Tag

race

Bridges Between Baltimores

By | Tinted Lens | 17 Comments

Race and crime in Baltimore has been top of mind for its residents lately. With our homicide count at 33 for the year and crime escalating daily, there has been much discussion around our problems and what the community and the city are doing to fix them.

ChangeEngine’s own Hasdai Westbrook, has been inspired to put fingers to keyboard followed up by voice to microphone to weigh in on the topic. With To #SaveBmore, Embrace The Wire, Hasdai’s thesis (and one I tend to agree with) is that to make Baltimore whole, we must actively embrace ALL of its parts, from the shiny and new of Harbor East to the older and a bit grimey of Greenmount Avenue.

When I first moved to Baltimore, I asked for neighborhood recommendations from everyone I knew here. These were my (white, middle class) aunt and uncle, their friends or contacts (mostly white), and my grad school colleague (you guessed it, also white). They pointed me to the safe ‘I’: Canton, Fells Point, Federal Hill, Mt. Vernon, Charles Village, Hampden, Roland Park.

These places were ‘safe’; they were where people had faith that I could start a new life on the right foot. From their perspectives, other neighborhoods were dangerous areas where people like us just don’t go.

The problem with this is that, while I was raised as a Person Like Us, I look more like the dangerous ‘them.’ While Highlandtown, Hampden, Fells Point and Patterson Park may be seen as trendy and the places to be, these are the same neighborhoods some people don’t go into because there’s a legacy of white violence against black people. Dr. Tara Bynum related this history on the Mark Steiner show last week, also highlighting that we are guided by a small subset of people’s idea of safety. The reason race and crime have come to the fore is because a white woman wrote a piece on her fears of living in the city. So, why do we only discuss issues when white people no longer feel safe?

If you grew up poor and black in Baltimore, there are neighborhoods you may never have been in because they were outside your reference area. To top it off, going to a newly trendy, but historically racist neighborhood is neither enticing nor economically comfortable.

On the other hand, if your opinions are shaped by your lived experience being white, middle class and informed by mass media, it is easy to live in fear of the Wire-inspiring streets of East and West Baltimore.

So how do we mix the two cities? Bike Party each month strives to cross neighborhood boundaries and take folks where they may not usually go, but that’s from the comfort and safety of your bike seat. How do we forge meaningful relationships between neighborhoods?

Healing the city takes more than talking about it. It takes stepping out of your comfort zone and working with people different from yourself towards what we all want: a safe place to life, learn, raise a family and go about the everyday business of living.

So volunteer at a community garden, tutor a student, clean up a park, go to that restaurant across town that looks interesting, but you have never stopped in. It sounds cliché, but every little action adds up.

Wait, Is That Art?

By | Tinted Lens | 4 Comments
Russian Editor-in-Chief Dasha Zhukova

Russian Editor-in-Chief Dasha Zhukova

The latest outrage graced my Facebook feed last week. Did you see it? Russian fashion editor and debutante Dasha Zhukova posed at her desk atop a ‘chair’ made of a bound and contorted black woman. When I saw it, I did not feel outraged; rather the picture engendered a sinking feeling of ‘yup- I’m sure she did.’ This heaviness in the pit of my stomach is something that comes with seeing yet another example of accidental racism.

My disappointment over this depiction of a white woman sitting on a subjugated black woman contrasted with my appreciation of the work of Nate Hill mere days before. Hill is a black artist from Brooklyn who has begun a selfie series called Trophy Scarves (NSFW). In these photos he is dressed formally with a naked white woman around his neck. While others have called his work blatantly sexist, I found it to be an imaginative social commentary.

So why do I consider one to be great art and the other to be bigoted stupidity?

Intention.

The chair Zhukova used was an homage to the 60’s artist, Allen Jones who did several in a series where women (both black and white) were shown as tables and chairs. Though she posted the picture to her Instagram herself, Zhukova insists that “This photograph, which has been published completely out of context, is of an artwork intended specifically as a commentary on gender and racial politics.” This homage, however, was entirely lost on the viewer as Jones was never mentioned, his work being used seemingly only to portray how edgy and fashion-forward Zhukova’s magazine Garage is.

