Our kick-off event for CSJ 2015 just ended and our brains are still buzzing. Dr. Kelber-Kaye, Associate Director of the Honors College, gave us a history lesson about Baltimore to give context to and explain why things are the way they are in Baltimore City. This information is an excellent foundation of knowledge to have when talking about Baltimore and to take with you to all of our other CSJ events.

Missed the event? No worries! Below is a recap of all the important information. It’s a little longer than most of our blog posts, but all of the information is important. We’ve written it in an outline form to make it easier to read.

Books you absolutely need to read about Baltimore:

1. Black Baltimore: A New Theory of Community
2. The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History
3. Baltimore ‘68

The Kerner Report, published in 1968, was the first report of its kind to blame structural inequalities for issues like crime, poverty, and public health among African American communities. Previously, these issues had been blamed on individual communities and black people themselves. This excerpt from the Kerner Report sets the tone for the information you need to know about Baltimore and Baltimore history:

“What White Americans have never fully understood– but what the Negro can never forget– is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

As Dr. K said, when we blame people and not structure, we’ve decided we didn’t cause it and we don’t have to do anything about it. This history lesson shows how structures built on racism led to today’s conditions.

• 1700s
  • Baltimore is very small; it is made up of mostly Fells Point and Harbor East.
  • Grain production increases in northern Baltimore County.
    • Grain producers begin using the port of Baltimore to export grain.
    • This activity inspires the rise of the shipbuilding industry in Baltimore.
    • Industrial jobs draw free Blacks and ethnic whites (Irish, Eastern European, etc) to the city.
    • Whites begin to move to the city in search of entrepreneurial endeavors, many involving the utilization of slave labor.
• 1800s
  • In Baltimore City in 1810, the number of free blacks equals the number of slaves. (Baltimore is the only place in the US where this occurs.)
  • 1830 saw the decline in slavery in Baltimore City.
    • Whites realized paying ethnic whites small wages for jobs was cheaper than keeping slaves.
    • Competition for jobs and housing created a rift between blacks and ethnic whites.
      • Mobs and gangs of ethnic whites begin to form among groups in the manufacturing industry. These mobs use violence and intimidation to keep free Blacks out of the industry and out of the competition for jobs.
      • South Baltimore became predominantly ethnically white because people lived where they worked and the white mobs and gangs had intimidated African Americans out of the industry in that area.
    • Increases in industry increased population
      • Overcrowding and poor living conditions in Baltimore City “slums” lead to disease and poor sanitation.
      • Estates north of the harbor sell their land to developers who build neighborhoods to house the growing population.
      • Using the rhetoric of “Public Health” and blaming individuals for the poor conditions in industrial “slums,” developers are able to keep ethnic whites and blacks out of these new neighborhoods.
• 1900s
  • In 1910, the first residential segregation law in the US was passed in Baltimore City.
    • Blacks could not live on a majority white block; whites could not live on a majority black block.
    • This law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1917, but racist segregation practices continued. (Some examples are below; this happened in a lot of other ways, too.)
      • Relators would not sell houses to blacks on white blocks or discouraged whites from buying in black areas.
      • Police and home inspectors would seek out and trouble white landlords renting to black people in white areas.
  • 1937: Post-Great Depression Redlining
    • The Federal Home Loan Organization, which later became the Federal Housing Association, worked with local mortgage brokers to outline housing districts.
    • Redlines were drawn around poor, black neighborhoods and divided the city into districts
      • Districts were classified based on crime, sanitation, median income, and “undesirable populations” aka black people.
      • Redlining policy explicitly condoned and encouraged the continuation of the racist and biased housing practices which resulted from the end of Baltimore housing segregation legislation.
      • Mortgage brokers gave different interest rates to different homeowners based on race and district.
      • Neighborhoods within redlines, the poor and/or black neighborhoods, received higher interest rates which made it significantly more difficult for the people in those areas to buy homes.
  • Why is home ownership so important?
    • It’s part of the “American Dream.”
    • Gives people stable housing conditions
    • Allows for wealth accumulation
      • Houses can be passed down through generations. Once it’s paid off, a house is pure asset. Even when someone is cash poor, they will still have housing and a form of wealth.
  • WWII
    • The wartime economy booms.
      • Bethlehem Steel brings more jobs to Baltimore City.
      • People live where they work, integrating some of the neighborhoods around industrial centers.
      • Unionization brings fairer wages to industrial workers.
      • Bethlehem Steel has the first integrated union.
  • Post war economic downturn
    • Population increases
    • Manufacturing jobs decrease
  • Urban renewal plans of the 1940s and ‘50s
    • After the post war economic decline, Baltimore City policymakers create programs for “Urban Renewal.”
      • The city purchases older, more run-down homes at low, unfair prices.
      • City blocks are flattened and new homes are built.
      • The original homeowners who were displaced are not able to afford the newer, more expensive homes.
      • As a result of urban renewal plans across the county, hundreds of thousands of people are displaced. 58% of them are black.
  • 1960s
    • Anger is building as unfair housing conditions worsen in Baltimore City and the Civil Rights Movement grows.
    • Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated in April of 1968.
      • Anger, exhaustion, and desperation trigger riots in Baltimore city.
    • People leave the city in droves and head for the county.
      • Whites move north, centrally.
      • Everyone else moves outward into the suburbs.
  • 1970s economic downturn
    • Public housing projects are implemented to better the housing conditions.
      • Old public housing is torn down and replaced, but with less units than before.
      • More people are displaced and begin to overcrowd neighborhoods again.
    • Banks use the opportunity to provide subprime mortgages to vulnerable populations desperately looking for housing.
      • People who got mortgages they couldn’t afford lose their homes and even more people are displaced and left with massive debt.
• Today
  • 2010-2013
    • Median household wealth for Black folks in Baltimore is one third of what it used to be.
    • The income gap between whites and blacks is the widest it’s been in 30 years.
    • Life expectancy can vary by as much as 20 years between baltimore city neighborhoods.
      • Life expectancy varies based on factors like living conditions, rates of violent crime, access to water and healthy food, and access to healthcare, among others.
      • The median annual income in the state of Maryland is $73,538 compared to Baltimore City at $41,000. 23% of Baltimore city residents live below the poverty line compared to 9.8% of Maryland overall.

