Urban Discoveries Baltimore

Like the girls my granddad warned me about, Baltimore’s got a reputation. In both the case of the girls and that of the town, the claim is truer the less one examines it. Which is how reputations work. Never mind that we’re the city that brought you club music, Michael Phelps, and tea-bagging (the good kind), ask a resident how people from other places view Baltimore, and the answer will involve a grimace. Likely enough you’ll also hear a cutesy/horrifying nickname for the city tossed out with a mournful shake of the head. I do this, too. And there are plenty of legitimate reasons people think this is a dangerous place to live. For one, this is a dangerous place to live. But I’m not sure we’re not enjoying it.

Take a look at the Baltimore Sun’s demographically adjustable map of murders, and you’ll quickly gather a few impressions. First, that there are a lot of murders here. Second, that most of them are happening in the same way (gunshot) to the same group of people (black males). (A note: to take 2008 as an example, you may initially get the idea that only about half of the victims of homicide were black, until you discover that almost every one of the remaining half is listed as being of “Unknown” race. Presumably this means that these murders did not actually occur in 2008, and that of the murders that did occur in 2008, we’ve probably not discovered all of them.) And third, that within the city, there really aren’t very many places where murders haven’t happened, unless you count ‘the edges’ as a place.

Here, then, are three meaningful reasons we have a reputation. First, the actual body count. Second, cultural segregation (wait, I’ll get there). And third, proximity of economically disparate communities. Meaning, the poor and the not-so-poor may live two blocks from one another, but we don’t hang out at the same bars. We don’t have non-transactional encounters (corporate or criminal). And we sharpen our sense of our own customs on the whetstone of our neighbors’. We’re more certain of what we’re like when we see what’s unlike us.

But what’s the other side of Baltimore? Celebrated quirkiness. Bee-hive hair and cat-eye specs. Roller girls and Wham City. Pink flamingos. All to the good, say I. Only, we’ve started to become the college station DJ of ourselves. We’ve started to like our style because it’s weird instead of because it’s still worth liking. Baltimore has been a locus of toleration since 1649, but there’s a big difference between doing your thing no matter who doesn’t like it and doing your thing in hopes that someone doesn’t like it.

Crime fits creepily into this swaggering routine. It’s cooler to say you’re from Bulletmore than to claim the Livermush capital of North Carolina. And, what’s more, the self-perpetuating momentum of local subculture works beyond the domain of the ironic hipster. B-more’s unofficial ban on snitching is (among other things, including distrust of authority, dislike of outsiders, fear, and uncompromising solidarity) an iteration of the urge to maintain the local mode. Actual cultures don’t survive this way. Meticulously preserving any way of life is like constantly gluing your dead skin back onto your body.

Baltimore’s problems, like its successes, are blindingly complex, and it’s the province of real scholars, journalists, and lawmakers to work out meaningful solutions. This blog is not a substitute for anything but other, less good, blogs. That said, we’re going to have a hard time shaking Baltimore’s reputation until we’re really willing to let it go.

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