I think what we saw happen in Baltimore this past week will happen again in some other city in America. Freddie Gray, a black man from a poor neighborhood in Baltimore, died while in the custody of police. After his funeral, groups of people took to the streets. Most of them were protesters. That is, they carried signs and marched against what they perceive as police brutality in their neighborhood. There certainly is nothing wrong with that. But others of them – a small minority to be sure – decided to go well beyond what could be considered a protest. They hurled rocks and bottles at police. They smashed storefronts and looted. They burned cars and buildings. Those things are not protests, they’re crimes. And the perpetrators are not protesters, they’re criminals. I hope that since six Baltimore police officers have been charged with multiple felonies up to and including second-degree “depraved heart” murder, future protests will remain peaceful. But the reason I’m afraid this situation will be repeated is that the root cause of such violence is not being addressed. And even if addressed, it would be extremely difficult – if not impossible – to solve. In a word, it’s hopelessness. Here are some statistics from a report at money.cnn.com Roughly 63 percent of Baltimore’s population is black. The article notes that Maryland is the richest state in the union by virtue of median household income. This makes the comparison of black family income in Baltimore even more jarring. The median income for a Maryland household is $73,500. The median income for a white household in Baltimore is $60,500. For black households, it’s $33,600. The unemployment rate among young black men in Baltimore is 37 percent. Among young white men, it’s 10 percent. In some neighborhoods, black unemployment exceeds 50 percent. Baltimore has an estimated 16,000 vacant buildings and another 14,000 vacant lots, CNN reported. In the blighted neighborhoods of Sandtown-Winchester and Harlem Park, the area where Gray lived, almost a quarter of buildings were vacant in 2011. CNN reports that the life expectancy in the neighborhoods of Upton and Druid Heights – where median income is only $13,388 a year – is 63 years. In the Roland park neighborhood, just five miles away, life expectancy is 83 years. The median income in that neighborhood is $90,492. People living in poor Baltimore neighborhoods are three times more likely to die of heart disease, eight times more likely to die of diabetes, 15 times more like to die of homicide and 20 times more likely to die of AIDS than their counterparts in more affluent neighborhoods. A third of Maryland residents in state prisons are from Baltimore. It costs an estimated $220 million a year to incarcerate people from just 25 communities in Baltimore. And you know what “communities” those are. They are the poor black neighborhoods, of course. We can’t imagine the level of hopelessness that must pervade these neighborhoods. How can these people have any sense of “community?” How can there be any “civic pride?” The simple answers are there is no sense of community and there is no civic pride. People living there are simply trying to survive. The vast majority of them have no hope of changing the trajectory of their lives or their children’s lives. Sure, there are stories of people who make it out of those neighborhoods and become successful. But they are exceptions. And they are exceptional. It’s folly to suggest that “if one person can make it, they all can” or “this is America, you can be anything you want to be.” Perhaps those haughty notions rang a little more true years ago, but in today’s America, once you fall that far behind, it’s virtually impossible to catch up. This is not a phenomenon unique to Baltimore. There are similar neighborhoods in every major city in America. It’s easy to pawn these things off as some sort of institutionalized racism, but that is lazy, in my view. In a place like Baltimore, for example, community leaders – the mayor, most members of the city council, the police chief and a majority of police officers – all are black. Can we say they are racist because they haven’t solved the myriad social issues faced by black neighborhoods under their watch? Besides, there are plenty of poor white neighborhoods whose inhabitants are suffering similar fates. No, the reason these problems have not been solved has less to do with race than the sheer enormity of the problems themselves. And when people live with that level of hopelessness, it doesn’t take much to set them off. It doesn’t take much to incite them to riot, loot and destroy property. Of course, I don’t condone this behavior. No one could. But I do think I understand it to a degree. Years – even generations – of resentment is pent up. People living in these conditions believe injustice upon injustice has been heaped upon them. It’s that one final injustice – Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore or Mike Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo., et. al. – that puts them over the edge. This is why I believe we will see events like this play out again in America. I don’t have answers. I don’t know how to solve generational poverty. I don’t know how to rehab an impoverished neighborhood, although I suppose good schools and jobs for its residents would be a solid start. But I do know as long as these deeply ingrained social problems persist, there will be more Freddie Gray incidents in America. The very least we can do, I suppose, is make sure that somebody – whether civilly or criminally – is held accountable.
