Streeter: Those ‘Baltimore: Actually, I like it’ stickers? Actually, I hate them.

One of my favorite things about Baltimoreans is that they’re going to tell you what they think, whether they agree with you or not. Emphatically.

Last week I wrote about Baltimore’s image problems, and I mentioned a popular bumper sticker that reads “Baltimore: Actually, I like it.” The stickers “may seem cute,” I wrote, “but they’re actually just giving credence to the haters” in a twee way. Why not just say “Baltimore: Hell yeah!” with our whole chests?

That one line in my column garnered several comments — some agreeing with me, others maintaining the stickers are just an example of the city’s self-deprecating sense of humor. I get that. It’s like, in the tradition of native John Waters, who cameoed in the movie musical version of “Hairspray” as a friendly flasher who greets our heroine as she sings down the rat-strewn streets.

When you’re punched as much as Baltimore, sometimes you develop a self-effacing layer of good-natured coping. But why make stickers like that our whole identity?

“I don’t like them. They’re clever, but they call more attention to the common negative stereotype than a straightforward ‘I like Baltimore’ would,” Shifra Frogeen, who has lived in the city for 50 years, told me on Bluesky. “To me, it sounds like the person who created them actually feels ambivalent about Baltimore.”

Longtime resident Dana Hurd was more direct. “I don’t need a qualifier before saying how much I love Baltimore,” she said.

She dislikes the stickers for some of the same reasons I do — including that you mostly see them in white neighborhoods whose residents may not be deeply connected to the racism that the Black native majority faces and can be more flippant about it.

“To me, it just screams ‘white gentrifier,’” Hurd said. “That ‘Actually’ is OK, but it’s a countdown until some minor city inconvenience becomes an ‘I hate Baltimore.’”

If we’re going to lean into our reputation of being cheerfully problematic, I like the popular “Baltimore vs. y’all whores” shirt, which basically says “try us.”

Baltimore is my home. My family. You know how you can joke with your cousins about some things you’d never let outsiders get away with? It’s like that.

But the “Actually” shirts and other winking merchandise have their fans. Leyla Krikor, of Burtonsville, who has a hoodie that reads “Baltimore, Maryland: There’s more than murder here,” says the offbeat slogans are a nod to the city’s realness. “Baltimore is a town that’s taken its knocks and kept on going. It’s not as pretty and shiny as it once was, but stronger and more resilient,” she said.

A lot of the people I interviewed are transplants who initially liked the “Actually” stickers because the sentiment mirrored conversations they’ve actually had.

“The sticker summed up how I had to approach folks, so I could shut them down,” said Jake Scholan, a city resident for 14 years. “But it kind of sets Baltimore at a low bar.”

Scholan also has the “more than murder here” hat, but he doesn’t wear it anymore. “It was like ‘ha, ha, ha’ and then, ‘This is really, really bad.’”

Amity Malcom, who moved to Baltimore from Florida, came across the “Actually” stickers with her wife while shopping in Fells Point.

“We both laughed. Being from Florida, we’re more than familiar with the ‘Florida man’ archetype, and the slogan felt much the same,” she said. “But the more I replayed the words in my head, it gave me pause because — using the words of the sticker itself — actually, there was never a reason to dislike Baltimore in the first place.”

The rat imagery used to represent Baltimore is worse. As an ironic nod to our incessant rodent issues, famed Baltimore rat hunter and self-named “Rat Czar” Matthew Fouse created the now-iconic logo of the city’s name inside the outline of the rodent. Stickers and magnets bearing that image, which saw a resurgence when President Donald Trump insulted the city, are popular at stores such as Fells Point’s Su Casa.

J.B. Shepard, who moved here from Maine in 1996, has owned the rat sweatshirts and even has a rat tattoo. That was right before he waged a costly war with the real thing, which first ate the innards of his new dishwasher and then dwelled in the walls. “We could hear it. It was like ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’” Shepard said. Frightening, but with Baltimore-appropriate Edgar Allan Poe symmetry.

He eventually won that battle with the very large rat and his colony, but it reminded him of how Baltimoreans, rodent and human alike, have struggled against the disdain of the federal government and others, and how hardy we are. “The symbolism is strong. If you see rats, it means the ship’s not sinking,” said Shepard, the son of a sailor. “Things can’t be that bad, or they would have left.”

You don’t have to live here to know about the stickers and have an opinion. Shannon Shea, of Rockville, visits when she can, including for last weekend’s Kinetic Sculpture Race. “I thought, ‘Oh, that is kind of insulting, isn’t it?’ Really passive-aggressive. Confirming the haters makes it stronger,” she said of the stickers she saw.

If Shea had her way, the marketing would be quirkier, in a positive, direct way.

“D.C. is like the dedicated civil servant that maybe lets loose on the weekend,” Shea said. “Baltimore is arty, a little more weird all the time.”

And there’s my vote for our new bumper sticker: “Baltimore: A little more weird all the time.” I’d proudly slap that on my car in a minute.