“Baltimore Residents Away From Turmoil Consider Their Role”
““They’re not our reality,” Ashley Fowler, 30, said on Monday at the restaurant where she works. “They’re not what we’re living right now. We live in, not to be racist, white America.” As Baltimore considers its way forward after the violent unrest brought by the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died of injuries he suffered while in police custody, residents in its predominantly white neighborhoods acknowledge that they are sometimes struggling to understand what beyond Mr. Gray’s death spurred the turmoil here. For many, the poverty and troubled schools of gritty West Baltimore are distant troubles, glimpsed only when they pass through the area on their way somewhere else… “I can only imagine how frustrated they must be,” said Ms. Bahr, 36, a nurse who was out with her 3-year-old daughter, Sally. “I just wish I knew how to solve poverty. I don’t know what to do to make it better.””
Let’s not even get into how patronizing these people are.
There is this thing I have been noticing recently where people don’t want to talk about things that aren’t basically already solved. Like, if there is a problem but there isn’t an obvious solution yet, people can get really uncomfortable when you want to talk about it. Like, I think there is way more discussion of police violence because we have this bandaid idea for bodycams — people can start sentences with “police brutality is a problem” because they know they can end that sentence with “bodycams are the solution”.
But, really, solutions only come about after all of the talking and the reflection and the looking directly at the problem. There is a necessary period of uncomfortableness.
Update: Wrote this right when the article came out, and now there has been the Charleston shooting — and this way in which the story about the Confederate Flag has become a bigger story than the real one.
Our society doesn’t seem to have the tools to deal directly with white supremacy #IWonderWhy
