Streeter: National media is finally catching up to what we’ve been saying about Baltimore

Sometimes being from Baltimore reminds me of a “Saturday Night Live” sketch. Specifically the one where the Black news anchors, including one played by our own Ego Nwodim, nervously wait to confirm whether the perpetrators in increasingly terrible crime stories are Black or not.

They’re sick of all the headlines about people like them being bad, and giddy when they are not. I felt similarly last week when I saw not one, but two national news stories published about our city. I instinctively braced myself, “Oh, no, what now?”

Fortunately, those pieces in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are actually positive about improvements in Baltimore’s crime and vacant home situations, respectively.

It took a few moments to exhale, because when you’re used to getting beat up, positive portrayals seem … weird. But it’s about time we are given some credit for what we are becoming and not this endless gloom loop we’ve been trapped in.

The Journal’s story follows the city’s long-standing crisis of vacant homes, and explains how a holistic approach has cut the number of crumbling eyesores down and encouraged both local people and newcomers to join programs enabling them to buy them.

And the Times piece interviews various witnesses to Baltimore’s declining crime rates, including law enforcement, activists and funeral home owners. It’s a stunningly honest narrative of a community that is trying to claw back from oblivion, and winning.

The images in these articles are so moving, especially one in the Times piece featuring a Black father lovingly playing with his kids on a city splash pad. They give Baltimore the benefit of such a gentle tableau: We are humans who adore our children, community and neighbors, even without a picket fence in sight.

The rest of the country — heck, even people who just live outside city limits — has been slow to come around to the progress that the city has made. And that has a lot to do with its image as a very Black place with a lot of crime, partly based in truth because our crime rates were alarming and undeniable. We’ve been referred to as “Bodymore, Murderland.”

It’s hard to separate fact from fiction when that image is so deeply ingrained. But it’s the absolute truth that the city’s homicide rate was lower in the first half of this year than at any time since 1970, before I was born.

“Baltimore occupies a place in the collective American imagination that is a repository of all of the notions that people have about Black people,” said Dayvon Love, director of public policy for Baltimore think tank Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, which advances the public policy interest of Black residents.

So when national readers see the beautiful photos and videos of a city full of Black people who had been discounted, in part, because of that, “it makes those images of that narrative even more powerful. There is a genuine rupture in that narrative,” he said.

You will be stunned that I think it has a lot to do with racism. I’m joking. No, you won’t. Love said it’s been harder for would-be haters to accept the city’s upward trajectory because so many of us have been fed the idea that nothing happens without white saviors. For Baltimore to have improved, the impetus must have been the kind benevolence of some outside force, not the multicultural effort led by Black activists like Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle and Safe Streets.

“People have a hard time with seeing Black people as drivers of our circumstances,” Love said.

He’s not wrong. Remember how many movies from the 1960s to the 2000s depict Black and Brown schools, for instance, as cesspools that can’t be saved until a kindly white teacher introduces Shakespeare, which they have never heard of, or a stern Black man with a bat? Baltimore is that high school.

Imagine if instead of relying completely on a Michelle Pfeiffer-type sitting backwards on a chair to drop some knowledge on the hooligans, the community figured it out from their own investment in the city they live in. It’s OK if people come in to help. But they shouldn’t get all the credit.

We’re a Black majority but this city will only survive if everyone who lives here takes ownership. The issue is how we stop it from going the route of a complete gentrification that displaces the organic things that make Baltimore, Baltimore. The city doesn’t need to be less Black or less weird or less scruffy to become safer or more prosperous. There’s a trend on social media where someone will praise the area and paranoid city dwellers post “Thank you, but we’re closed.”

Well, not really. Nobody is as protective of its turf than Baltimoreans. I am so grateful that, for all of our problems, people are starting to get us. And we want you to check us out, as long as you don’t try to change us into something we are not.