For a few weeks in late April, Baltimore exploded in a short, furious burst of tension and anger, but the fuse leading to the powder keg had been lit decades ago. There was an element of inevitability in the outbreak of the brief anarchic episode, for years of festering social and economic unrest were bound to come to a head eventually.
While President Obama advised Americans in a White House statement , “Don’t just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns,” it seems that society at large has abandoned impoverished urban neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester, Baltimore, where Freddie Gray lived and died. Yet such communities did not become ghost towns overnight; the undoing of Sandtown- Winchester, and Freddie Gray, was years in the making.
A 2004 report from the Service Employee’s International Union details the economic history behind the decline of the inner city. Before World War II, Baltimore was home to the Bethlehem Steel leviathan, providing reliable wages and benefits to the waves of African Americans and European immigrants arriving in the city each day. Following the narrative of many major US cities, Baltimore rose with the advent of the age of industry, and fell as the national economy moved away from manufacturing and towards “white collar” services after the war. Since 1950, Baltimore has lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs.
Middle class whites followed the movement of business to the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s, yet many of their black counterparts were denied such opportunities by racist housing practices such as “redlining” (denying mortgages and business loans to residents of certain neighborhoods, usually black-majority areas) and “blockbusting” (developers urging white homeowners to sell their houses out of fear that minorities will move into the area). Middle class black people were trapped in bleak, commercially desolate ghettos alongside poorer newcomers.
The rise of neoconservatism in the 1970s and 1980s only exacerbated the plight of inner-city communities. Ronald Reagan’s economic policies, colloquially known as Reaganomics, simultaneously intensified income inequality and drastically cut social welfare spending, worsening the conditions of already impoverished communities like Sandtown-Winchester.
According to data from the Congressional Budget Office, between 1980 (the beginning of Reagan’s presidency) and 2007, the top one percent of households saw income grow by 275%, whereas the bottom twenty percent of households only saw a rise of 18%. In spite of these alarming statistics, Reagan’s tax cuts, per another CBO report, decidedly favored upper income brackets and shifted the burden to middle and low-income groups.
In order to justify the massive cuts in the welfare spending sustaining inner city communities like those in West Baltimore, Reagan cast the recipients of federal aid as people simply too lazy to find work. The “welfare queen” trope, an imagining of a woman living an extravagant lifestyle solely through welfare fraud, emerged in a 1976 speech given by Reagan and only added to negative stereotypes about residents of black majority urban neighborhoods. Reagan’s proposed solution, a system requiring welfare recipients to work before receiving financial aid, provided no relief due to the scarcity of jobs in many of these areas.
When a community lacks commercial opportunities and social services, it is not surprising that illegal activity will flourish. Attempts to remediate social ills, such as gang violence and drug trade in these neglected communities, were misguided at best, and disastrous at worst. The idea of a “War on Drugs” in inner cities, beginning with the Reagan administration in 1982, was behind policy decisions greatly expanding funding for drug enforcement agencies and implementing tough “zero tolerance” laws. Though few would argue against aiming to reduce addiction, these extremely harsh laws —and the racially charged rhetoric accompanying them— had dire social consequences that continue today.
A major criticism of the “War on Drugs” is that it reinforces the image of the urban poor, predominantly black and Hispanic, as violent criminals . The “1033” program in particular, which gives local authorities access to leftover military weaponry, has been described as fueling the distrust between civilians and law enforcement; this was seen last summer as tanks prowled the chaotic streets of Ferguson, Missouri.
When weapons used in war zones are used to patrol your neighborhood, it is impossible to not get the impression that you are seen as a threat; when those weapons are used to kill your unarmed neighbors, it is impossible to not feel threatened.
No matter how shocking the disorder in Baltimore has been, it is imperative to remember that it did not arise out of thin air; the death of Freddie Gray was the straw that broke the metaphorical camel’s back. Americans as a whole must take the tragedy of his death and the ensuing riots and make positive change: we must rethink the way in which we view urban poverty and racism, and address their deep-rooted causes rather than pursue temporary and ineffective solutions.