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Martin Luther King

Baltimore Needs to Embrace The Wire

By | ChangeEngine | 65 Comments

We’ve all heard it. Many of us have said it. It’s a plea, a prayer – uttered so often it’s damn near a mantra:

“We’re not just The Wire.”

Baltimore wants nothing more than to be seen as something other than a byword for crime and decay, for poverty and violence. We’re not just the wasteland made notorious by David Simon’s landmark series, occupied by drugslingers and sociopathic murderers and sicklied over with impenetrable despair. That’s just the image that’s been conjured up in the public imagination, we say. We’re sick of people’s eyes growing wide in horror when they hear what city we live in, the inevitable questions … “Is it like that? Is it just like The Wire?”

In the past few weeks here at ChangeEngine, we’ve been debating what might “save” Baltimore from a present and a future where so many are condemned to a shadow existence and forced to the margins by poverty and inequality. And yet it seems like what Baltimore wants to be saved from most of all is itself, to be delivered from the stain on our reputation, the shame of The Wire; to shunt those things that cast an ill light on our collective existence back into the shadows.

But that shame, left unchecked, will destroy us. If we truly want to save Baltimore, to save ourselves from the perpetual instability of illusory wealth and the criminal waste of lost promise; if we truly want to fulfill Dr. King’s vision of a “beloved community” rather than languish in the spiritual poverty of a divided society, we must not be ashamed. We must not shy away from what The Wire represents and the heavy burden it lays at our door … because we are The Wire and we need to own it.


What we’re saying when we deny The Wire is that we’re not just ‘those’ neighborhoods, not just a city of poor black people embroiled in the drug war. In trying to sweep those people and places from our consciousness, we not only caricature what The Wire actually depicted but fail to heed its prophetic call. As David Simon said:

“[T]hat’s what The Wire was about … people who were worth less and who were no longer necessary, as maybe 10 or 15% of my country is no longer necessary to the operation of the economy. It was about them trying to solve … an existential crisis. In their irrelevance, their economic irrelevance, they were nonetheless still on the ground occupying this place called Baltimore and they were going to have to endure somehow.”

When we say we’re not The Wire we’re saying we should be like one America, and forget the other. And that we can only succeed if these people, this other Baltimore, disappears. But that’s impossible, it’s unsustainable; it will undermine the very future we hope to create by ignoring the things that horrify and embarrass us. The ONLY way we can make Baltimore not just about The Wire is by embracing the story it tells about us.


“See, back in middle school and all, I used to love them myths,” says Omar, the predatory gunslinger who roams Baltimore’s streets like a swaggering pirate as he schools a sheriff’s deputy about the Greek god of war. So complete a work is The Wire, so vivid and eternally real are the likes of Omar, Stringer and Bubbles that these offending shadows have become our mythology, our epic.

Whether it’s Omar resplendent in a shimmering teal dressing gown, scowling at the terrified ‘puppies’ who fling their stashes his way on his early morning hunt for Honey Nut Cheerios; Clay Davis’s sheeeeeet! stretching on to the last syllable of recorded time; a forensic epiphany derived entirely from a dialogue of f-bombs; the death of Wallace, of Bodie and Sherrod, of Prop Joe; the fall of the Barksdales, Dukie’s descent or Cutty’s redemption – these moments confer an identity that’s deeply ours, as iconic and intrinsic as Poe’s mournful features and gutter requiem.

This is our story, an epic of the American post-industrial city struggling for existence and meaning where all sustaining truths and certainties have been annihilated. It has the power to unify our consciousness and to rouse us to collective action. The Wire didn’t focus on the “bad side” of Baltimore; it cast a glaring light on what was wrong with America. Its creators offered us a study of dysfunction and neglect – a diagnosis, a pessimistic prognosis, and no real hope of a cure. That part is up to us.

And yet the cures we’re presented with are largely exercises in denial – efforts to tell a different story rather than confronting and changing the one we have. We are told to ‘Believe’ in Baltimore, then beggar belief by proclaiming ourselves ‘The Greatest City in America.’ We swear up and down that we’re not The Wire, as though that wire is live and we dare not touch it.


In the standard gospel, salvation comes through expanding the ‘white corridor’ that runs along 83, pushing out the ‘bad Baltimore.’ The Grand Prix, the creative class, a shiny new development downtown – these are the pet miracles of urban renewal evangelism. But without justice, they can only be a mirage. Just as civil rights activists were willing to be beaten and bloodied because they knew that no-one is free unless all of us are free, not one of us can say he is truly wealthy as long as any of us is poor. As long as we’re erecting monuments to distraction, condo towers with a stunning view but no vision, we’ll be blind. No sustainable salvation can come of growing that privileged bubble. We’ll fool ourselves into complacency, into thinking we can ignore The Wire, and the bubble will burst.