If you want to know more about structural inequality in Baltimore City, check out these links:

1. A large, interactive archive of information and personal testimony surrounding the Baltimore ‘68 riots.
2. Original 1937 Redline Districting Map (click to download)
3. Interactive map of inequality in city neighborhoods
4. Another, more in-depth interactive map of inequalities
5. Map of life expectancy by neighborhood

Get ready for Critical Social Justice: Baltimore 365 with our “What You Need to Know” series. 

In light of the Baltimore Uprisings this past spring, media literacy–the ability to find and analyze media–is now all the more important. For example, when the Baltimore Sun places a photo of a police car being vandalized on their front page, as opposed to a photo showing two rival gangs joining together to peacefully protest police brutality in their city, they are sending the message that all protesters are violent.

What narrative does the Baltimore Sun, CNN, or Fox News create about Baltimore? What story are we receiving from these sources? What is missing from these narratives? And why do large media platforms tell a different story than the one residents and activists of Baltimore tell through their tweets and recordings of police in their city? Media literacy requires us to answer these questions and think critically about the messages we receive, where we receive them from, and what they might be missing.

• Media literacy is the ability to find, analyze, and create media.
  • Twitter in many ways increases media literacy because it allows real people to both create and access various kinds of media outlets quickly and easily.
  • Facebook Groups are a way to enhance engagement with particular social justice issues. The forum that Facebook provides allows communication among community members that can shape how they understand the media they receive. Through engaging with specific issues and starting dialogues with one another, Facebook users can better see what is left out of mainstream news sources’ accounts of a story, and can detect when a news story is slanted or biased. They can use the skills they gain in these groups each time they encounter media messages.
• New media is digital, interactive, easier to access, and evolving at a rapid pace.
  • Instagram allows you to visually track events, protests, and news in real-time through the use of hashtags and following specific users. It also eliminates the hierarchy of who can produce and access news.
  • Hashtags are a method of new media, used to track and organize specific information. Here are some examples:
    • #FreddieGray – created both to honor Freddie Gray who was murdered by Baltimore police, and to organize protests around the city. This hashtag allows people to keep up and engage with news about Freddie Gray.
    • #SayHerName – created to honor black women who have been murdered and to bring attention to how black women experience policing, profiling, and violence.
    • #BaltimoreUprising – This hashtag was created to illustrate and organize the community activism taking place in Baltimore city. From organizing marches to getting groups together to clean up the city, this hashtag makes it easy to find information as well as get involved with the activism taking place in Baltimore.
    • #BlackLivesMatter – created by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, this hashtag has sparked a nationwide movement to anti-Black racism that permeates our society.

For more about media literacy as it relates to the Baltimore Uprisings, check out these articles:

News Media Struggle to Present a Balanced Picture of Baltimore Unrest

What’s Being Said in the Media vs. What’s Really Happening in Baltimore

Learn more about media as it relates to Baltimore at the Vines, Rhymes, and Headlines: Telling the Story of Baltimore event, happening October 22nd at Commons Main Street as part of the Critical Social Justice Initiative.