Hill’s Trophy Scarves project, on the other hand, is meant to shed light on the social phenomenon of some black men using white women as status symbols. The project’s mission statement is “I wear white women for status and power.” He is deliberately portraying these women as accessories to confront a deeply ingrained and problematic societal perception — as he said in an interview with Vice, “there are people who see certain races as status symbols, and someone had to comment”.

Nate Hill and one of his Trophy Scarves

Nate Hill and one of his Trophy Scarves

Therein lies the key. To be a provocateur, one must put thought into one’s actions. If an image takes an article worth of context, it is best left off of social media sites that only deal in snippets and tag lines. It is fine to outrage people, but you have to guide them into your thinking if you want anything meaningful to come of that outrage. When attempting a commentary, see your work through the lens of others and make sure your audience knows what you mean to say.

#SaveBmore – Why You’re Only Hearing About Income Inequality Now

By | #SaveBmore, Tinted Lens | 6 Comments

Income inequality is rattling around the collective consciousness of late on the backs of President Obama’s remarks and Pope Francis’ denunciation of trickle-down economics in the first lengthy writing of his papacy. The gap between the poor and the super-rich in the United States has been steadily widening for decades but only recently has it risen to the top of the agenda for the media, citizens and politicians.

Why? Why only now? Why has this issue been largely ignored for so long?

Because the effects of the wealth gap for the past several decades have mostly been felt by people of color.

Here is where I could trot out the numbers highlighting how the middle class has shrunk since the 1960’s, the map of the U.S. if land were distributed by wealth, the comparison of CEO pay ratios, or the number of hours of minimum wage earning it takes to afford an apartment. But I’ll leave that for others.

According to the 2008 census, in Baltimore City, half of all African-American households earned less than $35,000 per year, while only one-third of white households fell under this low-income threshold. The prevalence of poverty among black city residents is almost double that for whites. While the Black middle class makes up 40 percent of the African-American population, this has always lagged behind the number of middle-class whites. This smaller number of middle class citizens is attributable to the wealth gap between blacks and whites. In 1984 there was an $85,000 difference in the wealth of white households over their black counterparts determined by an Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP) study; over the following 25 years, it ballooned to $236,500. That’s a $151,500 increase!

IASP attributed the national wealth gap to home ownership, household income, unemployment, and financial support/inheritance while writings on Baltimore have highlighted education, pathways to careers and discriminatory hiring practices as our major obstacles. In a city that is 70 percent black, this level of poverty and inequality drags the entire city down.

How do we save our sinking city? Well, according to the Baltimore Ethical Society, we can overcome our apathy and get mad about it. Spread the YouTube video on inequality; if you’re in a position to hire, re-examine how you’re evaluating candidates of color; mentor disadvantaged youth, or better yet, give them apprenticeship opportunities if you work in a trade. Consider cooperatives as your next start-up business model and utilize Community Wealth by looking to and building on a neighborhood’s existing assets.

The shocking thing is, what will #SaveBmore is already here (as my fellow ChangeEngine blogger Robyn Stegman argues). We have the population, we have the innovators, and we have the entrepreneurial spirit. What we need is for the two Baltimores to talk to one another and we’ll set the world on fire.

Biting Galileo’s Style

By | ChangeEngine, Silo-Breakers | No Comments

Yes, we admit it: we’re shamelessly ripping off Galileo’s style for our own purposes. But in this case we come by it honestly. Our impromptu Silo-Breakers series prompted a tremendously thought-provoking contribution from our friend, Rodney Foxworth, on the power of racial divisions in Baltimore. So provocative in fact that it sparked its own spirited back-and-forth via email, even as we were discussing the mundane details of when to schedule publication.

The exchange put us in mind of Galileo’s “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” where he framed his argument for the Copernican model of the universe, in which the earth revolves around the sun, in the form of a classic Platonic dialogue. Perhaps the reference is obscure, but then again maybe not. Perhaps there’s as much progress to be made scouring our souls as gazing at the stars. So here, in somewhat briefer form, we present our dialogue on the cosmology of our personal universes and on the forces that keep us apart…

(TAKE THE BREAKOUT CHALLENGE! What’s YOUR silo? And how do you break out of it? Let us know @ChangEngine #breakoutchallengefacebook.com/ChangingMedia, or email hasdai@changingmediagroup.com.)