Saving Baltimore requires a shift in thinking, a hard confrontation. It requires ambition and audacity – the kind that causes a person to get up every day and try to keep children from dying on the streets, to battle slumlords who profit from blight and misery, or fight to keep the prison industrial complex from throttling whole communities. We would do well to pay tribute and attention to those on the front lines of social change, who wrestle with the darkness, who suffer a thousand everyday defeats and win a thousand everyday victories in the struggle to make a better world.


Like them, we must grapple with the darkness. Most urgently, we must fight to end the drug war. As The Wire makes so vividly clear, the war on drugs has become a war on the urban underclass, a war on the most vulnerable and powerless. Each drug arrest in this city costs us at least $10,000. Statewide we spend hundreds of millions of dollars to incarcerate non-violent drug offenders, 90 percent of them African-American. This despite clear evidence that white and black people use and sell drugs at roughly the same rate.

In the starkest of terms, black (and poor) people are being arrested and incarcerated, their lives ruined, for something everyone does. And that is the greater cost. This war destroys families, robs children of their parents and leaves them destitute, cripples chances for employment and advancement, and causes young people to be murdered in the streets as they scuffle over turf in a society that gives them nowhere to call their own.

We can change that story. Think what all the resources squandered on this folly could do if devoted to social change, what dynamism could be unleashed. Think of what it would mean to reclaim all the talent and energy lost to the criminal justice system and to the miasma of distrust and despair that crushes and humiliates the spirit and leaves so many feeling that the game is rigged against them.

This is about more than just one policy. Just as we condemn an addict to the clawing, scraping chaos of the criminal underworld when we force him into the shadows, so too do we deny ourselves a brighter future and invite in all the ills we run from by denying what The Wire says about us. Baltimore could be the one city in America that truly confronts the issue of its underclass and the ravages of exclusion rather than pretending it’s not there and brutalizing it when it rears its head. We must resolve that we don’t want to run from The Wire, but rather change the system that generates those conditions.

The engine of salvation is not in our stars but in ourselves. We need a Manhattan Project for transformation, a space race for social change. Let’s work to provide the greatest rewards to those whose efforts most benefit the least well off. Let’s energize social change makers to move to Baltimore and cultivate those already here. And let’s start treating them like rock stars, not martyred idealists.

Baltimore doesn’t have a PR problem; we have a poverty problem. We don’t need a better image; we need a better way. We need to celebrate and attract those who want to make a difference, not engage in a desperate charade to prove we’re just the same. So Just Say Yes – we ARE the Wire. Only then can we change the story. Only then can we start building a city of which we’ll never be ashamed, a place where every one of us is truly cherished.

 

Martin and the Media

By | Tinted Lens | 4 Comments

Yesterday, people gathered to honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by attending prayer breakfasts and service projects, continuing to forge community through fellowship and action. His image was run in news stories, remembrances and his memorable quotes were posted widely on social media.

This is notable, given that generally people that look like Dr. King are largely absent from news, television and film as anything more than criminals, comedic foils or window dressing. Only this Saturday did SNL debut its first black female cast member in over a decade (alongside two black female writers found during their casting search). Onscreen and in the writer’s room, the voices and talents of black artists are not present to be heard and realized in the final product. This leads to both news and entertainment programs (reflections of how we experience the world) being created by a select group (read: cis white upper or middle class males).

That grand world envisioned by King where one is not judged first by their skin is far from being a reality when the depictions of people of color are forged from the assumptions of whites. When young black girls and young black boys don’t see reflections of themselves onscreen, they internalize the images they do see.

Less than           Violent                Undereducated                 Criminal               Helpless              Unstable

The messages the media bombards us with daily from advertisements to movies imprint on us what the ‘ideal’ is, who can be counted as good and trustworthy and who is to be questioned and regarded with suspicion and distrust.

These stereotypes play out every day in the way media spins stories. Did you see the recent on-field interview with NFL player Richard Sherman? He is being decried for screaming and generally coming off as crazed, but really, he was just riding an intense adrenaline wave. Think about it, not only had he just made the play that would take his team to the SUPER BOWL, but he had just survived a game where no less than four people had to be helped or carried off the field! Wouldn’t you be acting erratic and excitable too?

