Baltimoreans have always hated it when people say to them: "Ah, From Baltimore? I love the Wire! Is it really like that?" Eventually, the series wound down and so did this inevitable association. People got back to saying something about the Inner Harbor or about the Ravens or sometimes the articles they had read in the Washington Post or the New York Times highlighting Baltimore's burgeoning arts and entertainments districts.

Demonstrations in the week before the unrest

That is, until this spring and Baltimore's riots, or uprising (depending who you ask). Immediately images of Baltimore reminiscent of the Wire came back and the whole world watched as they provided the backdrop for fires, looting, and burnt out police cars. Baltimore boosters ripped their hair out: it seemed like decades of efforts had gone up in the same flames as the various drugstores. Stories about the peaceful days that followed, the clean-up efforts in which one time rioters stood shoulder to should with community members, clergy and some white folks were as ineffective at polishing the city's tarnished image as the Mayor's efforts to explain that it "could have been much worse."

Overlooked in the ongoing uncertainty and the skyrocketing murder rate that have followed the unrest is a fact that emerged soon after the unrest: the insight that Baltimore is not alone in this, that its problems are the same as those in Ferguson, Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans or any other major US city with a large African-American population where racial tensions may be hidden from view, depending on one's perspective, but are always there nonetheless.

FAZ, "Wake up call of the unheard"

In the same week that the riots had found their way into leading media the world over, serious commentary began to analyze what was really going on. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a conservative German version of the New York Times, titled their lead story: "A wake up call of the unheard". The New Yorker showed a bullet hole not in Baltimore's image but in one of the stars of the American flag. Recently, another wave of the reporting has gone from events to explanations, and once again, Baltimore catches story-lines. Interestingly, the new explanations are not being offered by parachuted foreign correspondents, but by none other than African-Americans who live in the city or were raised here, most prominently Ta-Nahesi Coates.