It’s time to stop hating Baltimore. Time to stop tweeting nasty comments, time to stop posting or affirming angry and racist tropes about this old city, time to stop proclaiming that you’re never coming here again. It doesn’t help. It hurts.
The Freddie Gray unrest was seven years ago, and while Baltimore is still a violent place, I take the post-9/11 view of it: “If we abandon the city, then the criminals have won.”
It’s time to show some love — or at least some like.
Obviously, this message is not for people who live here and care about the city. It’s not aimed at the thousands of angels who every day try to make Baltimore a better place. It’s not aimed at the many suburbanites who work and play here. There are a lot more of you than there are haters.
And I need to stop myself here and pull back on that term, haters.
While some people might hold race-based animus toward the city — and you need only look at the history of white flight (or some of my mail) to appreciate it — a lot of people are just frustrated with the pace of Baltimore’s progress in recovering from the unrest of 2015. The rate of murders since then blocks all other information, and they decide they want no part of the city.
But, while the homicide rate remains appalling and tragic, those who live nearby and let their frustration rise to the point of anger, dismissing Baltimore with the worst pejoratives, overlook a significant fact of life: You live here. Like it or not, Baltimore is your city. We are all in some way Baltimoreans. If you’re traveling on business or vacation and someone asks where you’re from, you might say Maryland, but I doubt you’d leave out the Baltimore part, especially if the Ravens or Orioles are doing well, or if someone you love survived cancer at one of our great hospitals.
Many people in the counties think they can get by without Baltimore, ignoring or minimizing its part in their social, economic and cultural satisfaction.
But that’s myopic. Baltimore defines this region, and there’s no way to redefine it. So, even if you live in Monkton, Pasadena, Westminster or Bel Air, disparaging your central city is shortsighted and self-destructive.
When I moved to Baltimore 46 years ago this month, white families had been leaving the city for two decades. Records show that the city’s population loss started around 1954, the year of the Supreme Court’s finding that “separate but equal” in public education was unconstitutional. “Whites did not want their kids going to school with Black kids,” I heard a senior white woman say many years ago, offering those 12 words as an explanation for everything.
There’s a lot more to it: The construction of highways that led to the new suburbs, the loss of big industry and the union jobs that fostered socioeconomic mobility, redlining and blockbusting, racial separation and the concentration of poverty, the increased use of drugs and the high rates of incarceration that came with it, the surge in guns and violent crime. Those were seismic developments that changed the Baltimore landscape.
The clock says all this happened over 70 years, so the tendency is to think that Baltimore should have adapted to all that by now; we should have less poverty, better schools and less crime.
But I call Baltimore “our city of perpetual recovery” for a reason: It is still climbing back. Even when William Donald Schaefer was mayor, during the first Baltimore renaissance, the city was losing ground. Schaefer was a persistent civic cheerleader because he knew the population and tax base was breaking away under his feet.
So much has happened since — so much that’s good — but the problems remained.
During that time, I noticed a shift in tone among people who had left the city. They went from expressing nostalgic fondness and regret to expressing hopelessness and full-bore hostility.
I call it out now because it strikes me as foolishly self-destructive. Baltimore’s detractors need to consider their part in the city’s protracted recovery. You’re part of the reason it’s taking so long.
There is a clear political divide in all this: People who hold staunchly conservative or more extreme Trumpian views claim the city’s problems emanate from too many years of Democratic rule. But then, Republicans have had nothing to do with the city for more than half a century, and the GOP has little interest in urban policy. The party’s current leader called this majority Black city a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” while making the racist declaration that “no human being would want to live there.” Of course, he offered no solutions.
I’m not writing this to excuse city leadership. We’ve been through an embarrassing run of corruption and mediocrity. We’re still behind on police recruitment. We’re still losing population. Too many people are still reluctant to travel into the city because of the violent crime and the squeegee kids. I hear that stuff all the time.
But the last thing Baltimore needs is further disparagement, further abandonment by our own. It doesn’t make sense.
Consider the Orioles. The team needed to do its rebuild to get more people onboard. Baltimore needs more people onboard to do its rebuild. The city has to do better, and right soon. But I guarantee you, it will do better with a bigger rooting section.
