinese, Taiwanese, Jewish (jewish-cultural and/or jewish-religious), etc. Here in Baltimore, there is WHITE and there is BLACK. And we don't talk about it. At all. In fact, we pretend it's not happening, this fact of different people coming from different places and different perspectives in life. Frankly, it's always been uncomfortable for me, and disingenous, particularly because there is such a HUGE gap.
And now, I'm saying that I'm turning into a racist, but I'm really not. Because it really isn't about race at all, is it? It's not a white versus black thing. It's a money versus no money thing. It's an education versus no education thing. It's an opportunity versus no opportunity thing. It just so happens that most of the people with money, education, and opportunity in Baltimore are white and most of the people without are black. And it's also a cultural thing. Baltimore has managed to create an entire sub-class of people. This is more obvious to me in Baltimore than ANY other place I have seen, except for perhaps when I was living in France vis-a-vis the North Africans.
In reality, there are millions of people here that have been completely abandoned and who have literally no chance to ever change their lives in any meaningful way. So, in a sense, I'm not really BLAMING the junior high school-aged girl that I see tearing another girl's weave out on the sidewalk, screaming obscenities in the middle of the day. I don't really BLAME the woman who hit my car and then tried to scam the insurance company, blame it on me, and get $10K in medical expenses. I don't really BLAME the guy at the parking authority who can't grasp the fact that I am picking up TWO permits instead of one (what, you want me to do TWO things for you today?) and then acts all put out like i'm not just asking him to do his JOB. Why should he have to DO anything for his paycheck? Something for nothing, right? He's just waiting for his disability to come through, anyway. Yeah, i know, it's not racial so much as it is socioeconomic and cultural, but whatever it is, I just don't want to DEAL with it anymore.
I have to say I completely agree with Sibelian. I'm getting out of this city too, because after eight years, it's turning me into a racist. It's completely ridiculous, and so, so sad. Me, a racist. A thirty-one year old bleeding heart liberal New Yorker with a post-doctorate. A racist. WTF?
This city really could have so much to offer. Two major sports teams, a harbor, so close to 95, a walkable downtown area, and lots of colleges! I mean, it really COULD be a phenomenal city! But it's not, and I'm leaving, for various reasons. But honestly, right up there is the fact that I am starting to dislike the attention that I've started to pay toward race and behavior. Because I KNOW FOR A FACT that I had never had a racist thought until I came to Baltimore. Just like I know that not all black people in Baltimore are poor, uneducated, loud, obnoxious, lazy, dishonest, and dangerous. But man, it is getting harder and harder not to make those terrible generalizations.
I have NEVER been anywhere LESS diverse in my life than Baltimore. To me, diversity is not and never has been about race. Sure, you have white and black, but you also have German, Polish, Korean, Irish, Ethiopian, Pakistani, Chinese, Taiwanese, Jewish (jewish-cultural and/or jewish-religious), etc. Here in Baltimore, there is WHITE and there is BLACK. And we don't talk about it. At all. In fact, we pretend it's not happening, this fact of different people coming from different places and different perspectives in life. Frankly, it's always been uncomfortable for me, and disingenous, particularly because there is such a HUGE gap.
And now, I'm saying that I'm turning into a racist, but I'm really not. Because it really isn't about race at all, is it? It's not a white versus black thing. It's a money versus no money thing. It's an education versus no education thing. It's an opportunity versus no opportunity thing. It just so happens that most of the people with money, education, and opportunity in Baltimore are white and most of the people without are black. And it's also a cultural thing. Baltimore has managed to create an entire sub-class of people. This is more obvious to me in Baltimore than ANY other place I have seen, except for perhaps when I was living in France vis-a-vis the North Africans.
In reality, there are millions of people here that have been completely abandoned and who have literally no chance to ever change their lives in any meaningful way. So, in a sense, I'm not really BLAMING the junior high school-aged girl that I see tearing another girl's weave out on the sidewalk, screaming obscenities in the middle of the day. I don't really BLAME the woman who hit my car and then tried to scam the insurance company, blame it on me, and get $10K in medical expenses. I don't really BLAME the guy at the parking authority who can't grasp the fact that I am picking up TWO permits instead of one (what, you want me to do TWO things for you today?) and then acts all put out like i'm not just asking him to do his JOB. Why should he have to DO anything for his paycheck? Something for nothing, right? He's just waiting for his disability to come through, anyway. Yeah, i know, it's not racial so much as it is socioeconomic and cultural, but whatever it is, I just don't want to DEAL with it anymore.
