Baltimore's Black Voices Heard around the World

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.

Jon Stewart invited Coates. to the Daily Show, The SPIEGEL, Germany's progressive weekly Guardian, Slate, Politico, and the local station WYPR. A review also came from the serious Dutch daily the "Handelsblad" which somehow completely obliterated non-Dutch sensibilities by using the N word in the title of the review creating a stir of its own. The New York Observer calls Coates "the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States."

Coates

tailored after TIME magazine reviewed Coate's latest book and so did the New York Times, the Atlantic, the British

The thing is, Coates is from Baltimore, was raised in West Baltimore in large family, and still lives here. The insights and conclusions of his book "Between the World and Me" are drawn from his living in in this city.

To point to a crop of disruptive local writers and artists that lately became the go-to people of national and international media isn't to adopt them for simple local patriotism, bragging with their new fame in the same way that Mencken or John Waters, other disruptive narrators of Baltimore, have been integrated and made digestible before. Frankly, when D Watkins wrote in Salon that he didn't like the new Baltimore (the newly thriving neighborhoods and some communities that didn't even exist before), I was ticked about it. After all, wasn't Baltimore the way the white singer Jana Hunter put it:

The most alluring thing about Baltimore for me was the sense of community. People I knew that already lived here spoke in near-mythological terms of the closeness and fertility of the music and arts scene. I found these things to be true. I was enchanted, and remain so. (Pitchfork)

A somewhat deeper insight came to many in the time between Freddie Gray's death likely caused in that infamous Baltimore police wagon and his funeral which ignited the day of unrest. I had sat down with D. Watkins as part of the Baltimore Midday radio show. article that asserted in the title that "Starbucks had bulldozed black history"  to discuss the matter in a radio show. Originally intending to fight this assertion as ridiculous, Even though D Watkins may have been somewhat loose with words and factually wrong about Starbuck's role in Baltimore, that his introduction as a "professor at Coppin University" in the Salon piece was over the top as well since he really was just teaching some summer classes there, I realized in light of the daily Freddie Grey reporting that Watkins was correct in the context of a much bigger urban reality, that of systemic black oppression. An uncomfortable truth for someone like me who tought he had observed this city unflinchingly for twenty years.

D Watkins, Salon (Credit: Heezy Bear)

Watkins a Baltimore writer,  had written a polemic against gentrification in a Salon.com

The white Jana Hunter continued her already quoted op-ed piece with a similar insight:

I’d also still say that living in Baltimore affords one a sense of freedom, except to add that the sense of freedom exists almost solely for non-black artists and musicians. Whatever benefits there are for non-black artists and musicians to live in and move to Baltimore are directly indebted to the majority black population of Baltimore. Our liberties come at the cost of theirs.

A week after my radio exchange with Watkins the New York Times printed his opinion piece titled "In Baltimore, We’re All Freddie Gray" in which he takes his conclusions to new heights:

Some people might ask, “Why Baltimore?” But the real question is, “Why did it take so long?” The young uprisers of Baltimore have been paying attention to the peaceful protests in Sanford, Fla., Ferguson, Mo., and New York, only to be let down by the end result, over and over again. We are all starting to believe that holding hands, following pastors and peaceful protests are pointless.

I remembered the book "The Other Wes Moore" which I had sitting in a stack of unopened books for quite some time and began reading it.

Wes Moore CREDIT: AMUN

Moore, another Baltimore author, describing the rough realities of growing up in urban America as seen from the perspective of being a black man which D Watkins describes this way:

My childhood was like any other kid from East Baltimore. I loved basketball and dirt bikes… I always had a crush on the prettiest girls. I came up and stayed with my older brother Bip who was murdered, and I stayed at my grandmother’s house on and off… I was back and forth between homes.

Wes Moore had moved from the city to the county and then to the Bronx thanks to supportive family. He became a Rhodes scholar, he has made it, he considers running for mayor in Baltimore, He has met with Obama and traveled the world. Coates and Watkins are much less optimistic, there seems to be a world between their view and that of Wes Moore, maybe the "world between you and me" that Coates alludes to. After the unrest the black voices came from all sides: piece-by-piece a reality reveals itself that many whites had not known from their view from the outside. Even as an urban planner working in inner city neighborhoods I had not seen how deep systemic discrimination ran also inside of planning and design, certainly not in the words of the young writers growing up there.

Not having been around here in 1968, I have always defined Baltimore as a city that is recovering from de-industrialization, a city facing the challenge of reinventing itself as a city that can flourish in the age of knowledge. I skipped over the race question as mostly a class question, an issue of jobs and opportunities. Revitalization of inner city communities as just a matter of bringing enough people back to repopulate all the vacant houses. It had been fairly blatantly obvious that the African American neighborhoods had not been among those that had "turned" and that racial diversity flourished only in a few communities, certainly it was not spreading but I had few explanations for that.

The foreign media especially realized that Baltimore wasn't special, that the reasons for the unrest did not reside any unique characteristics this this city, but that Baltimore just happened to be the place where, most recently, the pot boiled over.

