"In Baltimore, looking beyond race to classism"
by Vinnie Rotondaro, NCR, May. 2, 2015 http://ncronline.org/news/faith-parish/baltimore-looking-beyond-race-classism
Baltimore
A sense of calm, if not normalcy, returned to Baltimore
in the days following the riots over the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old
black man whose spine was broken while in police custody earlier this month.
On Wednesday, journalists and newscasters descended upon
the impoverished neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester, where Gray lived. It was
surreal scene, with smartly dressed reporters dotting an otherwise blighted
landscape of boarded-up buildings and jobless Baltimoreans hanging out by the
hundreds on stoops and street corners. It was the first time in years, perhaps ever,
that outside media had paid any attention to this largely African-American
community or its problems.
A short distance away, fully armed National Guard
soldiers stood sentinel outside the city's Western District police station,
where Gray -- who police say was arrested for possession of a switchblade --
was transported by paddy wagon and found unconscious.
Following upon the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael
Brown, as well many other unarmed people of color who lost their lives to
American law enforcement, the Baltimore riots marked yet another incident of
African-American community anger boiling over into violence.
For two Baltimore Catholics who have worked for many
years among the city's marginalized, however, the roots of that anger involves
more than race. These community stalwarts paint a picture of hardship and
exclusion that goes beyond the staple media narrative of young black men
suffering under police brutality.
Outright racism "is much better than it used to be
here, and I expect in most other cities," said Fr. Richard Lawrence, a
fifth-generation Baltimorean who's served at St. Vincent de Paul Church, the
oldest Catholic parish in the city, since 1973.
"There are very few hardcore racists among the
police these days," he said. "That's been unacceptable behavior for a
long time now, and most of them have been weeded out. But there is still the
feeling that [the police] are the Roman troops in Jerusalem, the agents of the
occupying power. And if you revise your model a little to look at class as well
as race, that pretty well holds true."
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"It's classism," concurred Brendan Walsh of the
Viva House, home of the Baltimore Catholic Worker, located a short distance from
Sandtown-Winchester. "You know the stuff about the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent? Well, when you get here, we're talking about
people who are well below the poverty line.
"It's particularly vicious."
In explaining how it got to be that way, Lawrence and
Walsh both spoke of decline in quality and quantity of jobs.
"When we started the Viva House," which runs a
popular soup kitchen in the neighborhood and was featured in the influential
HBO series "The Wire," which dramatized many of Baltimore's
persistent problems, "we saw people walking down the street going to work
in the morning,"
Walsh said.
A hodgepodge of factory work existed; many worked at
Bethlehem Steel, employer of roughly 40,000, Walsh said. "There was a
place called Coopers. Montgomery Ward had the biggest catalogue store on the
east coast. There were a couple raincoat factories."
Now all of that is gone, and a disproportionate number of
young black men lack for work as a result, Lawrence said.
"There are a lot of reasons for that," he said,
"the most basic one being that human beings are increasingly
unnecessary."
"It's not just a question of shipping jobs to
China," he said. "It's a question of turning jobs that a person does
into something that a machine does. ... There's just a labor slack built into
our economy, and it tends to drift towards the bottom."
Former Baltimore Sun reporter Antero Pietila, author of
the book Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City, which
examines Baltimore history, said age-old effects from discriminatory municipal
and lending policy might have exacerbated decline for many black Baltimoreans.
"In 1910, Baltimore became the first American city
to require that all residential blocks be segregated by race," he said.
"And between 1935 and 1937, nearly 300 American cities were redlined by
the Home Owners' Loan Corporation," a government-sponsored
corporation created as part of the New Deal. "Redlining" refers to
the practice of using race and ethnicity to determine mortgage eligibility in
specific neighborhoods.
Baltimore was among the redlined cities. The maps created
a "two-tier mortgage system," Pietila said: "one rate for whites
-- basically -- and another for minorities."
This combined with historic population loss following the
World War II, the destruction of many public housing facilities, the
inexhaustible creep of gentrification, and the exodus of the local Catholic
church (three parishes have closed in the area around the Viva House) created a
people left behind in neighborhoods like Freddie Gray's, Walsh said.
Even a $130 million community-building initiative made in
the mid-1990s with public and private funding couldn't solve the neighborhood's
problems.
"You had a whole group of people with nothing to
do," Walsh said. "And that's when the drugs came in."
Baltimore has always had a problem with narcotics, Walsh
said, especially heroin. "But when crack cocaine came, particularly in the
'90s, it got brutal around here."
Murders abounded, and the police responded by
"getting brutal" in their own way.
When former Baltimore mayor and potential presidential
candidate Martin O'Malley introduced a zero-tolerance policing system to the
city, said Walsh, "we would literally see cops jump out [of their patrol
cars] and force residents against the wall."
"We'd see Baltimore street guys having to drop their
trousers right on the street as [police] searched them," he said.
"And for minuscule stuff, they'd bring the wagon and pile people in."
A sometimes-deadly cycle between cops and corner boys
developed in the streets.
Trade in illegal narcotics flourished because, according
to Lawrence, it was an "alternative" for folks left with nothing
else.
"You could make it there," he said. "You
wouldn't last long, but if you did well, you would do well. There was serious
money to make." But it amounted to "disorganized crime," he
said, "the biggest source of violence in Baltimore City today."
"Everybody's fighting for a corner, and since we're
doing a war on drugs," he said, "we're going to lock up everybody we
can. And the easiest people to lock up, of course, are the street-level dealers
... and that means he's never going to get a job for the rest
of his life."
"These are the marginal characters of society,"
Lawrence said. "The folks who have been forced out of society, who are
just plain frustrated, mad at the world." The folks "who are
frustrated with the discrimination that's been inflicted on them and the people
they know by the police, and others."
The game has been going on for too long, said Walsh and
Lawrence, both of whom were in Baltimore the last time riots broke out, in
1968.
"Things are going to have to change," Lawrence
said. "You can't just toss somebody in the wagon and give them a 'rough
ride.' "
"When you're white and you're arrested, it just
isn't the same," Walsh said. "Everybody is going to have to admit
that."
Yet Walsh said he believes there is more to the story --
that the violence and anger that Baltimore has seen is also rooted in
"inequality."
A portrait of Malcom X hung above him as he spoke in
dining room of the Viva House, where he and his wife have fed countless
homeless and working poor Baltimoreans over the years. It included a quote.
"I believe that there will ultimately be a clash
between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there
will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for
everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe
that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think it will be based on
the color of the skin."
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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