A guest post from Dr. Kate Drabinski

As someone who doesn’t own a car, I travel my bike and foot, bus and train, the occasional ride thrown in by a generous driver. Truth is, even if I had a car, I’d still travel without one, because that’s how you get a sense of where you live. Walking and biking in Baltimore has helped me understand how neighborhoods are organized, segregated, and cut off from each other by streets, transit systems, and urban planning policies. Cities look like they do not by accident or as the result of a series of individual choices, but because of planning decisions and the choices that follow. Even when we “choose” where to live, work, and play, our choices are circumscribed by stories space tells us about whether or not “we” belong. In a car you don’t have to see that, but walking or on bike, you become intimately familiar with the changes that take place as you get from here to there.

MLK Blvd separates and isolates the west side of Baltimore from downtown.  Read more at the Baltimore Brew by clicking on the image.

The separation of West Baltimore from the downtown area is particularly striking to me, the two sides of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard like two different worlds. UMBC’s downtown shuttle drops students, faculty, and staff on the east side of that divide, but both sides are integral to our lived sense of the city, belonging, and who are our neighbors. This walking tour will take us along MLK and both east and west as we learn about the history of this stripe that has made all the difference for difference.

To learn more about the neighborhoods we’ll be visiting during the walking tour, check out these resources:

• David Harvey’s article A View From Federal Hill
• The Battles of Lexington: City Paper goes deep inside and under Baltimore’s oldest market
• Where a 1997 Lonely Planet Guide Will Take You Today in Baltimore 

To learn more about Baltimore be sure to check out the kick-off to #CSJ365, Baltimore 101: Why Baltimore Matters on Monday, October 19th at 12pm.

Tickets for the #CSJ365 walking tour are going fast! If you want to join us on Friday, October 23rd, pick up your free ticket at the Commons CIC desk asap! 

What You Need to Know About Delegate Mary Washington & LGBTQ Youth Homelessness

A blog reflection written by Women’s Center Staff Member Daniel Willey

I recommend Unruly Bodies (GWST 345, taught by Dr. Kate) to anybody who asks. And to people who didn’t ask. But, whatever okay y’all it’s a good class! I took it two whole semesters ago and I still think about it every day. I’ve been thinking about it even more lately as I ponder the question: am I disabled? I’m 20 years old and I’ve never asked myself this question before. Nobody told me I was disabled, so I just figured I wasn’t. But as I read about disability studies in Unruly Bodies, I came to understand myself as I operate in society very differently.

In a really awesome video in which gender theorist Judith Butler takes a walk with disability activist Sunaura Taylor (link tw: some of Sunaura’s art contains nudity and images of caged and/or dead animals), they talk about what disabled means. Sunaura Taylor has congenital arthrogryposis and uses an electric wheelchair (she’s also a theorist, artist, abolitionist vegan, and disability activist). In the video, Taylor and Butler see an abandoned shoe and Taylor wonders if that person can walk without it. Butler says in response,

“I’m just thinking that no one takes a walk without there being a technique of walking.  Nobody goes for a walk without there being something that supports that walk outside of ourselves.  Maybe we have a false idea that the able bodied person is somehow radically self sufficient.”

Wow, okay. So to break it down, what Butler and Taylor are saying is that people have their own ways of moving and doing but that some ways of moving and doing are more normal than others. Our world is built for people who can walk, or walk frequently and easily, and aids like shoes work quite well in this world. Sunaura points out that there is a difference between “disability” and “impairment.” She says her arthrogyposis and how it affects her ability to walk is an impairment, but that the disability comes from the fact that the world is not built for someone like her whose way of moving and doing is NOT walking, but on wheels.

But what does this have to do with you, Dan??

I’m getting there, I promise.

Let’s talk about desks. you know the ones. If you’ve ever had class in Sondheim Hall you know what I’m talking about.

Last year I started having trouble with my back. I have two semi-herniated discs in my lower back which cause me significant pain throughout my day. I have difficulty sitting for more than 20 minutes at a time, but I do it because I’m a student and that’s what we do. But sitting, especially in these desks, all day cause me pain and make it difficult to do my work. I would like to stand at a standing desk in the back of the classroom, but I’ve never had the courage to do it because I feel embarrassed– embarrassed for not being able to fit into the classroom norm and because it doesn’t feel like a “good enough” reason for a special accommodation.

This is really what I’m trying to get at: the combination of body/social norms and stigmatization of disability and accommodations affects my ability to learn and do well in school. I and my fellow fat students run into a similar situation with these specific desks because they’re way too small. The classroom is literally not built for fat students or students with disabilities, and it affects our ability to learn and participate.

There are systems set in place to accommodate students. Student Support Services at UMBC can help you get what you need and they help make it possible for more students to access education. You generally need medical documentation in order to get support from SSS, but that can be difficult if you’re unable to afford an evaluation for a learning disability (which are rarely covered by insurance and can cost over a thousand dollars) or access to healthcare in general.

