I have a backlog of #DividedBaltimore writeups, and, as the school year gets more busy, it's more difficult to finalize them for "publication" on this modest blog of mine. My apologies. There have been some cool classes lately and I hope to write them all up. But, the lesson has also been that I should try to strike while the iron is hot, so I'm going to try to write up Monday night's engaging class as soon as possible.There were only two speakers tonight, JC Faulk, a community organizer who lives in Station North, and Wes Moore, the author of The Other Wes Moore and The Work, and CEO of BridgeEdu. Both resonated with me.
Faulk began his talk with a blunt statement about Baltimore: "It's horrible here for Black people."
And, he argues, the conversation about why begins with racism. Our country, he says, wouldn't be the powerhouse it is today without it being built on the backs and the suffering of my ancestors, and he argues, "There's not a piece of gum that can be sold in this country without race being wrapped up in it."
Faulk then began a talk about the term "Gentry", who, back in the day, were the cushion between nobility and common folk. In America, that cushion is the middle class. However, that middle road is eroding substantially. It has diminished in every one of our fifty states. However, according to Faulk, while the cushion is gone, and it has been replaced by increased police presence.
Faulk then laid into Gentrification, which he argued was racist. He looked at the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary definition of the term: "The process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the influx of middle-class or affluent people into deteriorating areas that often displaces poorer residents," and discussed the apparent innocuousness of the definition, when in fact to "displace" means that people are forcefully pushed out of their neighborhoods.
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| Faulk's home after his renovation. |
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| Faulk's home before his renovation. |
He then focused on his own neighborhood, arguing that displacement means police go into Greenmount Cemetery with infrared goggles and they watch black people in the neighborhood, and the black people don't know they're being watched. He discussed Blue Light cameras, which cost $35,000 and there are hundreds of them around the city, mostly in poor Black neighborhoods. He bemoaned the fact that 5 of 7 board members are white in the New Greenmount Community Association, when New Greenmount is a predominantly Black neighborhood, and railed against the Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School, which came into the neighborhood as a way of gentrifying the neighborhood, and claimed that citizens who lived right across the street from the school -- and whose families had gone to the school in that building for generations -- were denied access to the school (didn't win the lottery) while the President of the school, a white woman, got both of her kids in no problem and with no lottery.
[Much of this portion of the presentation left me wondering. The neighborhood is decimated by drugs and violence, so I'm wondering what the problem is with a camera that turns on when there's gunfire? Faulk made the claim that this was spying, but isn't this just searching for a possible murderer? I'm not a fan of blue light cameras, but cameras that turn on when there's gunfire seem prudent and a way to stop some of the horrible violence in this city.]
Mr. Faulk also works with murals in the city, and specifically wants more representation by Black artists; he claimed that out of 14 murals in Station North, only one is by a Black artist -- the one on the side of his house. [My own note: how in the world can this be true? If so, that is crazy. I've never even seen a white man painting a mural before. I guess because that neighborhood is host to MICA and Baltimore Design School, and they produce the murals? Still seems a huge misrepresenation.]
14 murals in an All-Black neighborhood, only one by a Black artist. Faulk attempted to rectify that by organizing a mural to be painted on his home, and that's when I got one of my thrills of the night: Faulk's home is actually the home of one of my favorite pieces of art in the city, the mural with James Baldwin (most of you readers know he's my favorite writer), Nina Simone, and Malcolm X. Here's a photo of me underneath Faulk's mural a couple of years ago. Faulk has been working to get more black representation in the creation of murals around the city.
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| Me in front of Faulk's home and the mural of my favorite writer. |
Faulk then spoke about Eminent Domain, which he saws caused the razing of 750 existing homes and removed over 600 Baltimore residents. Here's an article about it. This was not done to build new train stations, but instead they are giving them to people associated with Hopkins.
Faulk added these moving words: "White supremacy takes everything from Black people, including their lives." He then went on to discuss the death of Tyrone West, an artist who, according to witnesses, was pulled out of a car by his dreadlocks and beaten to death by 10-12 Baltimore City police officers. Tyrone West's sister, Tawanda Jones, who Faulk says is a "modern day Harriet Tubman," has been holding weekly Wednesday protests (West Wednesdays) about West in order to gain public support for charges to be filed against those responsible for his death, and Faulk implored all of the audience to tell one or two people about West's death so his cause is spread. Here's an article about the case.
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| A result of Faulk's Circles of Voices meetings, which seem amazing. |
Faulk ended his presentation with a discussion about how he transformed his formerly boarded up house, which he bought for $200 just a few years ago, into his beautiful home (and host to that Baldwin mural) over the last few years. He urges others to do the same, and had some derision for developers who do it just to make money. Put your heart into it, Faulk seemed to be urging. He then shared the following quote from Dante's Inferno: "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those, who in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." Faulk added, "It's not for the Hitlers, folks. It's for those who in time of pain sit on the fence."Wes Moore was the next speaker. I'm a big fan of Moore, and really wished he would run for mayor of Baltimore; he is the type of of transcendent leader our city needs right now. He is deciding to stay in charge of BridgeEdu, the organization he founded which works as a bridge from high school into college; the organization does really great work.