King’s Legacy itself has been sanitized for public consumption; he has been immortalized as a man of faith working for peace and nonviolence, not as a purported communist that was investigated by the FBI. The March on Washington for Jobs and Justice is widely remembered only as the occasion of the I Have a Dream speech while the larger issues and lists of demands continue to be omitted or pushed to the side because they make people confront uncomfortable truths. Americans are so quick to distill people down to idolized heroes that their essence gets lost in the process. For crying out loud, even the monument to Dr. King in DC is white!

With President Obama’s election in 2008, some have questioned whether America is a post-racial society. The reality remains that we have a long way to go. Until a broader range of the American experience is represented both onscreen and in the writers’ rooms and more people of color are brought on news programs as talking heads and experts, America denies the daily reality of almost 40 percent of her people. When the stories of American life are being written by whites painting blacks and other people of color as the ‘other’ we will all continue to be depicted as stereotypes. This prevents us from being able to start from a blank page and relate first as humans, let alone move forward together as a society.

It is incumbent upon all of us, black or white, to question what we’re being told. Ask yourself why media focused on a drug arrest in the inner city, but not the suburbs; why sitcoms are mostly intra-racial; or why dark skinned people rarely get to be the protagonist. Challenge stereotypes. Question your assumptions. And remember, if you’re not actively working against racism, you are serving the structures that perpetuate it.

Tinted Lens

By | Tinted Lens | 10 Comments

“I don’t want no peace, I need equal rights and justice” –Peter Tosh

Language. It encourages the exchange of ideas and information. But merely by opening one’s mouth, it can also betray where you’re from and how people will label you. The words we choose convey much more than their face-value meaning.

But what happens when members of a group use different words? Or the same words with different meaning? How do you move forward? How can you ensure you are actually working towards the same goal?

A few weeks ago, a friend was in a community discussion. She noticed that while the black and longer-term white activists spoke of ‘social justice,’ most of the other white community participants spoke of ‘social change.’

Let’s unpack this: ‘Justice’ is the quality of being just, impartial or fair; the establishment or determination of rights according to the rules of law or equity while ‘Change’ means to become or make something different.

When people speak of social justice, they hearken to a movement rooted in the concept that there is nothing inherently wrong with the black (and wider low-income) community. Rather, social justice takes issue with everyday ‘norms’ that serve to oppress and marginalize that community. The media perpetuates these ‘norms’ whether it be through reports of crime ‘in the black community’ or advertisements showing whites as good/pure while the black actor or model is evil/primal. These seemingly minor yet persistent depictions and images serve to imprint our collective minds with the thought that one type of people (black) is not to be trusted, that they aren’t as educated as the rest of us (white) and that any poverty is due to their own laziness. Social justice then, seeks to eradicate these lies and other barriers and to paint everyone in the same light, judging all by the content of their characters, to quote Dr. King.

This is intrinsically different from “social change,” which seeks to change behaviors, relationships and interactions independent of larger frameworks at play. It’s the difference between asking “what can we do to change this?” rather than asking why things are that way in the first place.

The social justice vs. social change dynamic can cause schisms and failure even when groups are authentic and well-intentioned. I worked in one community where half the group pushed for more community days (social change) and the others wanted to build mentorship programs and civic engagement training (social justice). The group split up and eventually the community day side was successful; but three years later there was only a minor difference in crime and unemployment was as bad as ever.

Social change is (by comparison) easier, it’s sexier, it results in happy photo ops with food and music. Social justice is work. It is shoulder-to-the-wheel every day, countering habits of privilege people don’t even know they have.

In this neighborhood, aligning successful adults with community youth, both ‘at-risk’ and successful, could have provided role models for youth that lacked images of success in their own homes or blocks. Helping youth and young adults vote, participate and make their voice heard in local issues could have lent a student perspective to school board decisions like the removal of music classes and extracurricular activities.

Here, both groups wanted to improve the neighborhood; one thought it could be done only with breaking bread together while the other wanted to tackle the larger issues without regard to celebrating the small successes. Social change is a part of social justice (it’s hard to imagine an effective mentor program without trust) but unless the larger WHY conversation is had and language explained, there is a disconnect and neither will succeed.

It is this place, at the juncture of two cities: white Baltimore and black Baltimore, that I will endeavor to explore in this column. As a mixed race Baltimore transplant, the lens through which I see this city is tinted by my experiences as a black woman raised in a largely white setting. Right now I have a foot in both Baltimores and am unsure of how to move back and forth between them. I look forward to examining that discomfort zone and discovering just how tinted our lenses really are.

 

IMAGE CREDIT. [Amber Collins].