Call me racist. I do.
White & Black built this country up so the "diverse" people would bother even coming here. Baltimore has nothing to apologize for in that regard as far as I'm concern. Frankly I find it one of its charms.
Becoming more conservative is pretty natural as one grows up.
What Zin Is In just said hits so many things I've wanted to say, but was afraid to. It's about economic opportunity, education and pride in where you live. Race is secondary. Baltimore really has created a subclass of people who, aside from extraordinary will or an angelic mentor, have little hope in rising above poverty and the horrible neighborhoods which make up huge areas of west and east Baltimore.
I see more sides of Baltimore than most of my friends because my job requires travel to almost every part of the city. I also ride transit a lot. Nowhere is the problem more evident than on the bus or the subway. When you see little kids - 5 years old, who look utterly depressed and worn down by life, something is wrong. The look of despair in their eyes is the same look their parents have. When you hear a group of young men casually talking about assaulting a man with a brick or how getting 6 months in jail is no big deal, something is wrong.
I came to Baltimore 3 years ago and was naive about race and class issues. Like Zin, I didn't have a racist thought in my head. But when you see 95% of people of a particular race down and out, you begin to make subconscious assumptions. I don't like this at all. Even though I love my job and the city has so much to offer, I feel staying in Baltimore is no longer healthy for me.
And it would be easy to just blame this subclass of people and say they need to get jobs or work harder, but the issues and history are complex. I read "Not In My Neighborhood" by Pietila, and the magnitude of segregation and racism here has tainted almost every neighborhood. African American communities which could have prospered were left to rot through a combination of segregation/red lining, economic exclusion, massive manufacturing job losses in the city, misplaced priorities of local gov, and poor urban planning.
The greatest crime is that the people in power don't talk about these issues, so the problem will continue to fester. A segregated city where one group is the "winner" and another group the "loser" is deeply dsyfunctional and unhealthy for both groups.
My reason for leaving is I don't want to get used to these things. I don't want to come to a point where I hear two guys talking about a murder and think, "that's just how things are". I don't want to come to think that a integrated, diverse neighborhood is unusual. I want to leave before I become hardened by the things I've seen here.
I would say the neighborhoods weren't "left to rot"; they were actively destroyed. Karen Olson, the history professor and Baltimore resident who wrote "Wives of Steel" about Sparrows Point once said that the way to make Baltimore safe was simply to have a lot of people out on the street. When blockbusting was en vogue, blacks would by rowhouses but not be allowed to move in immediately. Then when an entire block had been purchased all of the blacks would then all move in on one day so that whites couldn't mount any protest, challenge, or intimidating violence. Safety in numbers.
The middle-class should do the same thing in Baltimore. Buy up all the cheap, vacant rowhouses, take a year or less to fix them up, then everybody all move in on one day. Criminals wouldn't know what to do because there would now be thousands of witnesses to every act of crime. And these witnesses would be willing to "snitch" without fear of retribution. The only reason why Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, etc. became so crime-ridden is not because they became more black (the black populations of these cities are declining too) but they became anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 vacant. Has anything become safer or more pleasant as it has become abandoned? Has anybody noticed how New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. have gotten progressively less crime-ridden since they stopped declining in population and started growing again?
It is much easier to be a criminal when you can act in complete anonymity because the only people on the street are you and the victim (or the victim's property). The dozens of hoodlums would cease if there were hundreds of people to tell them to shut up. But with the "vacant" city in which they are the remnant population, the hoodlums outnumber people in public places.
I would say the neighborhoods weren't "left to rot"; they were actively destroyed. Karen Olson, the history professor and Baltimore resident who wrote "Wives of Steel" about Sparrows Point once said that the way to make Baltimore safe was simply to have a lot of people out on the street. When blockbusting was en vogue, blacks would by rowhouses but not be allowed to move in immediately. Then when an entire block had been purchased all of the blacks would then all move in on one day so that whites couldn't mount any protest, challenge, or intimidating violence. Safety in numbers.