Moore began his presentation by thanking UB for the course, saying, "Honest conversations don't happen very often. Surface conversations happen often." He continued with this description of institutional racism: "We didn't get here by accident. We didn't get here because people dropped the ball. We got here because there's been a very intentional system brought into place."
Moore then focused his discussion on education, saying that we can't talk about anything until we fix education. He then centered on Baltimore: "You can't understand who I am and why I am without understanding Baltimore: its path, its progressions, and also its transgressions."
He began describing an anecdote about two disparate opinion writers who took totally different meanings from his book The Other Wes Moore. Liberal writer Nick Kristof of The New York Times called the text a great examination of race and class, whereas conservative Washington Post editorialist Michael Gerson cited it as a great examination of personal responsibility."They're both right," Moore said. "You can't ignore personal responsibility in decision making, but we also can't ignore the fact that we've created a structure in which people are compiled to make decisions based upon what they have known and seen their entire life. We can't talk about personal responsibility without talking about social context."
Nowhere is this more clear, according to Moore, than in education.
Moore continued: "When higher ed was created, it wasn't created for everyone to go. The structure that was created was for 20% of population to attend higher ed. This means that when the K-12 system was created, it wasn't created for most of the ovulation to make it to college. Look at how the K-12 system is structured, after an agrarian calendar. We're continuing to compound upon a system that was never built for everyone to build from it, as if somehow this is an inclusive system. Every year, we hear about how change is going to happen, but the structure remains the same. We're creating a society where exceptions and cherry-picking is now our measure of success."
Moore then proposed six structural solutions -- three for K-12 and three for college -- towards creating a system where "all people don't just feel involved and engaged, but for all people to believe that their success is designed to happen." Moore considers himself cherry-picked, an exception; he wants this not to be the case for others.
For K-12 Education, here are his three solutions:
#1) Restructuring the Financing of BCPSS: "If you look at the way that Baltimore School System is structured, not just on the financing of it, but also in the actual administration of it: Baltimore City doesn't have full responsibility for how BCPSS works. In the late 1990s, there was a decision made about who would rule funding and decisions for BCPSS. When that decision was made, that decision was made with the clear understanding that within the first five years that we would revisit the decision; however, this never happened. BCPSS is still under state control. Currently, the way the system works is that folks from Harford County, PG County, Calvert County, etc., who are making the decisions for what happens in Baltimore City Public Schools. Why isn't this Baltimore's responsibility?"#2) Restructuring Curriculum. According to Moore, BCPSS curriculum is training students to be employees, rather than teaching them to be entrepreneurs. He wants the system to teach students how to be the next Kevin Plank, not just to work for him. He wants more curriculum around creativity.
#3) School Year Adaptation. He wants to eliminate summer vacation and create a trimester system. He says that this will allow school officials to work with truant students more, allow them to get in at different timelines and providing more breaks within the year so officials can work on its most at-risk students. Note: I was so happy to hear Moore speak about this, as it's one of my passion projects (I think the summer slide caused by our long summer breaks disproportionately hurts our poor students of color, since they largely can't afford things like summer camps), especially in the face of Peter Franchot and Larry Hogan's push to create a law that forbids school districts from opening before Labor Day. This is an issue of equity, as Moore notes.
For Higher Ed, Moore proposes the following three solutions:
#1) More Pell grants. For this example, Moore brought up the example from The Other Wes Moore, when the "other" Wes Moore's mother's Pell grant was cut. She was going to Johns Hopkins, but, after that, she couldn't afford it, and her life (and her son's) turned out totally differently after that.
#2) Change the Maryland FAFSA filing date. For some reason, Moore says, the state of Maryland has one of the earliest FAFSA filing dates in the country, March 1st. He's written about it before. And he's right: this seems just a ridiculous law that could be easily changed.
#3) Eliminate no-credit developmental courses in college. He says that these remedial college courses, which are taken and paid for but offer no credit, hurt college's most at-risk students and decrease the level of "social stickiness" that college students feel with their colleges. These courses wear down on students' financial aid resources and they don't even get any credit for them.
After the last point, the University of Baltimore CAO Joseph S. Wood mentioned that UB has recently taken these developmental courses out of its curriculum, to some cheers and some groans ("why couldn't this have been sooner?") from the crowd.
After the two speakers, there was a spirited question and answer session. I wanted to ask Wes Moore about the proposed legislation to push the school year start date back until after Labor Day, and if there were any movements to prevent that that he knew about it, but lots of others asked questions about such topics as white privilege and social capital.
I found the class to be inspiring; both Faulk and Moore were dynamic, with solid points for improvement and strong evidence.
from Epiphany in Baltimore http://ift.tt/1QG8DvE #DividedBaltimore, Week 12: Community Development with Wes Moore and JC Faulk - Entrepreneur Generations
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