If you have an invisible illness like Crohn’s Disease or Fibromyalgia it can be difficult to gain access to these services because you might not “look” like you have a disability. Even when you have specific documentation from the institution, individuals within that institution don’t always have the same attitudes towards you and how they see (or don’t see) your disability. This is especially true for women with chronic or invisible disabilities because of the way we think of women’s bodies and how we don’t take women’s health needs seriously.

I’m not just talking about UMBC here people! This is a problem everywhere.

Which brings me back to my question: am I disabled? Am I hesitant to use the term because of what I have learned “disabled” looks like? Is it because I don’t have any official diagnoses that label me as disabled?

As a white, middle class dude with good insurance, I definitely have not experienced the same types of oppression and stigmatization that many disabled people face. In 2013, 28.2% of disabled Americans lived below the poverty line. Over 40% of homeless adults are disabled in comparison to 17.7% of the general population. Being a disabled woman comes with a whole set of different challenges. According to WCSAP, disabled women are disproportionately at risk for abuse and sexual violence. 37.3% of disabled women experience domestic violence compared to 20.6% of non-disabled women. 83% of disabled women will experience sexual assault in their lifetime.

I’m not saying anyone is less disabled because of other privileges. I just mean that in my specific circumstances, I hesitate to include myself in a group that experiences oppression and marginalization because my other identities allow me to navigate “disability” differently.

In the end, I still don’t know the answer. Oh well.

There is so much I could write about this. I haven’t even touched on being a college student with learning disabilities and mental illnesses. Luckily for you all, there are lots of people who have written about all of these things and more already! The fields of Disability Studies and Disability Activism are rich and growing. There’s so much to learn! Check out this really cool disabled blogger’s videos to get you started! There are also some really cool disabled women doing really cool things! Sunaura Taylor and Erin (blogger linked to above) are not the only disabled women you should know. Maysoon Zayid is an Arab-American comedian, actress, and writer who did this great TED Talk about being a funny woman with cerebral palsy.

Remember, when you’re learning more about disability and disability studies:

1. Google it first. Disabled people on the internet are not info banks for you to tap into.
2. Don’t ask personal or unsolicited questions about a person and their disability. Some people are excited to share their knowledge and experiences with you. Some people are tired and just trying to live their lives.
3. Do self-work. Don’t be afraid to learn something. Apply what you learn to your everyday life.

Get ready for Critical Social Justice: Baltimore 365 with our “What You Need to Know” series. 

Delegate Mary Washington 

State Delegate Mary Washington represents the 43rd district of Maryland, which comprises of most of North Central and Northeast Baltimore (for those familiar with the city, that’s North Ave to the northern border and west from Harford to North Charles).

First elected in 2010 and again in 2014, Del. Washington is not Maryland’s first openly gay lawmaker. She is, however, the first black openly gay member of the Maryland General Assembly and the second openly gay black woman to be elected to US state legislature.

As a Maryland lawmaker, Del. Washington’s stated goals include “urban environmental education, equality for all, and improving quality of life and sustainability of Baltimore neighborhoods.” In 2013, she established the Task Force to Study Housing and Supportive Services for Unaccompanied Homeless Youth which continued into 2014 along with additional efforts focused on youth homelessness.

A dialogue with Maryland State Delegate Mary Washington about LGBTQ youth homelessness will be held on Monday, October 19th at 7pm in the Commons 329. 

For more on Delegate Mary Washington, check out:

• Her bio and campaign website
• Sunday Q&A video about her work on youth homelessness

LGBTQ Homelessness in Baltimore

According to the Gay and Lesbian Task Force, an estimated 20-40% of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ. A Canadian study found that LGBTQ homeless youth are three times more likely to participate in survival sex.

LGBTQ homeless people are at risk for violence and often face discrimination in shelters, especially those with strong religious affiliations. Being homeless as a trans person is even riskier as many shelters are gender-segregated, putting many trans people at risk for assault and sexual violence. There are no LGBTQ specific shelters in Baltimore, although homeless LGBTQ youth can drop-in at the GLBT Community Center for resources and support during the day.

For more on LGBTQ homelessness, check out:

• The Gay and Lesbian Task Force study on LGBT youth homelessness
• Washington Blade article about LGBT poverty in Baltimore
• Baltimore Sun article about advocacy for homeless youth

Next week kicks off the Counseling Center's Relationship Skills workshops. Join us for 6 unique workshops designed to help you have healthier, happier relationships. Drop in for individual workshops, or join us for all 6! 

All workshops are Monday from 4:30-6 in the Commons (Room 327). Topics include:

10/19--Be an Effective Communicator
10/26--Manage your Stress and Reduce Relationship Problems
11/2-- Listen More Effectively
11/9--Express your Emotions
11/16-- Be Assertive and Express your Expectations
11/23-- Resolve and Solve Problems in Relationships