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It is the purpose of my weekly blogs to go beyond the breathless instant opinions and thruths of the moment and provide a more in depth analysis.
However, after Baltimore became the center of the national tension between police and minority communities and the focal point for observations about race relations from the President down to national and international reporters, it is hard to write about any other topic that seemed quite appropriate before Freddy Gray died in the hands of the police.
Just at that time I had worked on an article about the "authenticity"of cities and gentrification. The research for the article and the discussions around it had brought home again how divided the community really is, not only into rich and poor and white and black but also into those who see new investment in Baltimore as good and those who hate the "new" Baltimore that investment brings. Those welcome hipsters and millenials and those who despise them. Those who celebrated that Baltimore had just recently begun to shed its inward looking inferiority complex and felt bolstered by new residents, mostly young or foreign born and those who mourned the demise of a Baltimore they had learned to cherish in spite of all its shortcomings....
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Peaceful demonstration Tuesday night on Eutaw Street, African Americans in front, while sympathisers in the rear
(Photo: ArchPlan) |
I discussed the matter on WYPR's Midday radio talk show with the young African American writer M. Watkins who had expressed his aversion against this new Baltimore in an
article on the Salon website. In his article Watkins had said:
My city is gone, my history depleted, ruined and undocumented. I don't know this new Baltimore, it's alien to me.
Like the talk show host, belonging to a third group, one that likes the "new Baltimore" but doesn't think that we have enough investment especially not in poor neighborhoods, I had written my own article as a response to Watkins lamentations, arguing for positive change and for learning from each other I had noted this:
Baltimore's success (if one wants to call it that) is too lopsided, too limited to certain areas of the city and even there too fragile to be celebrated without legitimately questioning inequality, motives and the forces that stand behind development. [..]
And now in the de-industrialized city, depopulated and marred by abandonment, we see the bifurcation into places of glitz and others of abject poverty.[..]Though Watkins narrative is correct, it misses one important point: those deprived neighborhoods [..] are still without any of the investments that create rapid change elsewhere.
After the radio show host Dan Rodricks had written his regular column in the Baltimore Sun titled "the fragile dream of the 'Next Baltimore' cracks". An irate reader responded with a statement much stronger than what D Watkins had written in Salon. The reader's hyperbole was fueled from a day in the streets of Baltimore after the Freddie Gray protests on Saturday, he wrote this:
The gentrified hell of The Next Baltimore is not a place I want to live. The Next Baltimore, owned and operated by Seawall, its poor driven to the outer counties in favor of "young professionals" [..] in the municipal ethnic cleansing game sounds like a dystopian 80s science fiction film set in the present day.
[..] this nightmarish "Next Baltimore"...[..], built in the cleansed neighborhoods and on the backs and ruined corpses of black men and women [..]
A day later, ( two weeks after my article), and after Gray's funeral, anger, frustration and discontent erupted in a flash across the entire inner city, spreading from the west to downtown and then the east.
Surprising everybody, including a fully unprepared police, the streets filled with black young man far from the hotspot at Mondawmin Mall, fists in the air. Glass broke a mere 80 feet from my office desk and disrupters broke a window and took 7-11 items from a shelf right when I passed on foot on my way home. This gave me a front row seat of some of the faces of the young men. For once they did not hold their heads down, did not stay invisible but looked triumphant, even happy. Not like how I imagine thugs, more like high school kids on a really cool field trip. Of course I saw only a very few faces out of the many, and some had, indeed, covered their faces. The groups .....
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