First, a caveat: I am not an expert on Baltimore. Don't take what I say as the gospel truth; come here and find out for yourself. Hell, I'll even make you dinner or something if one of my loyal readers visits. This is just my (admittedly limited) observations.
I moved into Pikesville, a suburb on the northwest corner of the city (I'm half a block away from the Bmore city neighborhood of Mount Washington). In the five or six weeks before I finally got a car, I was taking public transit to Hopkins every day. Aside from my rather low opinion of the system itself (precipitating my decision to buy a car), I was somewhat disappointed by some of the things I noticed about the city, particularly with regards to race relations.
Baltimore is roughly two thirds black and one third white (virtually no other ethnicities exist in the city). I imagine the suburbs are a bit more skewed in the direction of whites (or other ethnicities), but that's pretty much the makeup of the city itself. The area from which I picked up a bus and then the Metro (subway) is one of the few predominantly white neighborhoods in the city. Yet oddly, the proportion of white people taking public transit, even from my area, was vanishingly small, confined to students and the occasional downtown professional who didn't care to drive to work (don't get me started on the traffic flow management here...).
This bothered me for a while, and I think I've finally put my finger on why. As far as I can tell, Baltimore has rigid racial boundaries. Any number of children I've spoken to have unconsciously voiced a feeling that the other race was somehow 'other' (both white and black kids, though my sample of white kids was larger). There are extremely few neighborhoods that have any significant amount of racial mixing; even if people live in the same area, they simply don't associate with other races.
And what bothered me about public transit was this: Baltimore's public transit is shitty. It's slow, rarely on schedule, and it can't even get you anywhere (one subway line with 20 or so stops, a light rail akin to Metra from Chicago, and a small and poorly organized bus system). Before I bought a car, I felt trapped I could not use my time effectively to shop, commute, study, etc. It was simply impossible to get to any number of places in and around the city in any decent amount of time (and sometimes not at all).
Now, the alternative to taking public transit is to own a car - but that is an extremely expensive proposition, no? Car insurance rates in Baltimore city are extremely high due to the car theft rate. So that leaves those without the means of buying a car in a bit of a fix.
The black people riding the Metro were not poor, or criminals, or anything else I've heard as stereotypes in the last two months. They were just people trying to get to work or school, like everyone else... but they simply didn't have the means for their own transportation. To me, this highlighted and extremely disturbing financial divide that correllates with racial lines. These people were not from the inner city, yet they still were clearly not as well off as their white counterparts in similar jobs and situations. The abominable state of the Baltimore public transit system exacerbates this problem, splitting the city into 'haves' and 'have nots' in a very recognizable manner.
(I should mention that while I'm sure this happens in every city, it's nowhere near as obvious. In Chicago, vast hordes of people of every stripe take public transit every day, because it gets them to work/school/whatever with a minimum of fuss. It's just that in Baltimore, the cost/benefit analysis is so skewed in favor of cars that the makeup of the population riding the train can be so instructive.)
I found this obervation coupled with other tidbits I picked up here and there to be... disappointing. Why do we have such obvious and rigid racial/economic boundaries? I grew up being taught the credo that people were just people regardless, and should be treated accordingly. On any random street in my neighborhood you could find a dozen nationalities, ethnicities, religions, etc. Why do some places have these sharp divisions? I thought such silliness was a thing of the past.
Now, I can understand the existence of urban ghettos, no matter how I abhor them. But these were normal, middle class, working people. Why do they also need to reap the harvest of our countries' past mistakes?
I think that these glaringly obvious demarcations between the races is the thing that I most dislike about Baltimore. I am sad that situations like this still exist.
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3 comments:
Dude, I grew up with that everywhere.. truth is, that Chicago has those things too, it's not as clearcut, because racism in Chicago is more subtle. Racism in Virginia!--HAH! I have lots of stories to tell about that. It's not just B'more, though. You were very lucky to grow up with your parents teaching you what they did... plenty of Chicagoans didn't benefit from such teachings and live and act out racist stuff even if the lines are not as clearcut. Read A Raisin in the Sun sometime.. it's set in Chicago... and sadly is pretty indicative of southside stuff even today.
Of course racism (or more generally, bigotry) is present in Chicago - it's present nearly everywhere where there is a close mixture of people of differing races/ethnicities/religions. But... I think much of the racism in Chicago is tied to societal histories rather than actively perpetuated circumstances.
To explain: the great disparities between whites and most other ethnicities in American cities has its roots in gross economic discrimination that was rampant from 50-200 years ago (even or perhaps specifically in the North, where although blacks were not exactly slaves, neither were they remarkably free). The existence of inner city slums and the attendent societal structures that make escaping the ghetto extremely difficult are a product of terrible injustices of the past. Of course, these injustices should be remedied if at all possible (and slowly, some cities - including Chicago - are trying to treat the problem increasingly aggressively), but they are not *necessarily* the product of individual prejudices.
And I would argue that most people I know in Chicago (with some regrettable exceptions) simply lack the ingrained assumptions about racial boundaries that I've found in Baltimore. Fundamentally, people are people. Sure, disadvantaged people may be disproportionately of some races, and that may in turn influence things like differential crime rates - but fundamentally, people are people, and should be treated as such. The individual racism is much less obvious (and I would like to say, less prevalent), and the institutional racism (e.g. access to city programs/services/etc.) is much lower, and often rooted historically and not in policy.
BTW, I've read A Raisin in the Sun. Several times. *smiles* I won't deny that the play highlighted some problems in Chicago, but I'd like to point out two things: One, that was set in... 1920s? 1930s? And things have changed significantly since then. Even then, though, things were much better in Chicago - there was no official policy of segregation, though Chicago has always been comprised of distinct neighborhoods along sharp lines - sometimes by race, sometimes by income level, sometimes by nationality or religion. And while there was and is discrimination, I think the prevailing attitude in Chicagoans of every stripe (let's ignore the North Shore suburbs for now ;) ) has been to try eliminating these residues as quickly as possible... and this has been the attitude for a *long* time. Chicago was one of the centers of the civil rights movement, etc, etc.
I actually had an interesting talk with my grandparents a while ago about some of their time growing up on the West Side of Chicago in the old Jewish community (in the 20s and early 30s). Their neighborhood - and schools - were NOT segregated, though of course the neighborhood was predominantly Jews of European extraction, it wasn't exactly Boro Park. Peoples of other colors, religions, or ethnicities, were treated identically. Of course, getting *into* such a neighborhood would require some money and/or courage, but there were no barriers to entry. You can't say that about many cities in America even today, let alone 80 years ago (though of course formal forms of discrimination are illegal).
So, was there disparities in the living situations? Sure. Was there discrimination? Some. Do these still exist today, as unfortunate historical relics? Definitely. But is it as blatant, institutional, and are the racial boundaries so obviously ingrained in the consciousnesses of Chicagoans? Hardly.
THAT is what disturbed me. No place is perfect, but this place is very *imperfect*.
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