Indicted for murder in Baltimore

It could have and has happened elsewhere, in Oakland, Los Angeles, Ferguson/St Louis, Detroit or wherever race is paired with poverty. That urban unrest, in fact, has happened many times since 1968 and that the spark has always come from police brutality against minorities, especially African Americans.  As Lawrence Burney expresses his experience in the City Paper:

Living next to Hopkins frat boys who blasted Top 40 music through the night (usually every night) while they sat on their porch, drank themselves to the point of needing ambulance assistance, and walked over to Wyman Park to pass around spliffs, I experienced something completely foreign to me: a neighborhood with police around to actually protect and give people the benefit of the doubt. This was something I didn't experience growing up in East Baltimore. Well into their 20s, whites are allowed to be "just kids" while blacks of the same age and younger cannot throw a rap show and smoke blunts without being intruded on.

In the local "white" view, though, this overarching truth about systemic problems has not sunk in. In response to the unrest, suburbs around Baltimore re-intoned their old song that Baltimore is just one gigantic mess full of corruption, violence, and dysfunction. This response is full of contempt, with barely-contained racism. This local, myopic view is also systemic and happens around many urban centers in the US.

Coates, Watkins, Moore, they are probably more known in far flung places then in the hinterlands of Baltimore. The view from rural and suburban Maryland having just managed to elect a Republican governor in a blue state, sees the governor riding into the city as the savior who brought peace with the help of the National Guard to a place that the night before had seemed to be ablaze from end to end.

Ta-Nahesi said in a radio interview about growing up as the son of a college professor in urban West Baltimore that "you had to be bi-lingual and literate in two worlds." Taken as a metaphor for what this city needs, this idea works well. We need to learn each other's languages because words express a way of thinking, they are experiences.  A city that is strong on artistic expression, be it writing, music or visual arts should be well suited to master the multilingualism that is needed for improving race relations and ending discrimination.

Campaign disruption in Seattle (Sanders)

Jana Hunter the white singer has this vision:

I love Baltimore. It’s the rare place where culture springs forth from within. It feels like a small town. I believe it’s a place with the potential to form a kind of authentic, broader community, where societal mores are rejected for humanist ones, where consumer culture dies from lack of interest, and where our long-spurned African-American community members are finally given their fair due.
Jana Hunter sings in the band Lower Dens, who released their latest album, Escape From Evil, this year.

For TT the Artist (Tedra Wilson) who came to Baltimore from Florida to study here, then moved to New York and came back to this city, the answer is less clear (in her words as printed in the City Paper):

TT The Artist (City Paper)

Let me speak quiet, let me be polite, let me ask for just enough and not expect too much.
Let me make contributions to my community, but withhold all the necessary resources
Let me educate the youth about art, passion, and culture, but limit the plateaus of their future
Let me advocate for a change, but leave me voiceless
I am a brown face
Although I try to defy the stereotypes
I can't erase this color line

Should I instead act color-blind?

Cultural appropriation ain't nothing new so tell me what's a colored mind supposed to do?

To bring the matter back to the larger national context again, I will end with this quote from The Nation,

Black Lives Matter is first and foremost about black refusal to accept politics as they stand—left, right, or center. Those who are asserting the value of black life have placed it above the property rights of Ferguson and Baltimore residents, above the rituals of holiday commerce, and, yes, above the inspiring surge of a socialist presidential candidate. Successful movements have always discomfited those invested in the status quo, including progressives. White people of all political stripes will be challenged, even shaken by this movement. That is a cost worth bearing.

The heart of this movement could be Baltimore. Even if the city's problems are shared by at least half a dozen other cities in the US, there may be a critical mass of writers, authors, musicians and activists right here in Baltimore who ask old questions in new ways, develop new ideas, begin new conversations and lead the willing towards another way of defining a successful city that goes beyond counting downtown cranes on the one side and a litany of pathologies on the other towards the liberation of the minority that is in truth the majority. Coates himself has little hope for that outcome. He writes to his son:

“Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: To awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white . . . has done to the world. But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness.” (Between the World and Me).

Societies and individuals have often had their finest moments preceded by crisis, conflict and large amounts of negative energy bottled up in seemingly intractable situations. The Baltimore region of 2.7 million people can and must design a path out of the systemic failures that have dragged it down for too long. But long before that design can emerge more people have to understand the black perspective. Move over New Orleans, here comes Baltimore! If this city can apply what it's voices are telling us. 

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

White Privilege and Black Lives in the Baltimore Music Scene (Pitchfork)
Race and Music in Baltimore: Local musicians of color offer their perspectives (City Paper)
Ta Nehesi's "Between the World and Me" NYT Book Review
Lawrence Jackson, Christmas in Baltimore (short story)

The temptation is to believe that nothing has changed, but something has: Baltimore is blacker and poorer than it was then. It was not difficult to see who set buildings on fire there last week. The more salient concern is how cities become kindling in the first place (Jelanie Cobb, The New Yorker)

Share: