I. View of East Baltimore from Johns Hopkins
School of Public Health,
9th Floor
November 30, 2004
construction crane
turns imperceptibly
holding taut the wrecking ball
poised
Johns Hopkins
waits for East Baltimore to
crumble
when he is finished
only the prison & university
will be left standing
shoulder to shoulder
brick to brick
xxx
II. View of East Baltimore from the Public Defender’s
Office, Baltimore City Detention Center
February 26, 2005
pigeon shifts outside the window
rustling a leaf stuck in the grate
no light comes through
pane’s painted over
know the noise by
flashing shadows
fluttering wings
the only natural light:
a crack in the opaque plastic
lining the stairwell on the southside
the view: a pile of concrete rubble, parked cars and barbed
wire
the women duck down to see,
“what’s the weather like?”
third floor smells of jail food: greasy and acidic
one woman pauses during an interview
conspiratorially she says “don’t look now, but
there’s a mouse right underneath you. look at him go!”
another woman has so much pain it hurts to sit up
doctors said she had “a abnormal uterus”
wanted to take out a little piece and have a closer look
got arrested before her appointment
hasn’t told the guards yet
afraid they won’t believe her
“but why would I fake that?
I’ve bled five times this month
that’s never happened before.
I’m worried.
That’s not normal, is it?”
xxx
December 16, 2004
Where am I in this?
When I first got to Baltimore
I had never seen anything like it. The segregation. The rows upon rows of
abandoned houses. In San Francisco,
property is too valuable to be left vacant. The whole city’s landscape has been
turned over in the past eight or nine years since the dot-com boom. Newly
constructed live/work lofts stand vacant because they are unaffordable, a gaudy
new eyesore; not because they are abandoned or boarded up.
In Baltimore
I saw for the first time the kinds of segregation I’d grown up hearing about.
The dividing line between neighborhoods black and white: Greenmount Avenue. And
that is not to say there is not segregation in San Francisco, because there is. If anything
its “prosperity” has reduced the black population there from 16% to 8% in the
past ten years. What were once thriving black neighborhoods are now being
steadily coopted by white hipsters, bars and cafes. As a queer white girl I am
by no means free from implication in the gentrification conspiracy. We queers
are, after all, often the first “pioneers.”
And yet. I had never seen eight houses out of ten on a block
abandoned before I came here. I had worked for years with heroin injectors
doing outreach, needle exchange, overdose prevention. But I had never seen so
much of the adult population strung out on dope in one small place. Never seen
regular folks shopping at Safeway, nodding with shopping carts inside the store. The kinds of
desperation I was used to I had assumed were the results of living in a city
where housing is nearly impossible to come by if you’re poor and where the cost
of living means there are around fifteen or twenty thousand people sleeping on
the streets, under bridges, and in public parks every night. I had assumed that
having a place to live, a squat, a roof of one’s own (not a homeless shelter, I
know how unsafe those are), was the place from which to start making life
changes. I’d seen it work for kids I knew. Get arrested. Go into a residential
treatment program. Get a job, a house, a life. Or. Get SSI, get a SRO hotel
room. Things start to stabilize. (Or they don’t and you end up back on the
streets and start all over.)
To see so many people living here in “abandominiums” threw
me off. To see so much poverty that it was clear no amount of housing could
bring an equally stable life. The cause was clear: corporate divestment,
manufacturing removal, suburban flight. No jobs. No money. Leaves a vacuum
filled by street economy. It makes sense. I read about it in The Corner and got
a better understanding of the city I’d just moved into. I thought hard about
what it meant to be perceived as just another “white girl on a dirt bike,” except
I was not buying dope on the corner, just chugging up Biddle St. heading to
school for public health at Johns Hopkins.
xxx
On my first day at Hopkins there was a security briefing
where students were warned not to walk alone at night, not to park their cars
on the street, not to venture off campus or out of sight of the two hundred
some security guards and police officers that patrolled the six block radius
surrounding the hospital, nursing, medical and public health schools. The
speech conjured up images of an ivory tower surrounded by fire breathing
dragons and a moat with a drawbridge that was tightly closed. I contemplated
throwing a Molotov cocktail at the podium. I wanted to ask the speaker who
protects the people of East Baltimore from the
police, and from interpersonal violence? But in a room of four hundred people, on
the first day of school, I knew it wasn’t the time or place. I went up to the
speaker afterwards and asked that he check the underlying racism in his
language. Calling him on it helped me feel a little less crazy, but the
reaction of a woman who overheard our conversation about how she never walks
alone in East Baltimore served as a reminder that I was not in San Francisco anymore.
xxx
Since getting here and starting to grow accustomed to the
dichotomous landscape of poverty and prosperity, of racial “disparity” (as
systemic racism is so apolitically described in medical academia), I keep
conjuring up this image from the film The Battle of Algiers. In it, this woman, driven to armed revolution by the
oppression of her people, stands in a café, explosives in her purse, looking at
the white (French) café goers, chatting away obliviously. She knows they are
not responsible, directly. But, like the Afrikaners in South Africa
who benefited from apartheid, like white middle class US citizens who benefit from
privilege, they did not see that their comfort and ease came as a result of the
exploitation of Algerian land and people. She looks around, feeling the weight
of her decision, and, in service of greater revolutionary cause, orders a coke,
plants her purse full of explosives beneath a stool at the counter, and leaves.
I keep thinking about what it means to be those café goers,
and how much those benefiting from white privilege can be held responsible for
the atrocities carried out in our service. How is it that the activist scenes
here can be so segregated? How is it that everyone is not working around issues
of race and fighting white supremacy/privilege, in a city that is majority
African-American and so obviously in need of human resources? What is it that
enables non-Black to fight for bike lanes, for “peace” globally, for abstract
issues that we understand to have local implications (and they do) but which do
not speak to, or generate from, the local community? What does it mean to ride
critical mass down Greenmount Avenue, in festive Halloween costumes? To ride
critical mass past the jail that we only enter in service or in 24 hour stints
post-protest? Where is the dialogue--no, the action--around race in the mostly white
activist community in Baltimore? How are our struggles not inextricably linked?
How can I fight for my liberation and not others’?
How can “anarchist white boys from Towson”
not see that everything they think they are fighting for is based on issues
that effect first and foremost people
of color in Baltimore
City (prisons,
capitalism, sexism, class-exploitation, police brutality, white supremacy)?
What is my role in this, as an anarchist queer Jewish white
girl, studying at Hopkins
on scholarship, there ostensibly to get some skills to bring back to the
community, getting more disillusioned each day? What role do I play, riding the
shuttle from Homewood
campus to Monument St.,
a tourist in this town? I do my project in the jails, hoping that a needs assessment will help put some better services and policies in place to improve
the lives of women, both in and out of jail. I raise my hand and spout
revolutionary rhetoric every chance I can get. I get a reputation for being a Big
Mouth. I know who my friends are. I make my opinions known. I vow not to remain
in academia after this program. I check out what’s going on with activism in Baltimore, and try to
contribute within the limits of my time and ability. I try to listen, make
connections, and build bridges that will last after I am gone. I get off the
bus and walk through the streets of Baltimore,
alone.
April 30, 2015
post script: #BlackLivesMatter #Justice4FreddieGray