The middle-class should do the same thing in Baltimore. Buy up all the cheap, vacant rowhouses, take a year or less to fix them up, then everybody all move in on one day. Criminals wouldn't know what to do because there would now be thousands of witnesses to every act of crime. And these witnesses would be willing to "snitch" without fear of retribution. The only reason why Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, etc. became so crime-ridden is not because they became more black (the black populations of these cities are declining too) but they became anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 vacant. Has anything become safer or more pleasant as it has become abandoned? Has anybody noticed how New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. have gotten progressively less crime-ridden since they stopped declining in population and started growing again?
It is much easier to be a criminal when you can act in complete anonymity because the only people on the street are you and the victim (or the victim's property). The dozens of hoodlums would cease if there were hundreds of people to tell them to shut up. But with the "vacant" city in which they are the remnant population, the hoodlums outnumber people in public places.
Am I correctly reading that your proposed solution is for a group of unrelated families to band together in a pact to buy overpriced, overtaxed homes, renovate them over the course of a year (and hope your copper and windows aren't stolen in the process), then organize a mass move in so they can band together in a vigilante war against criminals that have previously run the neighborhood?
Am I correctly reading that your proposed solution is for a group of unrelated families to band together in a pact to buy overpriced, overtaxed homes, renovate them over the course of a year (and hope your copper and windows aren't stolen in the process), then organize a mass move in so they can band together in a vigilante war against criminals that have previously run the neighborhood?
I will also let you read the Wikipedia definition of vigilante:
"A vigilante is a private individual who illegally punishes an alleged lawbreaker, or participates in a group which metes out extralegal punishment to an alleged lawbreaker."
I know you think you are being clever but essentially you are showing your ignorance. You are making up things I did not imply for what purpose? Trolling? Baltimore is the only primary city of the five within Megalopolis that hasn't halted its population decline through revitalization and lowered its crime rate in the process.
It'll be awhile before we live in a post-racial world. I grew up in NYC in the 60-s and 70's and although things were crazy (think Wild Style, Savage Skulls, The South Bronx is burning, Son of Sam, Snake Pliskin, etc.) it seemed like a good mix of people engaged in live and let live....But that is only when compared with what I have experienced since then. Lived in Maine and Colorado: no racial conflicts, because everyone was white. Lived in Tokyo: That is where I realized that racism in the U.S., while definitely not good, was chicken feed compared to the stratified, codified, pecking order racism of Japan (i.e., all "others" strange, but some stranger than others). Whites first, then other Asians, then blacks. Trips to S.E. Asia were stranger. When the Cambodians got resentful of Vietnamese making too much money in Phnom Phenh, they might just kill them. No different from the lynch mobs here, but 70 years later. Lived in Montreal: the French and English might look the same on the outside, but the battle rages on over 200 years after Wolfe took Quebec. Moved to Texas: the gringos and the Mexicans going at it. And then finally, I arrived at the sine qua non of bad race relations, Detroit. After many years and many moves, I feel like the New York of my youth was as good as it got, so far as people of different races and cultures all living in one place and at least getting along. There was a lot of toleration, lets put it that way. I have been looking for a city to live in my whole life where a babel of people live together and thrive in apposition. Myriad languages, cultures, dress, food....The only place where I felt this harmony was Amsterdam, Holland. America is a much more polarized place, and the racial tensions here have always been bad. Detroit shocked me, because it is black vs. white, spy vs. spy, and it goes on for generations. In NYC I had black friends and acquaintances and we all kind of chilled to Sly and the Family Stone and Dostoevsky. The utter destruction of Detroit has paradoxically created an environment where post-racial folks are trying to rebuild from the ashes, but they are definitely in the minority, so to speak. There are small pockets of hope in Detroit, comprised of artists, urban farmers, bikers, musicians, and other dreamers, but the metro area still suffers greatly from decades of continuous poison. My wife and I want to move back east but can't afford NYC, so we were thinking of maybe moving to Baltimore. The few times I visited I have always liked the visuals. Reading this post depressed me, because it sounds like a smaller, more populated version of Detroit. I would live to move on to a future where American cities thrive and there is no hate. I know, a pipe dream, but I still dream. Also, working people have been getting battered by the rich here since the days of Ronald Raygun, and now it's a rout. We don't stick together and counterattack, we're all going to be living in abandoned factories and under highways. Well, I've gone on for long enough. Anyone out there who thinks Baltimore has a chance? Adios vatos,
Cool Breeze
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Baltimore is the only primary city of the five within Megalopolis that hasn't halted its population decline through revitalization and lowered its crime rate in the process.
Post-Racial World
